Overall: Symantec.com
Usability & Effectiveness: Symantec.com
Content, Features & Capabilities: Microsoft.com
Each business software site’s redesign over the past year has caused content and features to shrink on a huge scale. But did these diets help the sites’ usability scores? At least one Website should think so. Here’s the rundown from first place to last: Read More→
This week, we took the new Intel.com site for a spin. Let’s just say there’s more (and less) to this site than meets the eye.Intel.com’s latest redesign is like buying an exotic car. It is visually striking, can be fun to drive, and has more bells and whistles than other cars on the road. But going exotic has tradeoffs. Choosing to pass on getting the full options package can leave the driving experience far less exciting than advertised. In fact, it may even break down–always in inconvenient locations. And the unique controls and design that seems edgy and innovative in the beginning quickly become confusing and irritating.
2011 is turning out to be the age of the home page. We’re seeing updates in record numbers– and some designs are actually breaking new ground. On the other hand, few of these designs are actually making it down to lower levels of the site—which is a big no-no in our book.
I’ll leave that point for a future rant. Meanwhile, let’s take a look at who’s producing these new home pages, the important design points and strategies they bring to the party—and explore the age-old question: why only the home page?
I’ll start with the “who” and “how” and leave my humble opinions for the end. Read More→
Why do so many companies start with their support site?Your support site is supposed to be the fount of knowledge for your customers—and a way to prove your excellence to prospects engaged in the buying process. It’s there to solve your customer’s problems. Speed them the information they need. Show them how to use your product. Make all of the wrongs with your product right.
Since happy customers are the cornerstone of successful companies, it would make sense that support sites would be laser focused on sending all of the right messages – right? Wrong. Most are actually sending plenty of wrong messages – and what they are really saying is startling. Read More→
Once upon a time, search was a lot like socks. One of the basics you need to operate a well-dressed Website.
Search has also been pretty simple. Put out a box, fiddle with some “advanced search” explanations, spend some quality man-months meta-tagging mountains of content — and let the rest take care of itself.
That is, until today.
Just in case you haven’t checked, search isn’t your father’s Oldsmobile anymore. A new roster of features & capabilities are changing the rules. Read More→
This week we started our Q1 evaluations of 23 Websites, plus additional sites selected by our clients for comparison.
We’ve mixed up the siteIQ eBusiness Index for 2010. In some cases the decision was based on eliminating Websites that haven’t improved over the past year and don’t provide any good or best practices worth tracking. In other cases, sites have fallen off our list because they don’t exist anymore. That would be EDS.com which was integrated into HP.com — and Sun.com which went off the airwaves last week.
In both cases, these sites are a loss to anyone who cares about good and great practices. Don’t bother to follow them to their new homes. Their presence inside of their new parent’s sites is nothing to write home about.
Here’s some more about the new sites added to our roster – and why we’re singing “auld lang syne” to others. (If you are a siteIQ client you can read more about what we expect from these and other leading sites in 2010 in our new executive brief in the siteIntelligence Research Center). Read More→
One thing we are generally unable to do at siteIQ is evaluate the quality of support delivered through a company’s software products– and track how this on board support maps to a company’s Website. Naturally, downloading a muli-million dollar software product to our systems (as robust as they may be) in order to test integrated support features simply isn’t feasible—and could not adequately emulate the experience of a broad range of customers. However, for the business software that we do use, we have the opportunity to pass on some of our best, and worst, experiences.
This brings me to my tale of woe – and why Adobe deserves kudos for a job well done. Recently my trusty laptop lost his mind and wiped out my profile (thanks a bunch, Microsoft). Although we were able to get him up and running again, my digital buddy emerged with a serious case of amnesia. While he was in triage, I renewed a relationship with a old friend from my distant past—my desktop system. However, renewing this friendship was not without its pitfalls. I had to perform the painful task of reloading all of my software.Visions of long, tedious waits on the phone with repeated recounts of my story stretched out before me like a vast wasteland.
Enter Adobe… Read More→
Ever since we made the decision to add reseller sites to our eBusiness Index roster for 2008, I’ve been curious to see how they would perform against some of the IT industry’s selling powerhouses, including HP.com, Dell.com, and IBM.com. I wasn’t curious about their competitive performance, per se. Reseller sites are significantly smaller than their enterprise-class counterparts, even though they sell many of the same products. That automatically means their overall rankings will be lower. What I was curious about is how well these reseller sites would stack up based on their usability.
Insight.com and Newegg.com both receive scores that place them in a league with IT industry leaders — and well ahead of one of their major partners — HP.
When I rolled up the first quarter 2008 usability numbers this week, a couple of interesting facts jumped out. First, Newegg.com’s product marketing score is nearly 71%, which puts it on par with the eBusiness Index average (71.38%) — and places it in close proximity to enterprise systems heavyweights in the effectiveness rankings. Second, and more important, all three reseller sites — Newegg.com, CDW.com, and Insight.com — earn e-selling-related usability scores that are well above the eBusiness Index average, and actually rival those of the ultimate online channel — Dell.com.
Admittedly, these are two bright spots in an otherwise checkered usability landscape for these companies. Read More→
