This is surely making the rounds, but I wanted to draw attention to customer service with humor as demonstrated by Google Transit’s Joe Hughes. This is such a great way to give a large company a human touch, particularly with the sense of humor. The PR/buzz surrounding this is also going to be an added bonus.
Although it’s been out since sometime in 2006, I just discovered Google’s Firefox Browser Sync plug-in. I’m in heaven because I have 3 machines that I work with on a daily basis: my personal G5 iMac (at home), my G4 PowerBook (work), and my Dell Windows XP Laptop (work). Firefox is my primary browser on all three machines and thanks to this plug-in, I can finally share all of my cookies, bookmarks, browsing history, and passwords between all machines automatically.
It simply stores this information (in encrypted format) on my Google account. It also lets you optionally choose what not to sync.
This is particularly useful (especially for bookmarks) because I tried to manually keep the same bookmarks/hierarchy between machines but it would always get out of sync by doing it on my own. Now with everything automated, it doesn’t matter which machine I use because they all carry the same settings.
Yesterday I covered step 1 of DMAIC, the “Design” phase as a part of the larger Six Sigma for Web Development topic. Moving right along to step 2 after design phase is implemented is the task of measuring the success or usability of your design. Since the design phase of a website usually isn’t released to the public, you must execute qualitative and quantitative surveys/studies.
What is a qualitative survey?
A qualitative survey or study is where you have a small group of participants who you have carry out tasks on your website in a one-on-one setting. This is most often a usability study ran by a facilitator (or yourself). A group of 10 people over the course of two days will give you plenty of data to determine whether or not the design phase of DMAIC was a success or needs considerable work. The point of these surveys or studies is to do a deep dive with each individual spending 60-90 minutes with them understanding how they navigate the site, identifying their frustrations, and determining whether or not they can even complete the task at hand.
You will pick up a lot of small “fixes” from a qualitative study that will add up to an excellent list of incremental improvements you can make. You should also identify any major disconnects the site has in its navigations or the tasks that individuals are asked to complete.
What is a quantitative survey?
A quantitative survey is more about volume, or quantity of responses. These are going to be questions like, “On a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being very satisfied, please rank your overall satisfaction with this website.” You won’t get the deep dive like in a qualitative study, but you will get a very good overall ranking from a larger group of participants. Usually, you want about 200 responses to be statistically significant in a quantitative survey.
Perform a qualitative study first.
In my experience, I would recommend performing a qualitative study first. If you do a quantitative study first you may see your overall rankings suffer, but you won’t really know why. It essentially reinforces the point that you will need to do a usability/qualitative study anyway. The qualitative study is always going to deliver rich feedback that your team can prioritize and execute. This data is so powerful that once it is implemented, the quantitative study should help identify any remaining problem areas. If there are significant drop-off areas or low rankings, you can individually tackle and evaluate these sections.
Structuring the Measure, Analyze, and Improvement phases of DMAIC
Additionally, the use of web analytics to see how these people from the quantitative study are navigating your site is an added bonus. This is how I would structure the these three phases of DMAIC:
Ongoing quantitative studies (The “Control” phase)
Consider companies like OpinionLabs to implement an ongoing quantitative study for your site. With their software, you can even obtain qualitative results from people from individual pages or sections of your site. This information is powerful and the ongoing measurement of satisfaction of your site will be an important way to continue to improve overall satisfaction and conversions.
Bricks and mortar retail stores do not just put products on the shelf and leave them for eternity. They are constantly trying new end-cap displays, custom product displays, promotions, and adding/removing products to optimize their layouts. Website visitor’s usability experience and requirements will also change over time. The same sites built in the late 90′s are laughable today. You need to be able to change with the times and this is why the control phase is extremely critical.
As a continuation on the topic of applying Six Sigma methodologies towards web development, design, and usability, this post focuses on step 1 of the DMAIC process, “D” (Define):
In the “Define” phase of web development, this is where you identify the key components your customers need in order to navigate a conversion funnel. This concept can be applied to many types of websites, but here is an example of how this applies to an e-commerce website:
Defining attributes for e-commerce sites
A primary goal of an e-commerce site is to generate revenue. This means you’ll need a storefront, the ability to add products to a cart, and the ability to securely purchase these products online. Compatibility and usability issues aside, this is usually a significant area of oversight for many web developers, marketers, and managers.
How would your online store compare to bricks and mortar?
