The Top Trends Likely to Dominate Web Applications In 2023
2023 is waiting in the wings as the world gears up to bid goodbye to a year that had plenty of cheer after almost two years of gloom. We have seen record growth in online retail as well as in internet-driven businesses for almost every sector. There has been a paradigm shift in how consumers spend on digital channels, that looks set to sustain through 2023.
Web applications are fast gaining a pivotal position for global businesses. So, let us examine the top five trends that are likely to dominate web applications in 2023.
Metaverse Entities
A couple of years ago, we would have written the names of AR/VR in this space, but over the last few years, the world has seen an unprecedented race toward establishing a footprint in the metaverse. 2023 is sure to witness more exciting use cases materialize for web applications in the metaverse as businesses will integrate such virtual experiences into their customer offering.
For example, the travel industry will see hotels and popular destinations entering the metaverse and offering virtual tours to help potential travelers get an exclusive walkthrough of what they will get if they fly down to the spot.
Experience-Driven Metrics
In the past, websites and web applications were judged for their performance based on how fast pages loaded or how adaptable it was for mobile screens. While those criteria remain, the future holds more value for metrics that actually deliver information on more specific parameters that influence a user’s journey within the app or website. These include:
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which is a marker for the stability of visual elements on the website
- First Input Delay (FID), which represents the speed of response for the very first action a user commits on a website
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which indicates the loading speed of the largest content piece on a page, which could be an image or a block of text.
These three metrics have been recognized by Google as the three major pillars that will drive adaptability among users for a web application.
Adaptive Commerce
E-commerce is and will be a huge part of the internet era in 2023, and trends in the sector cannot be ignored under any circumstances. From an online retail perspective, 2023 will witness the widespread adoption of adaptive commerce experiences.
In simple terms, it is a merger of physical and virtual shopping experiences wherein a customer who walks past a physical store or a smart sensor in a shopping mall or zone will instantly be notified about offers or promotions being run by the same brand on their mobile phone. This is achievable via dedicated apps or through partnerships with popular apps likely to be present on the customer’s phone.
Retail is just an example of this trend, and other businesses can hop into the online retailing bandwagon by deploying similar models.
Secure Services
Just in the 3rd quarter of 2022, there was a 28% rise in cyber-attacks globally compared to the same time in 2021. Enterprises must find ways to sustain themselves in the digital economy by not just creating winning business models but also ensuring that customers can trust these services with their confidential data and credentials.
Safeguarding all checkpoints in web applications will be a core part of the enterprise’s digital strategies in 2023. All supporting infrastructure for the same will also see heightened investments coming in 2023.
Applied Observability
Most enterprises having a web application understand how important it is to ensure observability in their critical digital channels. For those who are unaware, observability refers to the ability to determine the performance of a system from the nature of its output or, in other words, gauging current performance from the data generated by the system.
As we move deeper into unchartered realms of the cloud, more distributed systems will crowd the space, and general observability will become less useful. In 2023, enterprises with large cloud-driven web applications will turn their focus to applied observability, wherein more fine and granular visibility into the application’s performance is observed. It will include not just the core application but also enable transparent visibility into the performance of supporting infrastructures like networks, data, security frameworks, and business processes that guide the operations of digital channels.
What Do These Trends Mean for the Performance Testing of Applications?
If you look closely, the top 4 trends we covered initially in this blog have a very striking connection with the 5th trend of applied observability. In simple terms, be it new business models or innovations, enabling secure experiences, or building feature-rich services, 2023 will see a greater focus from enterprises on how application components are stacked up at their architecture level to support growth. This has a profound impact on the way web applications are subject to performance testing.
Rather than the usual suspects of load times and page speed, performance testing in 2023 must cater to areas such as:
- The performance of applications under the influence of newer security protocols
- How they work in an integrated environment supporting multiple innovations like the metaverse
- Ensuring that new test metrics are derived from the experience metrics that are now a key part of growth.
An in-depth granular view into even the deepest internal components will be crucial in making decisions on end consumer-facing operations. It is critical to ensure that no part of the application fails when faced with dynamic needs all through the year.
Eliminating potential failure scenarios must be a top priority for enterprises as they gear up to welcome the new year. But they need pro-active monitoring of their infrastructure with unbiased verification of the performance of every modular component of their digital channels. This is where the appNeura web browser monitoring tool becomes a key asset for businesses with a large web presence.
Get in touch with us to have a closer look into how the appNeura web browser monitoring tool can help in delivering a world-class, disruption-free end-user experience for your web applications.