Why We merged and why We think it’s Important to the Industry

You may have read recently that The Usability Company completed a merger with the web analytics company WebAbacus (www.webabacus.com) in the last couple of weeks. It’s an exciting time for us and we see it as an important development for the usability industry. Why? Let me illustrate with a little anecdote.

We worked with a well known retailer in January of 2003 with the goal of helping them to improve many parts of their site. They commissioned us to carry out a series of usability tests in our labs, prepare a report and deliver a presentation with key findings and recommendations. We felt we offered insights otherwise unavailable to the client and recommendations that we felt sure would make a real difference to the site. The client stakeholders were very receptive to the findings and we finished the project pleased it was a success. However, the client implemented only about 50% of the changes we suggested and even these changes were made over a 6 month period. This happened in spite of the fact that we were convinced that they would derive significant benefit from making the design changes we had advocated.

As you can imagine we were concerned about how good a job the client had felt we had done. The truth was that the client was very happy with the project and we are still having a dialogue with them more than two years later despite the fact that they have not completed any usability testing since that time. Why did this happen?

Very few would argue that good usability is a determinant of commercial success on the Internet but it is very difficult to quantify what the benefit of usability actually is. So while there is little doubt that organisations are availing themselves of usability methods more frequently than in the past, we have not seen the widespread adoption of usability practices that some might have expected. This, I believe, is because these practices lack the business justification required to ensure that usability is high on the agenda. The retailer I describe above was both reluctant and slow to implement the recommendations because the effect on the bottom line could not be easily established.

If we, as an industry, are to demonstrate the real value of the services we provide then we need to ensure that these services have a demonstrable impact on those measures that are important to those buying our services. Those buying our services are invariably marketers and it may come as no surprise that these people have little interest in the measures of usability espoused by the usability profession: efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction. These constructs have limited appeal and they are much more concerned with return on marketing spend, conversion rates, customer loyalty and revenue lines.

If you subscribe to the view I describe above then you will agree that the combination of web analytics and usability consultancy is a match made in heaven. This is true on a number of counts:
1. Web analytics data helps us to pinpoint more accurately where usability issues are occurring. We no longer need to fumble in the dark and hope that we strike upon a problematic area. The data from web analytics gives us direction and research in the usability lab can be targeted at these areas to determine why the issues are occurring.
2. With web analytics data it becomes much easier to convince cynics that they have a usability issue. I would like to think that we employ some of the best usability consultants in the UK but admittedly even these guys are sometimes fallible, particularly if the findings of Rolf Molich and UIE are to be believed: that even seasoned usability professionals disagree on observations from a usability review. However, the significance of a usability issue can be unambiguously determined by looking at the web analytics data (eg 40% of people dropping out at step 3 of 4 of a registration process).
3. Having implemented recommendations from usability research we can now readily measure the impact using web analytics. Gone are the days where people patted each other on the backs following a site redesign without really establishing if the redesign has made a difference. The web analytics data allows us to measure performance trends over time. It’s less about ‘trial and error’ and more about ‘trial and measure’.
4. Web analytics tools (such as WebAbacus) offers information on the universe of users using the site. However, it only ever gives information on ‘what’ people did but not the ‘why’. Usability consultancy is the other half of the equation – ascertaining the reasons for visitors behaviour.

The anecdote about the retailer coincided with the publication of an article called ‘Usability and Web Analytics: ROI justification for an internet strategy’ that I wrote for the Journal of Interactive Marketing (this can be downloaded at www.theusabilitycompany.com, liked below). This article was the germ of an idea that resulted in the merger. Over the last two years we have been developing our thinking and working with some of the largest web analytics players on client accounts.

Having met with many of them we decided that WebAbacus was the best match because the technology was comparable with the big players (such as Webtrends) but also because we were in a position to influence future development of the WebAbacus tool to ensure that it collected the type of data our clients value most.

In order to get buy-in to usability at a strategic level, it is imperative that the usability work we perform has a clearly discernible ROI. We are now encouraging our clients to develop a balanced strategy to inform the user experience incorporating the strengths inherent in usability research and the powerful analysis offered by web analytics.

Marty Carroll
The Usability Company
www.theusabilitycompany.com

© The Usability Company Ltd

Associated Link: The Usability Company

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