EightBlack.

If you’re into web usability, then you’ve no doubt have heard of Jakob Nielsen.

Jakob’s the founder of the Nielsen Norman Group and they are considered the “guru’s” when it comes to web design.

They charge a staggering US$35,000 for a usability report.

I’m sure they are good - but for those of you who dont have a lazy 35 large, then the content below will save you a lot of money.

We recently launched a site for a client.

3 days after the launch, we emailed the client’s database (around 10,000) and simply asked for help.

You see, web design firms, technology integrators and more importantly, site owners become way too attached and emotional about their site.

We certainly had because the project had dragged on for 12 months.

All we did is use a method that Socrates came up with and found the answers to a lot of the site’s problems by asking the most important people.

The customers.

These are the people who use the site everyday. They have to live with it.

In this case, we’d introduced a new booking engine and customers had to get used to a new way of doing things.

We found out within 48 hours, some critical things about the decision path of the site, that is, the logical process a customer follows when making or completing a transaction online.

More importantly, the client listened and we made quite a few changes.

Was this a difficult process? Nope.

Did we get some wacky responses? You bet.

But the entire “test” cost us less than $1000 (we gave away some product to entice people to provide the feedback).

In addition, we were able to make changes to the site before we lost too much revenue and caused people to “click away” to a competitor.

So, if you’re struggling with web design and cant afford Jakob Nielsen, all you need to do is ask someone way more important than any consultant.

Ask a customer.

Because customers will tell you some plain truths.

And that, in marketing, is worth its weight in gold.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006 at 7:41 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.