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How Microsoft Degrades Their Users (In a Good Cause)
blackbearnh writes "We all know that slow Web pages drive users crazy, but where is the boundary between too slow and too simple? As Microsoft's Eric Schurman points out, the fastest-loading page of all is a blank one, but it's also the most useless. In an interview with O'Reilly Radar leading up to his appearance at the Velocity Conference, Schurman talks about his experiences working on some of Microsoft's highest-volume sites, including the home page and Live Search. In particular, he discusses how Microsoft will selectively degrade the performance of pages to small sets of users so that they can see how various amounts of delay at different times and places affect user behavior. 'In cases where we were giving what was a significantly degraded experience, the data moved to significance extremely quickly. We were able to tell when we delayed people's pages by more than half a second, and it was very obvious that this had a significant impact on users very quickly. We were able to turn off that experiment. The reasoning... was it helps us make a strong argument for how we can prioritize work on performance against work on other aspects of the site.' He also talks about what it's like to be one of the most often-targeted DDoS sites on the planet."
In this, there is also the possibility of becoming complacent and ill-tuned to the needs of your users. Taking Google as an example, they keep their services in a perpetual state of beta, always in testing, never reaching a final v1. This type of reliance on constant feedback from customers may work for a short while, but unless the product reaches a state of relative stability (in terms of both not crashing and also not changing) the users will typically find some other software to use.
You just disproved your own point.
Yep. Half a second delay is the end of the world. Age of Linux as SaaS...or whatever buzzwords are in play here.
I'm up for a good Microsoft rant any time, any place, but if a small batch of users have to take a performance hit to improve the experience in the end for all users, isn't that a positive thing? You can't really beta test this stuff. You can try running simulations, but nothing beats real world numbers.
Would we view this any different if Apple tried it? Google?
(Disclaimer: This is a logic exercise. In reality, I doubt there's actually much MS could and would do to their site to improve my experience using it.)
Experimenting by delaying a pageload for 500ms is worthy of ethical considerations? Would you like to sue Microsoft for emotional damage? Too many people are afraid of doing anything these days.
You're discussing the wrong topic. "graceful degradation" != "selective worsening".
In Gmail, the degradation is helping you cope with a poor connection. In Microsoft's experiment, the degradation is hurting you and is imposed by a coin flip.
Yeah! I mean, take IE6 for example. That didn't change in a REALLY long time, and lots of people use it! That makes it good, right? [/sarcasm]
Your statement neglects quality. Yes, people want sites that're stable and don't crash, and yes, changing the design every week is bad and confusing, but improving on the design and function of a site is always a good thing, so long as you do so at intervals large enough for users to adjust to. The design of Gmail has only changed drastically two or three times in it's history design-wise, but they still consider it a Beta (depending on what you consider a drastic change, of course).
The issue is that Google, once simply a search engine, is now in the Web Services industry. The fact is, no matter what the label says, Gmail and many of their other apps are not in Beta, and haven't been in a long time. They're just hesitant to call it "v1" or something because that has a sense of finality, like customers shouldn't expect it to change very often. With the web, and Web Apps in particular, that's no longer really the case. They are often redesigned and redone to improve their performance, effectiveness, ease-of-use, and even aesthetics. You even point out yourself how agile the web is as an environment for releasing software. You neglect, though, that this keeps it interesting for the users as well, because they like the feeling that their product is continually being improved at no extra cost to them (unlike many shrink-wrapped software) (Note: When I say "extra cost," I mean in addition to any subscriptions they already have to the service, if any).
The "Beta" in Google's case is very much a marketing issue as much as it is a technical issue.
I always thought that was Spock.
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It sounds absurd because what you're saying is absurd.
If you ran an experiment where some customers had their orders delayed by a few minutes more than was necessary and had some kind of metric to determine their enjoyment of their dining experience, it wouldn't be so absurd. Perhaps you provide free internet access in your store, and the extra delay results in a greater chance of people making use of it. And once they've started using it, there's a greater chance they'll decide to order a coffee after their meal and stick around for a bit longer.
Or maybe you find they're less likely to return to the store. That might be hard to track, but the point stands. There are some things which are interesting and which may or may not give unexpected results when tried in real life. If an experiment like this shows that a few minutes delay significantly upsets customers, then it becomes clear that spending extra money to have more staff on is probably actually worth the expense. On the other hand if you can show that most people don't notice, then it makes sense to risk having a shortage of staff at peak periods if you can save a bit of money.
You might even find unexpected results, for example maybe a lot of people after waiting a few minutes with nothing to look at but the menu end up ordering more than they initially would, so it's actually profitable to make people wait longer. Who knows? The only way to find out is to experiment.
That would probably completely invalidate the results though, for two reasons. First, the sorts of people who would opt into that wouldn't at all be representative. (It would take an unusual person to even find the opt-in, let alone volunteer for a degraded experience knowingly.) Second, knowing about it would be way too likely to affect how the people behaved.
You could get halfway by saying "would you like to help us do research" or something like that, without saying in what way, which would reduce these problems, but not completely.
I think this would only actually be a problem if anyone used LIVE search.
Exactly. It's their site, and they certainly allowed to do with it what they want :). They could do "market research" and ask people how slow it could be, but instead they are collecting real world technical data and gaining insight on to how the performance impacts real people. Hopefully they then use this to decide where to spend time on performance.
Modded as Funny (100%), but you've just laid out the environmentalist rationale for controlling everything everyone does, everywhere.
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