October 24, 2007 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The past few years has seen a surge in e-commerce, making websites an essential aspect of any business. Websites that are inadequately designed can discourage both existing and potential customers and cause them to turn to a competitor website.
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This growth proves it is more important than ever for businesses to be able to assess the usability of their website and pinpoint any changes that must be made to their site to improve the overall customer experience.
On-demand mobile and Internet test and measurement solutions provider Keynote Systems (keynote.com) help customers achieve this comprehensive task through its recently launched WebEffective 6.0 software.
Earlier this month, Keynote offered a public demonstration of WebEffective 6.0 at The Optimization Summit in San Francisco, California, before officially launching the product last week.
"[WebEffective] combines the two approaches to have the in-depth nature of the usability lab, but have it delivered in an on-demand environment to hundreds or thousands of participants," says Dan Richards, senior product manager of Keynote Systems.
The on-demand customer experience / UX solution helps aid companies in improving their website effectiveness and online business performance by performing in-depth, online UX research.
The research tool measures the attitudes, behavior and performance metrics of website visitors as well as their competitor sites. The new version has been extended to track user interaction with core client-side technologies, particularly DHTML/AJAX and Flash.
Unlike many of its competitors, WebEffective 6.0 does not require any instrumentation, enabling clients to monitor events without having to manually tag them. The solution will work with any site, including competitors, enabling researchers to activate various actions based on client-side user behaviors.
The customer experience research program helps companies recruit study participants that accurately reflect their target market.
Companies can intercept customers visiting a site, invite their customers to participate via email, or select participants from either a third-party panel or the Keynote Research Panel.
The program is offered in a wide range of languages to accommodate various areas of the world.
"We work with a lot of global companies and it's important for them to be able to run these studies in multiple countries so we support 17 different languages," says Richards. "It's very easy to build one of these studies and all of the questions that you've created you can have them translated into Russian or French or German."
Customers perform assigned tasks, such as browsing, searching and shopping, from their home or office. Keynote WebEffective then asks relevant questions that are based on predetermined 'action possibilities,' recording their actions and summarizing all the relevant clickstream data.
WebEffective 6.0 provides companies with insights into customer attitudes and behaviors as well as their competitors' strengths and weaknesses, helping them target advertisers more effectively.
"Interadvertising is just exploding and that is driving a lot of revenues for websites," says Richards. "And as it continues to grow from $17 billion to $30-something billion in just a few years, those advertisers, the brand managers, the product managers, the design agencies -- its more and more critical they can evaluate the effectiveness of those banner ads or micro-sites that they're building."
