PROVIDING AN efficient and user-friendly experience to online shoppers translates into higher visitor-to-customer conversion rates, increased revenue, and improved customer loyalty. Just ask any of the Web merchants who were plagued during the previous holiday shopping season by intermittent outages, poor performance, incomplete transactions, and content errors. As a result, their sales revenues were less than they'd hoped, and they suffered irreparable damage to their customer bases and reputations.

Unfortunately, quantifying user experiences on a Web site is somewhat subjective and difficult, especially for e-commerce shops that have limited staffing resources and dwindling budgets.

With this in mind, many organizations are turning to outside services and software programs to assess their sites' ease of use and unearth potential problems so as to enhance visitors' online experiences. Via its Site Analysis and Task Analysis services, WebCriteria offers a two-pronged approach to gauging customer experiences.

Both services use WebCriteria's proprietary agent technology, dubbed Max, which automatically traverses corporate Web sites simulating human browsing behavior. While moving from page to page, Max collects various time and effort measures of the visit, focusing on areas such as load time and accessibility. These findings are then translated into one or more comprehensive reports, complete with observations of potential bottlenecks, points of frustration for customers, and possible remedies.

The use of agent technology is not new on the Internet: Search engines have been using aspects of it for some time. However, WebCriteria has added enough "intelligence" to Max to bring it many levels above a typical Web bot that scours pages and builds search indices, earning it a score of Very Good.

This intelligent approach, designed to replicate a Web user's online experience, also allows WebCriteria to offer a slightly different take on human-response monitoring than do competitors: Vividence, for example, uses a large pool of demographically selected volunteers to assess sites, whereas WebTrends and Net.Genesis focus on collecting and analyzing raw log data and creating individualized user profiles. For a relatively new service, WebCriteria boasts a fairly impressive client roster, with the likes of Delta Air Lines, GTE/Verizon, Honda, and Chase Manhattan already in the fold.

Site Analysis: The big picture

WebCriteria's Site Analysis service measures the effectiveness of your Web site by focusing on three criteria: the length of time it takes for a page to load into a browser (load time), how long it takes an average user to navigate to pages (accessibility), and the graphics, text, and technology behind each page (content). Sites can be analyzed from two different user perspectives: that of a home user operating with a 28.8Kbps modem and that of an office user with a T1 line. Analyzing your site from these two perspectives helps ensure that it doesn't alienate low-end users.

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