Web Operations

How User Experience Affects Web Ops

With the newfound focus on end-user experience, your role as a web operator is changing. There's much more interest in what's happening online and every aspect of a website is tied back to the business outcomes tracked by analytics.

Many More Stakeholders

Lots more people want access to the data. Remember that they're not necessarily technical, and they're almost certainly not interested in backend monitoring data. Here are some tips for reporting end-user experience to the rest of the organization:

Train your stakeholders early

From the outset, make an end-user experience report part of weekly meetings. If you need data from other groups to create correlated reports, set that expectation with them and demand it. The organization should start to expect your information regularly.

Don't keep changing things

If you want to add a chart or table, put it into the report on a trial basis, in a separate section. See if it works, or if it confuses people, before you incorporate it into the overall report.

If performance is core, make it visible

Invest in some TV screens and display things prominently. Make sure the company understands that the underlying web operations drive the business. When everyone else knows data is available, they'll come to you with questions and ideas, and you'll work better together.

Take baby steps

Start with simple reports (such as uptime) and easy-to-understand figures (such as percentages or scores). Although percentiles and histograms ...