<quote> While you can use it for this, to my knowledge its main purpose is to test campaign effectiveness. While I haven't used Offermatica in particular, I have been involved in campaigns where we did A/B testing with a limited audience. What we did was to test two different creative treatments/messages. It was pretty helpful, as one message converted significantly better than the other. When we launched the campaign nationwide, we did so with the campaign that converted better. Obviously. : )
I think the key to successfully using a product like this is to use it for something with an extremely limited scope. I'd never, EVER use it for a whole Web site. There are just too many confounding factors in that sort of situation that prevent a product like this from giving actionable information. Sure, it would give you data, but any conclusions you'd draw from that data would be basically made up. Now, if there is a particular area of the Web site that has a particular conversion or activity of interest, then that might be a situation in which such a product can yield actionable information. - Fred </quote> When I was with GSI Commerce, we began to use Offermatica for exactly this purpose. At the time it could not be used to evaluate a workflow; the architecture was that you would designate an area of a tested page as an "m-box", then put two or more variants in play and analyze their results. Multiple campaigns could be evaluated at a single time, but the data became suspect if the campaigns overlapped. One of the other shortcomings was that the page architecture had to be consistent; only the contents of the "m-box" could change. They could be different sizes, but your layout had better accommodate that or the whole page would get wonky (which happened a few times). It was not by any means a way of testing experience or workflow; and unless they have significantly improved their system architecture, it still isn't. All you can do is see if one way of treating one section of one page is better than another way. Hardly a substitute for usability testing or good interaction design, and probably not a particularly valuable tool. Dante Murphy | Director of Information Architecture | D I G I T A S H E A L T H 229 South 18th Street | Rittenhouse Square | Philadelphia, PA 19103 | USA Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.digitashealth.com ________________________________________________________________ *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
