Hello, all. I'm a long time reader, first time poster here.
When you live in West Michigan and it's the middle of January, you start trying to dream up ways to get out of the frozen tundra and go somewhere warm and sunny. Fortunately for me, I was offered a great opportunity to do exactly that.
Internet Retailer asked Quixtar to send someone down to speak at their inaugural Web Design Conference in Miami, Florida. When we looked at calendars and availability, I was the big winner! (David Prescott is still slightly jealous, I think, as he was one of the potential candidates.)
Beside the fact I could escape winter for a few days, it was also a fantastic opportunity. I would get to see what some of the other industry-leading websites were up to and hear first-hand what they learned in their recent redesign initiatives.
Usability testing was an underlying theme of nearly every session. Without a solid usability testing strategy, a website can suffer from not evolving fast enough or just making the wrong design decisions in general. If you aren't evolving and adapting to meet your customers' habits and practices, you will lose their business. It is becoming more important than ever for websites like Quixtar to understand how our customers are using the website so we can evolve appropriately and enrich the Quixtar experience. One method of looking at usability is to collect user behavior data as customers browse and use the website. This is the topic about which I was asked to speak. My session was entitled "The Role of Real Time Data in Better Site Design and Usability." It was a joint session with Geoff Galat, Vice President, Marketing & Product Strategy, from
Tealeaf Technology. Here was our session's abstract:
"Tracking customers' movement as they navigate a retail web site and capturing the information in a real-time database can give a merchant valuable insight into understanding shopping behavior and troubleshooting performance problems. By analyzing individual site visits, merchants can react more quickly to performance problems such as slow loading pages and broken links. Access to real-time user data can also help merchants improve customer service and implement a better site design. This session will help retailers understand how to capture visitor data in real time and how timely analysis of the information can yield better performance."
Geoff started things off with an excellent overview of the benefits of capturing user behavior data. He punctuated the fact that companies need to understand this data by showing some pretty staggering statistics. For instance, 42% of consumers that experience problems on websites abandon the session and go elsewhere. That's an enormous percentage! Quixtar is unique in one respect because there aren't any other websites our IBOs can go to if we inconvenience them. Those affected users are forced to deal with the inefficiencies or errors that could arise at times on the website. It is our job to alleviate those occurrences to make the experience at Quixtar.com as easy, convenient and reliable as possible. But just how can we utilize user behavior data to do this? That's where my portion of the presentation picks up.
I followed Geoff with a case-study, explaining what we here at Quixtar are doing with user behavior data collected by Tealeaf. We have learned a lot about how our customers use the website. And we've been able to alleviate some nagging inefficiencies that were unclear to us before implementing Tealeaf. If you'd like to see and hear more, stay tuned. There will be a webinar available for public viewing in the next 7 days. I promise to post it here when it is available.
Once my session was over, it was time to head home, back to where the ice and snow reign over the land. It was hard to leave sunny Miami, but I was ready to get home to my family. And after about 7 hours of delays and two planes, I did just that.
Leave a Comment
Comments policy: Please note that comments are moderated.
All comments are welcome as long as they are on topic, respectful, and do not advertise competing products
or businesses. We reserve the right to remove without warning any and all offensive, unlawful,
defamatory, or libelous comments, as well as any personal attacks or offensive language.
About Greg Robinson
Originally from Central Indiana, I moved up to Michigan in 2002 to join the Quixtar Web Operations team.
I'm a huge fan of music and movies. I'm also a big fan of baseball and football, both real and fantasy. My favorite teams are the Chicago Cubs, New York Yankees, Indianapolis Colts and Chicago Bears. And in my spare time, which is scarce these days with two kids, I also love to brew beer.
I graduated from Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana in 1997 with a B.A. in Physics.