How to Pick an End-User Experience Tool

Aberdeen Group has stated that they have found "solid evidence" that monitoring the end-user experience leads to a better overall application experience. This not only applies to the experience of users but also gives support staff a better experience. In this article in Network World, Beth Schulz summarizes ten recommendations for choosing an end-user experience tool.

The article cited above lacks a few aspects of such tools that are also important, and that should be included in any evaluation or selection of tools. One important question you should ask yourself is: What is my definition of end-user experience, and how do I quantify it? Because end-user experience may be seen from different perspectives, that may reflect different aspects of the truth.

Wikipedia defines user experience as "User eXperience is about how a person feels about using a system"; a definition that is based on ISO standard 9241-210. This is a much wider and more generic definition than that generally assumed when IT people talk about measuring the end-user experience. But it is still much closer to the reality of users' experiences, than the simple measures of response times and availability that IT operations assumes.

In other words, a concept of user experience should include not just those performance and availability aspects that normally are measured, but also more subjective factors. The look and feel of an application may influence how the user feels about it, simplicity may also impact the experience. A slow but easy to use application may be a lot better - particularly for casual users - than a fast but complex one.

Coming back to the question of criteria for selecting an "end-user experience tool", we need to define whose experience we want to catch. Is it the infrequent user who spends a long time in the application when he first gets here, the frequent but fast user who knows exactly what she wants and need to go straight to the core? And to what extent do we include "related services" (such as responsiveness of a help desk, or users' response to surveys on satisfaction) into the total experience that we (want to) measure?