Web Performance Matters

Gartner IT Maturity Model

Last week, one of my posts introduced Peter Armstrong's paper about IT-Business alignment. BMC has just published a new whitepaper by Peter -- Taking IT to the Next Level -- about the challenges IT organizations face as they evolve from a cost center to a creator of business value.

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Today I am continuing my review of Web Usability books, from the perspective (described here) of someone who believes that Performance Matters:

Usability for the Web by Tom Brinck, Darren Gergle, and Scott D. Wood

Subtitled Designing Web Sites That Work, this book is about managing the design process, with the term design being used in its widest sense. In the introduction, the authors define Usability as the product of several design goals: functionally correct, efficient to use, easy to learn, easy to remember, error tolerant, and subjectively pleasing.

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Today I am continuing my review of Web Usability books, from the perspective (described here) of someone who believes that Performance Matters:

The Design of Sites by Douglas K. Van Duyne, James A. Landay and Jason I. Hong

As its title suggests, this book is written for anyone involved in the design of a Web site. In the preface and on their site the authors say: Its focus is tilted more toward Web design professionals, such as interaction designers, usability engineers, information architects, and visual designers.

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Today I am continuing my review of Web Usability books, from the perspective (described here) of someone who believes that Performance Matters:

Designing Web Usability : The Practice of Simplicity by Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen is a famous usability guru. He writes, speaks, and consults on Web site design and usability, and his 1999 book is a classic. It is surely the best-seller on this subject, having been translated into 21 languages. According to the New Riders Press publisher's introduction over 250,000 Internet professionals around the world have turned to this landmark book.

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I have twice promised to recommend books on Web Usability, so it's about time I got on with it. I have organized the books I like on a scale from simplest to most comprehensive. Today I will review the first, and simplest, of my recommendations.

Before we start I have to point out that I am not an expert in the subjects these authors devote most of their pages to, which I have labeled Clarity in my four-dimension usability model. My particular interest in writing these reviews is not primarily in the authors' expertise in the Clarity dimension, but in the extent to which they also acknowledge or discuss the dimensions of Availability, Responsiveness, and Utility.

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Whenever specialists attach technical meanings to everyday words, they tend to create confusion and make their profession harder to penetrate. Some professions are masters of this. If you heard the words party, service, and cases in a sentence you might be looking forward to a celebration -- unless they were spoken by your lawyer.

In the world of information systems, Usability is a case in point. Model is another -- especially since it can be a noun, a verb, or an adjective. All the same, today I am going to use a model to help me discuss the concept of usability!

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If you research the business case for performance on the Web, eventually you're sure find yourself reading something published on a site called NextSLM.org, a site sponsored by BMC Software. One contributor is a former colleague of mine, Peter Armstrong.

Peter and I started our careers with IBM UK in the 70's as SE's supporting IMS customers. Although information technology has evolved a bit since then, our interests apparently have not diverged much. Peter now writes a BMC blog called Adopting a Service (Management) Mentality, which focuses on the increasingly important domain of how business and information technology need to work together --the area he is responsible for at BMC.

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In life, wisdom is generally thought to come with age. But in business, years of experience do not always lead to best practices. This often seems to be the case when it comes to the systematic application of performance management or service level management (SLM) practices.

Lately I've been working on the business value of SLM. In particular, I've been focusing on how to establish the value of SLM activities devoted to improving the availability and responsiveness of Web sites and e-business applications. In the process I've been speaking to several companies about how they approach this question.

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These days everyone has an opinion about aligning IT with the business. If you think I'm exaggerating, just Google that phrase and read a few of the 800+ references you get back. You will quickly see that this subject generates very strong feelings, the trajectory of which depends largely on whether the writer views the world through the prism of IT or the business.

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Turning Point Model

Browsing the Web can lead to useful insights, even when you don't find what you're looking for. Today I was searching for information about an aspect of Web site performance management. As often happens, Google returned many links to pages where the term performance management was used in contexts having nothing to do with managing Web applications.

On one site, Turning Point, the graphic shown here immediately caught my eye ...

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