“We depend on applications today,” stated Zach Trusty, Senior Solutions Engineer at Riverbed Technology. Think about how often you check the weather app to pick out an outfit or check all your social media sites from your phone. Applications are a constant in our lives.
Applications are frequently used, but they are routinely updated as well. How do IT specialists keep up with all the updates while making sure the application performance is up to par?
In GovLoop’s recent online training, Organization Performance Depends on Application Performance, we heard from Brian Stanton, Cognitive Scientist, National Institute of Standards and Technology and Zach Trusty, Solutions Engineer, Riverbed Technology.
To improve performance, there are requirements. These requirements include your agency’s goals and remembering that you are creating these applications for the user, not an IT specialist. “It starts with the user and understanding the context,” said Stanton. An important factor application success is having a good user-centered design, also called human-centered design. This means your application should be user-focused and friendly. The main thing you should remember while improving your application performance is to “identify your users and always keep that in mind when you develop these products,” said Stanton.
Next, Stanton said your user and organization standards should be measurable. “You need to define the task and system objectives,” he said. The data being measured and tracked turns into feedback from your users. By soliciting user feedback, it ensures you create a human-centered applications.
Once you have your requirements and receive evaluations about your applications, how do you maintain applications, “Applications are growing more complex and constantly innovating,” said Trusty. To make sure you keep pace with these changes, manage issues proactively. By doing so, developers can see why things failed and fix bugs faster. By catching the failures and bugs faster, operations can deploy and monitor new features that will enhance the application. From here you can share diagnostics and keep improving your apps so they are up to speed.
The last thing to remember is to measure user experience and usage trends. How? “Look at your data, find out if it’s coming from the network or the server itself,” advised Trusty. The data will tell you what’s working and what’s not.
Application performance is important in this day and age. We are using them everyday and depend on apps. We expect the performance to be great. Developers having objectives to keep improving applications is key to keeping up with user-centered design. Receiving feedback and implementing them into your apps will keep users happy and the application performance will keep improving.
