Mobility

Data Hogs at the All You Can Eat Buffet

Something's got to give.

20 years ago I sat down at a Sushi bar in LA where for $25 you could order all of the sushi you want over the course of an hour. Seemed like a good deal. 

Not 5 minutes into lunch about 12 players from the local football team came in and sat down for the same deal.  In short order they effectively shut the place down cleaning the restaurant out of everything fresh and worth eating. I left the restaurant hungry and unhappy, never to return again.

With the All You Can Eat data plans available in mobile, carriers/operators face a challenge similar to those running a buffet.  How to satisfy the needs of the power eaters without impacting the experience of everyone else?

A recent study cited in the New York Times points out that a mere 1% of all mobile subscribers are using 50% of all data bandwidth! 

In a competitive environment you can't simply raise prices and spread the costs across the other 99% if you want to retain market share.  The rank and file data users in the 99% are too valuable to lose.

But unlike a small restaurant, it's a bit difficult to comp the service and then kick someone out.

While abuse does occur in the 1%, that's not always the case.  Many are early mobile adopters and have simply embraced the technologies promoted by the carriers/operators, handset manufacturers, and content providers.

What's more, the article goes on to say that data user will grow tenfold between now and 2016.  The usage rates of today's data hogs may seem quite pedestrian years from now.  The real issue operators/carriers face is how to brace for the future when our collective appetites will strain their capacity to keep up.

In the short term each operator is going to figure out how to deal with the high usage customers.  Some predict that without a change data will soon no longer be profitable. Unfortuntely, while most users do not consume data at the same rates as the the 1%, they like the comfort of knowing that their data isn't capped and that they won't get a surprise bill if they should go over.  To some degree the carriers/operators are at fault having set a past precendent by hitting consumers with high, unexpected bills for voice and text overages. 

Now they need to figure out how to get everyone to pay their fair share without increasing churn.   But, they cannot forget that the issue at hand is a supply issue and not one of demand.  Choking off demand with tiered pricing is only a stop gap measure.  They need to invest in the networks that will face continued pressure to keep up with the voracious appetite mobile consumers.  

They need to be sure that these networks can deliver a good and consistent data download experience across the entire network and benchmark that experience against the market.  They also need to ensure that a good download experience is available 24/7/365.  Keeping the data hogs happy is important, but keeping the 99% from churning is the real key to long term success. 

Has your mobile website been Naughty or Nice this year?

 

After a flagship year of growth for mobile commerce, Keynote Systems calls out mobile website best/worst practices from 2011.

 

 

As the mobile industry continues to grow and makes an increasing impact in commerce, businesses are learning to make considerations for their mobile user experience. Over the past year Keynote Systems has continued to analyze mobile performance through its Performance Indices. Here we've laid out the “naughty or nice” list of mobile website trends seen in 2011.

Sugar and Spice and everything NICE

+ Keeping a light mobile site – It was clear that keeping a mobile site on the light site was the way to get top speed and performance on Keynote’s Mobile Performance Index. Most of the top performers this year, stayed that way by keeping their mobile home pages trim. When deciding whether content is needed the rule is: when in doubt, leave it out.

+ A little “Spritely” magic goes a long way – Best Buy, Foot Locker, Toys R’ us and Wal-Mart, leveraged a little magic to boost their mobile website optimization in 2011. Using a ‘Sprite’ in mobile site development helps condense the amount of server requests made for images by packaging elements of mobile Web pages together and giving the mobile user a faster experience.

+ Choose a partner wisely – Some of the top mobile site performers in 2011 had one thing in common, Usablenet. Usablenet helped Dell, Walgreens, CVS and Victoria’s Secret stay atop the Keynote Mobile Performance Index because of the way their sites handle JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets through its cloud mobile commerce platform. 

+ Give the people what they want – While redirecting mobile users to mobile splash pages promoting an App did not bode the best interest of the mobile Web user experience, some retailers like Walgreens at least gave consumers the option to click through the splash page and continue to an optimized mobile site. Some people like Apps, some people want Web—the best sites give options.

+ Success rate boosts performance – When retailers pay attention to success rate, good things happen. Dell was one retailer that was able to shoot into the top 10 of the Keynote Mobile Performance Index by improving its success rate. Success rate is the percentage of the time a page loads on a smartphone completely and successfully.

 

Nothing but coal – The Naughty List

- Heavy lifting – Content heavy websites had dramatic impacts on performance from the reigning top mobile sites. Several sites that saw performance impacts when adding content to their pages this year like Buy.com, Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s.

