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Web Marketing Resources offers a history or our unique brand of User Experience optimization. If you are unfamiliar with some of these marketing and usability terms please use our glossary or the Google search tool at the bottom of the page. Usability has been around for years but user experience testing first hit the web in the 90's. People still have the mistaken impressions that if the site (or software) is confusing that it was their "fault", not the site. I still hear the words: "what is wrong with me I can't get this to work!" My mission started out making people understand it was in fact the site or software's fault and let's fix it! I came from a marketing background and had been working with computers since PC's became available. I computerized my entire business and built my first network (such as it was) in the late 70's. I worked on a number of sites and helped start the Mystic Seaport E-commerce site before the days of shopping carts and sales tools. I watched, studied hard, and learned from a wide variety of disciplines including graphic presentation from Edward Tufte of Yale, and early web marketing and usability pioneers. I began my first usability studies for SNET and after some involved research, wrote a paper on Colorblindness and the Web for a new online publication. The paper showed how Microsoft and Amazon had not considered the impact of colorblindness on web sites. Amazon's changes after the research earned them millions. I can't say how much it affected Microsoft though they made immediate wholesale site changes. IBM ignored the research and as a result failed this usability standard for years. Early usability testing was about functionality, and ease of learning the user interface. How well did a site work?Did the code run smoothly on all (both) browsers? What was the page load time? Were the fonts consistent? Were physically challenged users able to use the site? We came up with well over 100 criteria we used to test a site. Testing was typically done standing behind a test candidate with a notebook full of questions and comments while they explored a site. Things evolved quickly as tools progressed to include: audio, video, screen captures, event logging and even eye tracking. These tools enabled me to analyze the user experience to greater depth. What intrigued me most was the psychology of motivation and communication, how people learn and and comprehend, what persuades people to move along to the sale. Neuro Linguistic Programming intrigued me for quite awhile and I dove into that. I still believe it has merit but it is no longer a major focus. I still recognized the need for testing the standard areas like task completion but without the psychology component it felt incomplete. I was also quite lonely in my approach since functionality was still the keyword for most. I had worked with some leading psychology professionals and had a partner (still do actually) who is a brilliant PhD. She helped me to understand testing, profiling and we explored body language and nonverbal ways to interpret results by watching how people react to a web experience. We took the practice of some psychologists (gestalt) who video tape an interview then watch the client answer questions with the sound turned off. Body language doesn't lie. We deepened our studies of profiling along with learning styles and began to apply our research with some narrowly focused groups. The first one was software developers. They are an interesting breed. We discovered that they don't learn well from visual presentations. We identified how they learn, how they understand, how to motivate them, what they respond to, colors they like, language style and wording. After a year of research we were ready to apply the understanding. We were excited but were not prepared for the reaction we got. The years of exploring, trying new things and refining paid off far more than we had ever expected when we won a national award based on reader voting that by all measures should have been way beyond our reach. Armed with this success the real work expanded in earnest. We developed (or discovered) ways to profile quickly and easily, we began to apply the learning in new ways. My approach to building personas is to identify existing and prospective client types (nothing new there) but, instead of using this information to build persona profiles, I find typical users at varying skill levels, test them on a site and then do my psychological research/profiling. From this information I build the appropriate personas along with communication styles, sales path schematics, and the essential elements users need to make a decision, etc. Prototype testing normally accompanies several stages of site development. Once the site is completed or refined, I once again test the site and measure/gather a data on: content effectiveness (what they comprehend), brand impact, overall site messaging, search techniques, site architecture and, as much as possible how compelling the site is towards reaching the objectives. Obviously we don't design a site the old way, starting with a home page and building it out like so many brochure sites. We start at the objective and build the path back to the top. To use some great Future Now terms, we test to eliminate "Points of Friction" and insure that the necessary "Points of Resolution" are in place. I am quick to add that the Future Now guys do a lot more than persona building and their book: Waiting for your cat to bark is a good read. With these elements tested and refined the site goes live and now we are able to use the analytical tools which measure web traffic to further refine the work. Ideally, it is an ongoing process. We have become certified in testing web results as well. This treatise touches on a variety of points and we could spend many pages on each one. I have not yet discovered anyone else doing this kind of work on the web, and I continue to be pleased with how successful it is. Also it is a fascinating process for any company manager to explore the mind and motivation of his customers. Come along and join us on this exciting venture. There are all kinds of great changes coming along.