Hi Oleh, IxDA'ers, I've been mostly lurking / posting jobs, but I couldn't resist responding to this post.
Offermatica sounds like an interesting tool, and I'd like to learn more about it. I could see myself & my team adding it to our toolbox. I doubt, however, that it or tools like it will replace or put a dent in the amount of exploratory - or even summative - usability testing that occurs. I have a few reasons for this claim. The first is an economic argument, the others are more conceptual. 1. The UX industry as a whole has been experiencing steady growth since the dot-bomb days. Even if tools like this do supplant *some* 1-1, in-person, facilitated usability testing, I think the most that would happen is that the rate of growth for that kind of utesting would slow slightly. Caveat, I don't have hard (or even semi-soft) numbers at my disposal, this is IMO. 2. Not all web sites are transactional, so the metric of interest is not always going to be sales or conversion. So the tool will not always be appropriate. 3. Like data from survey research, data derived from behavioral traces (as opposed to actual observation of behavior) always leads you back to the "why?" question. Knowing *why* people did something on a site - or at least having a good idea about why, which is what you can get with in-person testing - provides interaction designers with much richer and actionable guidance for making big, significant conceptual design decisions. There's much to be said for tweaking your way to optimization, however. If you're already confident that your navigation and process flows are solid, I'm all for a/b/multi testing a la Offermatica and tools like it. I just don't think they put a stake through the heart of ye olde utesting methods. - Paul Sherman -----Original Message----- From: Oleh Kovalchuke Subject: [IxDA Discuss] The death of web usability testing as we know it? I was reading Supercrunchers [1], and came across Omniture's Offermatica [2]. Offermatica does real time randomization and analysis of traffic from the variants of the page. The randomization is important here for validity of the results. The analysis is per session. For instance, you want to see, how search box placement or font size affects product sales. Make the layouts to be tested and see, which one increases sales in real time. I think this could lead to an incremental microevolution of layouts, not unlike the biological microevolution (and look what good that has done...). So the questions I have are these: - Have people used Offermatica? - Since it brings actual statistical analysis into usability testing based on sales goals, doesn't it lead to the death (or at least to the significant dent) of the conventional web usability testing (facilitator, one-on-one etc.)? Put "something" on the web and start incrementing on daily basis. Oleh ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
