Background: What is User Observability?

What makes understanding human behavior so hard?

What is User Observability?

How does it relate to system observability?

This year, Stratascale introduced the Full Organizational Observability series: a how-to guide for developing a 360-degree view of customer and employee experiences.

In a previous Horizon Report we covered system observability, which focused on monitoring application and infrastructure performance to understand system behavior.

This edition will focus on user observability, where organizations monitor user interactions to understand their behavior when utilizing technology.

We are striving for business observability, which comes from monitoring customer and employee activities to understand what impacts business outcomes.

Technical Challenges for User Observability

Traditional IT infers user experiences from system performance

IT traditionally managed user experiences by maintaining service level objectives (SLOs) for individual parts of the technology stack operated by siloed teams of technical specialists (storage, compute, network). Teams rarely integrated monitoring tools, and their primary goal was hitting their own availability targets. When users called in response to a service disruption, the best they could hope for was a timely response from the help desk.

Today, operations teams at more advanced organizations use a suite of monitoring tools to quickly diagnose system performance issues across all levels of the technology stack. Product owners establish SLOs or error budgets based on the effectiveness of the entire business service, rather than each team being responsible for their own piece.

But even after conquering these technical challenges, most organizations have a long way to go to extend observability to experiences at the user level. Even organizations that achieve their SLOs or stay within their error budgets may struggle to answer these questions:

Are our customers, employees, shareholders and other audiences having good experiences with our technology?
How much of our customer and employee churn can be attributed to poor experiences with our technology?
How can I improve our users’ experiences with technology?

You can’t measure crucial business outcomes like employee productivity and customer satisfaction just by looking at your service SLOs or error budgets.

In order to get a true understanding of an application’s business value, product teams must extend visibility to user experiences.

Human Challenges for User Observability

Interactions with complex technical systems are hard to see

Let’s define user experience: It is the impression a person gets when interacting with technology.

Digital experiences are harder to observe than in-person experiences. For each technology layer you add between your organization and users, you need additional technology to monitor activities within that layer—increasing the scale and complexity of your operation.

Humans are harder to predict than technology, especially when humans interact with companies in new ways. Innovations like social media also create new contexts for feedback loops of human behavior.

Making things even tougher for organizations, IT and user experience staff are often in different parts of the organization, making collaboration difficult. The “back-end” staff (IT) and the “front-end” staff (user experience) need to solve problems together.

What is your organization's view of the connection between IT infrastructure & applications and user experiences?

User experience is just an issue for the help desk.
If the technology works, users will have good experiences.
IT and user experience are important but separate issues.
The link between technology and user experience is well understood and appreciated.

IT and User Experience Connections

User observability is built upon strong IT & UX collaboration

User observability is proactive by necessity. If you wait to address customers’ and employees’ needs until they call the help desk, you have already lost. Customers will go to competitors and employees will succumb to inefficient work processes.

Slow applications and unusable services will always lead to bad user experiences. Users expect a lot more than just working technology, however. They expect great experiences.

Customer experiences aren’t only a marketing problem, just as employee experiences aren’t solely an HR problem. IT bears responsibility for user experiences, too. Strategic IT leaders understand business issues, including user experience challenges, and propose technology solutions that address those business challenges.

“Plug-and-play” models are outdated solutions for coordinating IT operations, software development, user research, and user interface design capabilities. Your customers and your employees deserve a tailored approach that incorporates your business model, culture, and product maturity.

Source: GovLoop