- Splash page replacements – The start of the holiday shopping season saw an interesting trend. An increasing number of mobile sites were looking to capture the attention of mobile users by replacing their mobile site home pages with splash pages. Retailers like Dell, Nordstrom and Walgreens redirected users to an advertisement to download a mobile App to access mobile content.  The mobile equivalent of an interstitial, and who likes them, Splash pages were a Fail for the mobile user experience.

- Website outages – Mobile load testing is critical to the success of website’s performance and to revenue in busy shopping seasons. In addition, other site issues can hurt performance like Brookstone’s maintenance outage earlier this year. “When conducting maintenance, retailers should always provide a ‘Site under maintenance’ message to inform end users when to expect service to resume,” says Herman Ng, mobile performance evangelist at Keynote Systems.

- Deficient Data Centers – Mobile site performance isn’t always in the hands of the retailers. There are many outside factors that can affect the performance of a mobile site, like ToolFetch’s recent data center woes.

 - Ignoring the masses – Dell and Foot Locker are among the retailers whose sites didn’t perform well on slower devices and networks speeds. Let’s face it, not every smartphone is a 4G rocket, and a retail mobile site needs to serve millions of users with devices and carriers that are a bit slower.  When measuring the user experience on a BlackBerry Curve on T-Mobile some sites had relatively much slower page load times when compared with the same site on other devices and carriers.  The sites with better overall performance were able deliver all users a great experience across a broad cross-section of devices and network connections. 

Size matters in mobile retail

There are several reasons why some mobile retailers have fast websites while others tend to be slow. We took a quick look at the three fastest sites in the Keynote Mobile Retail Index and noticed one thing in common-- they were all relatively "light."  The three averaged 62KB in size compared to 223KB for the rest.

Many other factors impact download time, but having nearly 4X the content as the competition will certainly put your mobile site at a disadvantage.  A good rule of thumb when designing a mobile site: when in doubt, leave it out.  Remember that your customers are using your mobile retail site differently than they do the desktop. Don't feel compelled to deliver the same set of functionality to the smaller screen

Top Performing Banking Mobile Websites Serve the 99%

Want to #Occupy a top spot amongst the best banking and financial mobile websites? If you look at our Keynote Mobile Financial Services Index, the lesson is clear – focus on the 99%.  Smartphone and tablet users should be able to successfully download your website 99% of the time.  It’s a valuable lesson for anyone who wants to have their website outperform the competition.  What’s more, it’s a lesson that goes beyond Banking and Financial Services websites.  

You can largely ignore the other 1% because it might not be attainable for reasons beyond your control. Not because of a conspiracy of the rich, but for the mere fact that mobile networks are inherently less reliable than their fixed-line counterparts. Carrier (operator) networks might let you down up to 1% of the time, but two 9’s of reliability are within your control. 

If your mobile website can’t successfully download 99% of the time, chances are that you need to take action to improve the availability of your content for customers.  Thoughtful site design and pre-deployment testing are important. 

 

 

But also know that you don’t have to be a Fat Cat to afford around-the-clock monitoring to ensure that downtime is minimized.  Basic and affordable monitoring with Keynote Mobile Web Perspective^TM will let you know when your mobile website goes down and alert your teams to reduce mean time to repair.  Pay a little attention to your mobile website and camp out amongst the top sites in a Keynote index.

Private Mobile Network Monitoring: a Smart Alternative

The big story in the news today is the uproar over carriers using software embedded within popular smartphones to help them monitor their mobile networks.  The key-logging software comes from a company called CarrierIQ and is already preloaded in many of the latest devices on the market today.  Data collected from the software is sent to the carriers giving them additional information for tracing performance issues and reducing mean time to repair. 

Unfortunately, most people didn’t know that the software is there and that their personal usage data is actively being monitored.  The big fear is that other types of user data can be collected from the smartphone in violation of the privacy and trust of the smartphone owner.

Real user passive monitoring has been a best-practice of carriers (operators) for a long time and it’s important that they monitor their systems internally to make sure that the fewest number of subscribers are impacted when outages occur.  The problem here is that the passive monitoring of real user traffic has extended beyond the traditional network and into the hands of unsuspecting customers.

According to MSNBC, three of the four top US carriers use CarrierIQ (Verizon being the exception) but they explain the limits of their use:

“The Carrier IQ program is an analytical tool, strictly to "improve wireless network and service performance," not to track users' personal data, said AT&T.

Sprint said in a statement that Carrier IQ software helps "analyze our network performance and identify where we should be improving service…."

T-Mobile, contacted by msnbc.com, said late Thursday it uses Carrier IQ strictly as a "diagnostic tool to troubleshoot device and network performance with the goal of enhancing network reliability and our customers'  experience."

