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One of the clients I’ve been doing a lot of work with over the past year is Starkey Laboratories, and last Monday we launched a new consumer site. Here is their official announcement:

We’re very excited to officially unveil the all new Starkey.com website for the U.S. It has been completely redesigned to make it easy for site visitors to learn about the effects of hearing loss and the benefits of hearing aids.

The Starkey.com site was created with current as well as prospective hearing aid users in mind. In addition to clear, intuitive navigation, the site features a rich media video experience where a number of people share personal stories about hearing loss. Many of the faces are celebrities you may recognize such as Marlee Matlin, Arnold Palmer, Norm Crosby, Leslie Nielsen and Peter Marshall. The site also provides a very fast and easy dealer locator to drive inquires to the hearing health professionals who are authorized to fit Starkey products.

I worked as part of a collaborative team of independent consultants and internal resources. I was involved in defining the ux strategy and lead the information architecture, design, and metrics for the site (as well as implementing a flash based video player with closed captioning). Earlier this year we also launched Starkeypro.com which is a site for hearing professionals which includes very detailed technical product data and account management.

So have a look and tell me what you think! (Feel free to ask me any hearing aid questions as well)

I’m really looking forward to the MIMA event tomorrow night (11/14) where Jamie Roche, President of Offermatica, will be speaking on Web Analytics, Testing and Optimization. » Event Info

I spoke with him last week to finalize things and it sounds like he will be sharing a lot of “what we’ve learned to be good tests and bad ones” and focusing on the methodologies of how to make tests meaningful.

I’ve always been suspect of third party “Click-Stream Panels” like Alexa, hitwise, etc. but I’m building confidence in Compete.com Basically, they have the largest pool of participants (2,000,000+) and they also pull data from major ISPs/ASPs, opt-in panels and people using their Compete Toolbar (see their comparison). This service is free and it gives you a unique ability to learn about traffic to other sites (like your competitors that you compete with, thus the witty name). It serves as a “public record” of sorts that people can view contrast and compare. Here’s a snapshot chart I created to compare some major online shopping sites. Notice the holiday surge and how Amazon’s pattern is different:

What you can learn and not…
You can see user traffic volume and patterns over time but like most metrics you should not get hung up on exact numbers. You should focus on relationships and percentages. All the numbers are coming from the same large pool, so even if they the exact numbers are not quite accurate they will still be proportionally accurate. You can easily compare and contrast sites like the chart above to see who has the most traffic, who is showing a trend of growth, what seasonal patterns exist or what spikes maybe occurring due to ad campaigns, product launches, bad pr, etc. Bottom line, you can see who is using their sites effectively and who is not.

They also have a nice blog that offers some insights and observations around trends and topics. Here are a few interesting ones:
Google and the rest of the usual suspects continue to dominate video
UFC: 6th Most Popular Sport in U.S.?
And with the first Pick in the NFL Draft…

So give it a try! If you install their Compete Toolbar you get some added value about the “trust” of sites you search and visit as well as their popularity ranking and deals that are offered. And the more of us that use it, the more accurate it will become.

Planning for success is important, foreseeing it’s effects is critical. Making improvements to a site design should result in, well results. But if we are not thoughtful and consider the effects of success we could end up like the beaver above.

So you must ask yourself, “if this change is successful, what will it impact directly and indirectly?” Will fulfillment be able to keep up? Does the sales force know about the change and it’s potential effects their customers inquiries? Does the Customer Service staff know about the change so they can answer questions and offer a good customer experience? Does IT know about the change and the traffic it may direct to particular services?

Obviously, not all changes will have dramatic results but how do you know? When demand is pent up because of a bad label or layout and an effective change is made, you can see results immediately and many times dramatically…because it’s been pent up. This is especially true when you add a new feature that you think customers desire. I know of new features that have been added and needed to be quickly “shut off” because they created demand that was unforeseen and were resulting in bad customer experiences. So the feature’s strategy and design was “successful”, but not successful for the customer or the business.

So how can you predict? By measuring successes and failures over time…creating quantifiable history to learn from. The more history you have to learn from the better you are looking forward and predicting orders of magnitude, which may impact how you release a new feature or test a change on a smaller subset of users.

Either way having a web metrics tool implemented is critical to predicting cause and effect accurately over time. The web is unique in how measurable and wide reaching it is…but you have to be proactive to harness it’s power. You need well implemented tools with metric plans to measure activity and most importantly qualified people to analyze the results and communicate them in a way that’s meaningful to the business.

So the next time your planning a change, ask yourself “how can I measure success and what will it impact if it’s successful?”

Last fall I worked closely with Sun Microsystem’s UX team to redesign their home page (www.sun.com). I helped with the research, conceptual thinking, IA work, interaction design and the measurement plan. The new homepage launched in Dec and we are now tracking the usage. Which is the thing I am most excited about! Every link on the homepage can now be tracked.

So by combining this new usage data with the usability studies (that sun does a lot of), we can learn and evolve the design in a whole new way. We will begin to see which ideas work and which ones struggle (or flat out fail). But that’s the point, we will build on our successes and learn from our failures. I think this is a new way of thinking that designers and clients alike need to embrace. We can’t expect perfection, but we can learn from our mistakes — but we need to be able to see them first.

I will be presenting a case study on the project with Jennifer Bohmbach (Sun Microsystems) at MiMA’s February salon. I will post my presentation after that talk.