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Prioritize
Your Limited Interactive Resources
In this recession, it seems no company or department has been immune to
budget cuts. Many of our clients, from Fortune 100 companies to smaller
firms, have been asking us to help determine how to invest their interactive
marketing resources where they will have the greatest impact. It’s much
easier to prioritize your site development budget when you know which website
content and features are most effective at driving conversion.
In this situation,
we often recommend conducting an on-site intercept study. This study collects
demographic information on actual users of your site and surveys them on
topics such as satisfaction with key features, brand impression and likelihood
to convert. The three key areas usually examined in an intercept study
are:
User Profile
Who is coming to your site, and what is their mental mindset? Sometimes
clients find that website marketing efforts send an unintended audience
to the site, or set expectations about site content or functionality
that weren’t met. It might also be obvious from these findings that specific
design changes are necessary, or perhaps new user personas should be
created to aid the design team.
Features that Drive Conversion
A driver analysis will help you understand how to prioritize improvement
of site features and content. The features that have the highest importance
are those visitors say are important and are also statistically proven
to have the greatest impact on conversion. Areas of hidden importance,
and key opportunities for development, are those that visitors don’t
state as important but are proven to have an impact on conversion. Areas
of stated importance and minimal importance are also identified, thus
bringing clarity to your development roadmap based on user needs AND
business impact.
Voice of Customer
While it’s often clear that users want a certain feature improved without
qualitative feedback, it’s hard to know why. Open-ended questions provide
key insights into how these features fit into the conversion process.
They tell the story behind your site ratings and observed user behaviors
and provide extremely detailed insight into how to
improve the site.
You want to make sure you’re spending your money wisely in 2009. By gaining
a better understanding of your users, knowing which specific features drive
conversion, and understanding how features should
be improved you can set
your site development budgets accordingly. Contact
us if you’d like to
discuss how we can help.
Example
of Successful Simplicity -
An iPhone Application Review
At AnswerLab we conduct lots of mobile application research for
clients and we also test out a number of applications on our own.
One of our favorites is NetNewsWire – we like it because it’s an
example of an application that serves its core function very well.
NetNewsWire
for iPhone is a free application based on the award-winning Macintosh
RSS feed reader. NetNewsWire for iPhone is a successful and popular
application; not because of the multitude of features that it contains,
but rather because of its simplicity and minimal design. The author
purposefully left out most of the features one has access to in
the Macintosh version in order to maximize and embrace the user
experience of the iPhone version.
For example, you can read and
remove feeds on the iPhone, but rearranging feeds is done on the
Macintosh or the web version. As well, the iPhone display shows
only the name of the feed and the number of unread posts. The
Macintosh version shows much more information like the date, time,
subject, and author of the post. All valuable information but not
truly necessary on the iPhone.
This minimal approach to creating
an iPhone application benefits the user with fast and efficient
news feed syncing and reading on the go. Had the author tried to
replicate all or much of the functionality of the Macintosh version,
surely the experience would have been compromised.
Information about
NetNewsWire: http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/NetNewsWireiPhone
Testing
Before Building Saves Money and Improves Customer Satisfaction
 It’s
important to obtain input from your customers early in the development
process. One of our key clients learned this first hand by conducting
testing among three prototypes of their online checkout process.
Not only did the research save valuable engineering dollars by
offering a clear-cut ‘winner’ - the results also revealed important
missing information the user required prior to making a purchase
decision.
The Situation
A leading e-commerce company was looking to enhance their online
checkout process. They wanted to gather user feedback before
beginning an expensive development effort. The client had created
three prototype checkout versions and wanted to understand which
one best communicated their message - and if the offers were
compelling enough to influence additional purchases.
Our Solution
To find these answers we built three functioning online prototype
environments, each of which communicated one of the client’s
messaging options. We used remote tracking technology to send
600 current customers and 600 potential customers to the prototypes
and captured qualitative, quantitative and behavioral data as
they completed tasks. The research allowed us to obtain concrete
data on all three prototype versions on key metrics such as awareness,
recall, purchase consideration and usage.
The Outcome
We found that one checkout version produced significantly higher
levels of satisfaction and conversion than the other two. We
also found further opportunities to improve the presentation
and increase the clarity of the information provided, as many
users had difficulty locating the details they required to make
an educated decision on the new offer. With this valuable information
the client was able to save money by focusing their limited engineering
resources in making changes that would have a measurable, direct
impact with key customers.
Could this approach provide similar gains for your company? Contact
us and
we can discuss.
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