Real User Experience Insight Part V

A graphical view of the error category is seen, as filtered on the EBS suite. There are different types of error categories. Click on the Content error link in the Legend section.

We have drilled down to the different kinds of content errors. As we can see, these are all EBS specific errors which are pre-populated due to the Accelerator.

You can right-click on any error, and select "My Oracle Support" from the dropdown menu.

This shows the integration of Real User Experience Insight with My Oracle Support (MOS), and lets you diagnose the problem faster.

This is now logged down to the My Oracle Support screen, and we can see the knowledge articles in My Oracle Support about the specific error that was right-clicked on.

Move to the Shop dashboard again.

One of the most important and interesting aspects of the Real User Experience Insight software is its ability to portray a User Flow or a transaction funnel. This is defined in Real User Experience Insight as a process that users follow to reach a certain destination in the website – such as, confirming an order.

Normally a website visitor would search for a product, add it to a shopping cart, and make a payment which would then result in the order being confirmed. The business owners would like to monitor such a flow and make sure it goes through completion without any issues.

If it does not, then RUEI can be used to analyze the exact cause of the non-completion.

We will now look at the Order Flow widget on this dashboard. Click on the cube button. 

The User Flow can be seen to have dropped off just before completing the order.

To analyze this further, we select a different view named "Flow status" from the View selection section in the left panel.

In the Flow status view, each step is seen in detail with performance indicators and the error percentage on each step. We can see that the actual errors occurred on step 2.

Click on the bar which is displaying the errors. This enables us to understand how the error impacted the user session, and which users were impacted.

This now displays all the users who were affected by the errors on that step. You can drill down to any of the users to see the detail.

This is the user activity page that you have seen before, with all the pages that the user visited in the session, with the camera icon available to view the actual page seen.

Hence if at any time, the User Flow in the main dashboard shows visible signs of constricting, this signifies that the users are dropping off before confirming the final order (or any other end goal of a user flow). On observing the signs, the IT department can immediately drill down, find out where the most errors are occurring in the User Flow, examine the session replay of the affected users, and attempt to correct the problem before there is further attrition on the website.

This enables Real User Experience Insight to be used very effectively for monitoring website User Flows, and considerably assist the business in satisfying and retaining its end users.

Summary

In this article series, we have looked at Oracle Real User Experience (RUEI). This product allows a company to effectively monitor multiple web applications, either internal or external facing. RUEI captures the network traffic at the switch level without impacting application performance, and allows full analysis of user sessions with the possibility of session replay in most cases. The technology used by RUEI is called Network Protocol Analysis (NPA) Technology.

Any bottlenecks in the website can be quickly found by analyzing the user experience. User Flows or transaction funnels can be set up that reflect the actual business work flow of the website up to the final point of a certain transaction, such as booking an airline ticket, or placing an on-line order. It is possible to drill down and examine why users are dropping off after any step, and rectify the issue – such as a slow page or application module, or content error.

The advantages of Real User Experience Insight are manifold. First of all, it aids in resolving user problems on websites. Support staff would immediately find it easier to reproduce the exact steps taken by users and find out what went wrong. Reproducing a reported problem with RUEI is much faster than if attempted manually. This drastically reduces the support costs – as a matter of common sense.

Real User Experience Insight also assists in effectively increasing the website visit “conversion rate”, so that visitors to the website increasingly perform desired actions which are the end points of the transaction funnels, since they are pleased with a better user experience.

Finally, since Real User Experience Insight helps in increasing customer satisfaction, it will also decrease the so-called “bounce rate” and more customers will return to the website.

The conclusion is that companies with large websites catering to external users, as well as those with internal users, would potentially find Real User Experience Insight (RUEI) extremely useful to monitor these websites, understand the end user experience, and improve the experience consequently.