So what is an organization to do? How can an organization hope to improve the web experience it delivers even as it gives up control of it?

1. Engineer the experience into your product. Don’t just pile on functionality, switch applications on, and see what effect they will have on the business. Take the entire experience into account up front, as part of the development process. Ensure that your release criteria include specific metrics that you can measure often and from the very beginning of the application life cycle.

2. Know your customers, their profiles and their usage patterns. What kind of browsers do they use? What kind of machines? How do they connect to the Internet? Where in the world are they located? What are their usage patterns, (e.g., days, nights, weekends or certain paths through the application)? All of these factors affect the customer experience, so make sure your application will work well for your customers. And just because your third parties deliver well in one geography doesn’t mean they will in all of them. You can’t assume your third parties are as consistent as you are.

3. Continually check in on your customers’ experience. Continually gauge the customer experience from various locations around the world, using both periodic planned tests as well as real data from real users’ browsers. With the Internet changing so rapidly, just because your customers’ experience is satisfactory today doesn’t mean it will still be satisfactory tomorrow.

4. Know (and manage) what feeds into your customer’s experience. Many organizations understand the concept of third-party web services but still monitor the delivery of only the content they serve up. Keep track of every factor affecting your customers’ experience, including third-party data and services. And remember: just because a third-party web service works well for some of your customers doesn’t mean it will for all of them.

5. Take the time to investigate Ajax and other RIA technologies. Done right, these technologies can transform the web experience for the better. There are many frameworks, yet few standards. The best way to learn is start working with the technologies and get comfortable with them. Don’t fear them.

6. Benchmark. Identify your chief competitors and find out exactly how the web experiences you deliver match up to theirs. For starters, look at response time, availability and consistency. Then look at users’ ability to find or do what they came to do. Is it too much work or do they sail right through? If you’re not at the top of these comparisons, fix problems and move up the rankings.

7. Connect the web experience to business results. Web performance testing reveals connections between web experience quality and business success. E-commerce professionals can track important processes such as online conversion rates, shopping cart abandonment, click counts, or even the frequency with which users hit the stop button to interrupt failed page loads. Users can drill down for in-depth data on what may be responsible for a problem, and then quickly resolve it.

8. Don’t buy any testing software. Okay, I’ve given you seven activities you need to be performing to control the web experience in this new age of composite applications, and now I’m telling you not to buy any testing tools. Nope. All of the tools you need to ensure a superior web experience – synthetic testing, real-user testing, load testing, functional QA and browser profiling – are available on-demand using software as a service. With just your web browser, you can employ these tools to test and monitor the entire customer experience across third-party partners and your customers’ varying geographies, connection speeds, browser types and more.

9. Optimize. When the data pours in, you’ll be back in control of the web experience. If the experience fulfills Web 2.0’s promise, great. Breathe easily. If not, you’ll know what to do next. While others are chasing shadows behind the firewall and leaving the rest to chance, the data you’re collecting – internal, external, synthetic and real user – will tell you what you need to do.

10. Remember. As you design, develop, validate, deploy, operate, analyze, enhance and optimize the customer experience, there’s only one perspective that really matters – your customers’.

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