The problem is that there’s little trust that someone, somewhere isn’t using this valuable data for their personal benefit. 

Looking at what these carriers are trying to accomplish in the statements above, Keynote Systems is proud to say that that our active testing and monitoring solutions are ultimately designed for the same benefit.  Our private testing and monitoring networks of smartphones, measurements computers and networks probes provide similar Quality of Service data to carriers around the globe, including the United States. 

Because our mobile network monitoring solutions are built, operated and managed by operated by Keynote many headaches are avoided.  Private networks of smartphones, computers and probes are placed in strategic locations generating private network traffic. This has helped us become the trusted third party of carriers and operators looking for that extra advantage in improving the end user experience. We don’t replace the need for thorough internal passive monitoring, but we can help carriers keep their subscribers happy while hopefully keeping their names out of the headlines.

 

One in four online holiday purchases to be mobile

According to research recently published by Google, one out of every four US online purchases will be made with a mobile device during this holiday season. 

In a very short period of time, smartphones and tablets have drastically altered our shopping behavior.  What's more amazing is that 68%of all smartphone shoppers are using them to help in either their online or in-store shopping experience.  This gives them on-demand ability to locate stores, product information and to compare pricing. 

Shoppers now have an unprecedented amount of access to information and the flexibility to pull the trigger on a sale at any time.  But has this power shift come at the expense of retailers who now need to be ultra-competitive with respect to the competition? The early results say "no."

According to the USA Today, November retail sales were strong.  Arguably, consumers are using information provided by smartphone and tablets to shop smarter, not to spend less. Therefore, retailers that are doing a better job in getting product information, store locations, pricing and purchase options into the hands of smartphone and tablet users have an upper hand on the retailers that don't. 

Each week Keynote tracks mobile commerce website performance for both leading US and International retailers.  We've seen that leading commerce providers are taking mobile performance seriously.  What's more, the companies that enable retailers to go mobile are paying attention as well. 

While seeing that one out of four 2011 purchases is exciting news in mobile retail, we're equally excited to see what 2012 will bring.

The rise of mobile testing

In the movie, "The Guardian" (Kevin Costner, Ashton Kutcher), Jake asks Senior "What is your number?"

Jake is asking Senior about the number of people he saved over the course of his career. The rumor was several hundred, but no one knew the exact number.

Senior responds "22".
Jake then says, "22...that's good, but it isn't 200".

Senior: "22 is the number I couldn't save, it is the only number I kept track of."

Within the software testing discipline you often hear numbers for things like: number of test cases created, number of defects found, etc. Many IT hallways are adorned with graphs showing these numbers rising and falling over a function of time.

To me this seems like a inwardly focused way of doing things. Instead should we be asking "How many did we let slip through?" Or maybe another way to say it is "It's not how many you find, but how many you missed."

Over the years we have developed ways to do testing of desktop and web apps. And for the most part organizations have been successful utilizing some form of testing methodology to measure the quality of the software products they produce or utilize. We still hear of "Oops" moments in the news when the provider of a major on-line service has a problem in their system used by thousands of real people, In most cases the problem is resolved quickly, and in most cases some damage has been done to their brand.

Now we are all in the "undiscovered country" of mobile. There are many more variables such as the variety of handset models and OS flavors. And on top of that the pace of which everything seems to be changing in mobile is unlike anything we have ever seen. How do we deal with it?

Will our existing test methodologies used for desktop and web still work? Are there automation tools that we can use to help us? Is it even possible to test on all the handset flavors that users of a service will have? What compromises are reasonable knowing that we can't test on every possible device? 

Even though counting things like test cases and defects isn't the same as asking "How much have we saved the company by doing proper testing?", measuring what we can at least gives us a starting point.

The complexities of mobile testing will no doubt push the entire testing discipline to a whole new level of innovation. New ideas, new techniques, new tools, and new analysis will all be needed as we move further along this path where nothing is "standard" and everything changes every few months. Even with the rise of technologies like HTML5 the number of test variables in mobile will continue to be unlike anything we have ever seen for desktop testing.

No one has all the answers to the mobile testing problem, but here at Keynote we are trying to contribute by providing both our MITE and DeviceAnywhere testing tools. WIth MITE you can decompose mobile web pages to figure out how to optimize them, with DeviceAnywhere you can control real devices either through automation or by using an interactive console.

The rise of mobile testing has just begun.

Mobile Performance Dr. Prescription: take one tablet regularly

Tablet = iPad

Recent data from comScore shows that tablets now account for roughly 1/3 of U.S. mobile Web traffic (32.4%) once you remove game consoles and iPods. What's more impressive is the the iPad accounts for virtually all tablet traffic on the Web (95.5%).