If you think of a bricks and mortar business, you can associate their aisles of products with your online store. Moving further down their path, you will also find shopping carts to hold products and cash registers to process transactions. What many sites fail to realize is the sales component of a store. A bricks and mortar business has the benefit of sales associates who can help customers with questions about products and with how to find products in their store.
Websites lack the human component. Don’t just focus on the tail end of your conversion funnel.
Websites on the other hand lack this human interaction, so it’s up to the “Define” phase of Six Sigma’s DMAIC process to identify the key components that will help drive consumers to the sales funnel. This is typically going to be a product search engine, product comparison tool, and a product catalog (outlining more in-depth information than the online store). If a customer can’t figure out your product or service if it were sitting on a shelf in a bricks and mortar store, then don’t expect them to be able to understand it online.
Leverage retail environments when building an online experience
If you have an advantage of selling products online that are also sold in retail stores, you can piggyback off of your learnings from the retail experience. What benefit does a sales associate play and what is the process that the associate walks the customer through the conversion funnel? At which point does the associate hand the customer off to the purchasing portion of the funnel? Use this experience and information and convey it online — it’s a necessary feature.
Failure to define the complete components of a conversion funnel will be identified with qualitative surveys
Avoid tunnel vision from the beginning when building a site. Whether it be e-commerce, social media, etc., don’t forget that the majority of your visitors will not be experts in the product or service you are trying to sell them or get them to use via your website.
My next post will discuss quantitative and qualitative feedback for the “Measure” phase of the DMAIC process.
A few weeks ago while analyzing the results of an internal test on a new web design we’re testing, it was brought up about how manufacturing is guided by Six Sigma standards. It was suggested the website live in a similar realm of excellence.
What is Six Sigma?
Six Sigma is a rigorous and disciplined methodology that uses data and statistical analysis to measure and improve a company’s operational performance by identifying and eliminating “defects” in manufacturing and service-related processes. Commonly defined as 3.4 defects per million opportunities, Six Sigma can be defined and understood at three distinct levels: metric, methodology (DMAIC/DFSSstructured problem solving roadmap and tools) and philosophy (Reduce variation in your business and take customer-focused, data driven decisions).
Can Six Sigma be applied to web development, design, and usability?
This is a very logical question. Yes, it can be applied, but achieving it is another issue altogether.
Pulling from Jakob Nielson’s November 2003 post, Six Sigma engineering relies on a five-step process called DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control). He was really ahead of his time in this article. A google search does not pull up much information on applying six sigma to web development, design, or usability. This tells me the concept has not been discussed too much and it makes sense — the web is still in its infancy, and the more experienced developers within organizations today are now moving into upper management where they are beginning to look at the website from a higher view within the company.
As the web becomes more of a vital tool for most businesses today, upper management (who often times knows little about how exactly a website goes together or how to build a successful site) is seeing the value in applying other business practices and methodologies towards the design, testing, and execution of their websites.
Why Six Sigma is difficult to achieve in web development today.
In manufacturing, the amount of variables encountered in an assembly line is not as vast as a complex website. Manufacturing doesn’t deal directly with consumers, either, and the manufacturing process has very strict processes and tolerances for how things are assembled.A website is dynamic in nature and also navigated and operated by your customers — customers who may not know a thing about your product and have had no training on your website. Manufacturing lines are staffed by duty-specific workers, trained to perform specific tasks accurately and efficiently.
A website on the other hand can be navigated in millions of different ways and combinations by millions of different people. Testing each of these combinations is impossible and will result in you testing your website into eternity without ever releasing it to the market. Add on top of this a team of people who are most likely very diverse in their backgrounds: developers, designers, and marketers — each come with their own education and experiences and often time have no visibility into what their other team members’ job responsibilities really entail (how many developers do you know that can truly do graphic design? how many designers do you know that can write complex database queries?).
Accept the variables in web development, and apply the concepts of Six Sigma
The key is applying the Six Sigma mentality to web development, design, and usability so you can get the best balance of accuracy and conversions. The problem most developers and designers have is that they get “tunnel vision” and focus exclusively on just one piece of the entire web application. This is a problem for any type of site which has multiple conversion funnels (sales, registration forms, contact forms, etc.).
Next Segments:
More on this topic over the next several days as I cover each phase of the DMAIC process in individual blog posts in an effort to keep the posts spread out and on-topic, rather than one long, rambling post. 
I’ll provide links at the end of this post as each phase of DMAIC is evaluated.
Blog by Eric Long