For the past year(!) or so I’ve had a series of articles I meant to write about some intermediate programming concepts that can allow you to write code at a higher level. I regret that it’s taken so long to come around to them, but I hope they can be of some use. This series will cover semaphores, asynchronous tokens, and green threads, and I may extend it with some brief notes on assertions and iterators. Today I’d like to talk about semaphores.
This is essentially the second part to my last post. This time however, I’m concentrating on the user experience of the same campaign site (www.starbuckscoffeeathome.com) based on tracking data. I’ve used a custom-built statistics class which helped me to derive plenty of useful numbers from a normal user experience flow. My method was to record all important events and normal status data like the amount of external data loaded, the frame rate, and the memory usage. After recording the information I designed an infographic about what I discovered. You can see the graph here.
As you can see, there’s some disappointing trends. I noticed there seems to be a memory issue -something that must have become unresolved before final launch. The framerate reflects the usage on my trusty Intel 2 Ghz Mac Book Pro. Very unimpressive considering this is a decent machine really. I’m sure there’s a little bit of overhead which came from the statistics activity. Although the experience didn’t seem out of pace with the same one when the statistics class inactive. After considering when the average user leaves the site, I decided to make a second graphic which can be seen here.
And this is a little bit unfortunate. I will confess however that the connection speed on the machine I recorded the statistics with was a very slow DSL. A DSL connection would’ve produced more favorable results (assuming the user wasn’t doing other download work in the simultaneously). Although, as you can see a very large amount of time is consumed by watching a loader which brings me to the point of this post. If you build Flash sites which rely upon a pleasant user experience, then make sure all the content you load is well worth its weight.
