Are you losing money because you’re not having this conversation with your IT department?

Here’s how to get in the loop…

The Feedback loop!

In this article we’ll teach you how to get wise so that your website gets eyes

A website can look nice and seem to work, but repel potential clients.

In other words, no news may not be good news. It’s pretty obvious that when your site goes down, you must take immediate action, but if you’re only getting logs when your site goes down, you don’t have a good feedback loop. Read ahead and we’ll tell you just what that means, and what you can do about it!

Feedback Loops

If you understand feedback loops, then you’ve mastered one of the key principles of DevOps in Los Angeles and around the world. Feedback loops are natural to every system, not just in tech. It’s basically cause and effect, with revisions along the way. Here at our Los Angeles Dev-Ops Company, we explain to our clients that Feedback Loops refer to the cycle of development and assessment. The system is a gift that helps us improve! When using feedback loops to improve your website, the goal is not to find that one perfect action or decision, but to embrace the continual learning, experimentation, and adjustment it involves.

Q. What makes an awesome feedback loop?
A. One that is short and clear.

That way, your IT team can:

1. Catch what’s not working and fix it, and;
2. Catch what is working and amp it up!

For example,
“The site has been running well, but we find that every time it goes to the checkout page, it hangs for 30 seconds.”

New requirement: The hang time should be 10 seconds!

Then it goes through the loop again until you have the result and user interaction you want.

We measure this by longer browsing times, higher click rates, and more buy-ins!

More on User Interaction

People may land on your site but leave before they’ve read all the awesome content you invested so much into creating. They may close their browser window before entering their contact information, before exploring your offerings, before calling you to learn more, before they buy a single thing.

If that’s the case, here’s a handy list of potential problems you can ask your IT department to screen for:

• The page view takes a long time
• The database query takes a long time
• Images aren’t optimized correctly
• Users on different continents experience delayed image
• Servers are running at high utilization, using a lot of ram, receive frequent error messages
• Outages occur, or possible system overutilization
• System underutilization
• Load average is above 1
  • The load average should stay below 1, or you risk overloading your server.

If you discover one of these problems is ailing your website, take that information and relate it to either the customer’s experience.

Q: What are the steps of the feedback loop so that I can solve those problems and optimize my site’s user interaction?
A: Here’s the breakdown:

The Devops Life Cycle (Big thanks to New Relic for their thorough explanation of this process!)

1. Develop Requirements
   • Establish the business or site requirements: What is it going to do and who is it going to connect?
   • Hand your business’s requirement off to developers, and they’ll write it!
2. Test
   • Make sure everything does what it is designed to do.
3. Deploy
   • Publish the new feature or update.
4. Monitor & Alert
   • Be prepared! You just put something new in, so make sure everything works seamlessly.
5. Feedback
   • How many people are hitting your site, and how long do they stay on it? This is your matrix of the user experience.

Finally, look back at your requirements, make any amendments you deem productive, and Voila! The feedback loop is complete.

More on Feedback

Q: How do I interpret the feedback?
A: One California DevOps company, New Relic, has a metricts that monitors the load average (from something called the “Linux Box”) and relates it to the real users’ experience using such questions as:

• How long does the page take to load?
• How long do the buttons take to respond?
• How long is it between putting in a query and getting a response?
• How are your visitors interacting with my page?
• How long before they click?

Hopefully these questions and answers have armed you with the information you need to hone the site of your Los Angeles business into the profit-making machine it was born to be.

Now go, communicate with your IT department! If you need an intermediary, call Jobst Consulting of Los Angeles DevOps expertise and we’ll help you with this process. Ask your IT team what feedback loops you have in place. Find out the page load, but more than that, start seeing the whole picture.

If you want to be competitive in your market and have the advantage over competitors, make sure people go to your site and have the best possible experience- proven by their behavior.