Well these days it seems that you are even lucky to get that apathetic acknowledgement of what is happening. It’s very frustrating to know that “something” is happening, but not to get any feedback or information pertaining to your delay. If someone, please someone just stand up and explain to us what is happening. Inform us. Set expectations. Manage my satisfaction. Keep me as a customer. That’s fairly simple, uh?
 
Segue to application performance and customer satisfaction…

So, this morning when I boot up my computer and try to load any program, such as Firefox, nothing happens. I try again. I still see nothing. Gees, I just want to see if that flat screen TV that I ordered had been shipped. Nada. Niente. Nothing. I see nothing except my Desktop and its lineup of icons, but I can hear the hard disk churning away. What is happening? Cue Microsoft Task Manager. Exit stage left LIRR (for now). Microsoft Task Manager is a nifty program that allows me to quickly glance at how my computer’s resources, such as the memory utilization and CPU utilization (amongst other things), are being used. When Task Manager finally loads, I can start to poke around and see what is causing my hard disk to spin like the dickens. I look at the process list. I sort the list by CPU to see what process is currently requiring the most horsepower on my computer. Low and behold, it’s one of the well known antivirus programs. As it turns out, it was performing a system wide scan on my computer. OK, that’s why I have this software; to look for virus and spyware that might be lurking in the depths of my computer. But again, just like the gate agent on my most recent flight who couldn’t seem to manage an answer why we were still waiting to board the plane after 2 hours, why couldn’t this program actually inform me what it was doing? Why couldn’t a simple notification that it was scanning my computer be produced? Maybe a simple message box could have sufficed? Let me know what’s happening.  Managing customer expectations goes well beyond running load and volume tests in order to determine application bottlenecks. In the more holistic process of software performance engineering, providing feedback is a key attribute in keeping end-users satiated.

So, I’m not here to pick on this antivirus program, but the lack of feedback from software is more of a norm, rather than the exception.  When I submitted my credit card for that flat screen TV the e-commerce web site that I was using gave me no indication of what it was doing while I waited for 20 to 30 seconds to get a confirmation web page back. I think that flag or globe in the Internet Explorer toolbar was waving or doing something to indicate that I actually did submit my payment information. Or did it? I tell you it was not comforting knowing that I just made a large financial investment over the internet as I waited for some clue of what was going on. All I did know is that I just clicked a button to send my credit card information to some remote location and I all had to show for it so far was a blank screen in my web browser. I was thinking, “should I hit the back button and tried it again?”.  I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking this way. And I’m sure that non-technical people are even more perplexed on what to do. What could have been done? Perhaps the web application that I was using could have launched a little progress window stating that it was doing something, rather than relying on the web browser’s flashy toolbar as a progress indicator. Perhaps rather than relying on the mouse cursor to change to an hourglass, the application could have provided feedback that was pertinent to the operation it was currently processing. Perhaps the next time I won’t have to rely on Microsoft’s Task Manager to tell me that my antivirus program has taken over my computer to run a system scan.  I am betting that this not-so-groundbreaking realization of software performance engineering is much easier to implement when compared to getting some clue why my train is not moving. And I’m sure that the customer perceived performance of your application will be well revered, unlike applications that require people like me to use Task Manager to figure out what is going on.