After a difficult January The Usability Company
found February to be considerably more buoyant and we received an
increase in enquiries and in overall interest in the company. We
won a significant number of new accounts, some mentioned earlier
in this newsletter and some won under strict NDA. However, in the
course of winning new business there were the inevitable losses.
As it is two years since The Usability Company was incorporated it
seemed appropriate to share our thoughts.
Without doubt, since the company was founded usability has
gained in recognition in the general market. Outside of usability
practitioners there was very little recognition and understanding
even of the meaning of usability. As a result we found ourselves
spending the vast majority of our time with potential clients
educating them about the process and benefits of usability. This
created its own issues as it was unclear in many organisations
just who would or should be responsible for usability or the
customer experience.
More recently we have found companies contacting us, and asking
us to help solve their problems of low conversion rate or a
website simply not achieving its mission. We find our enquiries
extend significantly beyond the area of Intranet and Internet, and
although this has always represented a significant portion of our
business the difference now is that the enquiries are coming not
only from specialists within organisations, but also from business
owners. There has certainly been a significant shift in
understanding and as a result the market is improving in the face
of a potential slowdown.
So why is this? Unlike two years ago, there are now far more
cases of proven benefit as a result of employing usability within
the development process. We were probably the first usability
specialists to talk with any real conviction about return on
investment and drive our clients to measure it. Now that tangible
benefits have been realised organisations are far more willing to
invest in existing channels to market knowing their investments
will be returned 10 fold. If there are fewer sales to be made, as
an organisation you need to make sure you are winning a larger
proportion of them than your competitors. This is without doubt
one of the reasons may of our clients still work under
non-disclosure agreement; they see improved usability as providing
them with a competitive advantage.
So what of the lost opportunities we have had? As with any
business we lose business sometimes because we have misunderstood
the brief, sometimes because the client is testing the market and
has an incumbent supplier or for a variety of other reasons.
Lately we have found ourselves forgetting that the market for
usability is still embryonic. Recent activity from organisations
that now understand usability has blinded us to those that still
don't and we have sometimes not focussed on the need for
education. This sees us losing business to market research
companies because we haven't helped the client understand the
difference. They evaluate us against criteria that we cannot meet,
and were we to try would devalue our offer. The lesson for us is
that the education must go on.
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