What does this mean for mobile Web monitoring?

Keynote has many mobile Web monitoring customers concerned about how their mobile website performs over the most popular devices on the market.  Many ask which devices are needed for to get a representative cross sample of the mobile end user experience.  Based on the data, if your going to monitor from three or more devices, one of those needs to be an iPad. 

 

Not so fast (literally)

While it seems so obvious that Web content owners would monitor and improve their mobile experience from the iPad perspective, Keynote data suggests it's not happening as often as it should. 

As part of a larger study soon to be published by Yankee Group, we monitored the download speeds of 16 popular websites for one week over an iPad and an iPhone over 3G networks.   

One surprising finding was that the average download speed for the iPad was slowerthan the iPhone.

iPhone download average: 15.04 seconds

iPad download average: 18.27 seconds 

What can we conclude from the data? A lot of mobile web traffic is coming from the iPad, and yet little is being done to improve the tablet user experience.

The best practices for improving the mobile user experience are the same ones developed for the Web many years ago.  Monitor your website and take steps to improve performance from the end user experience. And don't forget the tablet (read: iPad) user as well.  When you develop your mobile monitoring strategy, add an iPad measurement into the mix. 

 

The State of Mobile Commerce: Anything but Silky

Keynote’s recent study of 392 mobile commerce sites (conducted for the Internet Retailer Mobile Commerce Top 300 Guide) shows that less than 1 in 10 sites download the home page on a smartphone in under 5 seconds, and half of mobile retail, ticketing and travel sites downloaded in 10 seconds or more. It is clear that online/mobile content providers need to focus on performance and user experience on smartphones to stay competitive.

Recently much press was devoted to Amazon’s entry into the tablet market with the Silk browser.  The combination of Silk's back-end computing power and predictive navigation (predicting consumer behavior), is potentially a game-changing technology for e-commerce. Its impact on mobile performance is less clear because Silk runs on a device that does not connect to mobile networks (only W-iFi).  While Silk definitely makes inroads to bridging the gap between mobile and desktop user experience, until the Silk browser (with cloud connection) can be replicated and/or licensed by mobile networks, mobile devices over 3G and 4G networks will simply not be able to reach the speed that Silk boasts.

That leaves mobile site owners still having to figure out how to improve the performance of their sites on smartphone and tablets that do connect to 3G networks.

M-Commerce Websites Not Making the Grade

Keynote partnered with Internet Retailer to be the exclusive performance data provider for Internet Retailer's 2012 Mobile Commerce Top 300.  Going beyond the weekly mobile performance data featured each and every week in the 30-website Mobile Commerce Performance Index, Keynote captured smartphone performance of nearly 400 websites (392 to be exact) covering Retail, Travel, and Ticketing. 

What became quickly apparent is that many websites are not delivering a user experience that many users would come to expect.  Studies conducted over the last year show that users want the mobile Web for many of their mCommerce needs.  However, slow download speeds and gaps in availability may be preventing mobile as a commerce platform from reaching its potential. 

Here are some high-level findings from the study:

 
 
Less than 1 out of 10 sites downloaded the home page on a smartphone in under 5 seconds.

For many users requiring more than 5 seconds just to get to the first page of a transaction, search, store locator or other content is pushing the limits of their patience while on the go.  That the number is this low for mobile despite the retail industry's overall investment in improving the online user experience shows that there's long way to go.   

 

 

Less than 2% of websites had 100% availability from a smartphone over a 10 day period.

 

If you're doing the math at home, that's 7 websites in the study of 392 companies.  Not being available is the online equivalent of saying "we're closed."  

 

   

 

 

One-half of the mobile retail, ticketing and travel sites downloaded in 10 seconds or more.

Even if a website can't deliver a download of better than 5 seconds on a smartphone, at some point we all can agree that a line needs to be drawn. If 10 seconds to download the first page of a transaction is that point, then 1/2 of the class isn't making the grade.

 

 

 

How did the bottom quarter of all website fair?

 

The range for the bottom quartile of website downloads from a smartphone ranged from 16.92 - 61.81 seconds.

 

The study clearly shows that many commerce providers need to take action.  The reality of the market is that customers are using smartphones to find and interact with you while on the go. 

Just as the eCommerce leaders learned how to address desktop performance issues over a decade ago,  similar best practices and tools are available for mCommerce providers today.

If you're an mCommerce company interested in taking the next steps to improving your website over a mobile device or, if you simply want to find out how you ranked against top companies in our study contact us today. www.keynote.com/MC2012