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After a difficult January The Usability Company found February to be considerably more buoyant and we received an increase in enquiries and in overall interest in the company. We won a significant number of new accounts, some mentioned earlier in this newsletter and some won under strict NDA. However, in the course of winning new business there were the inevitable losses. As it is two years since The Usability Company was incorporated it seemed appropriate to share our thoughts.
Without doubt, since the company was founded usability has gained in recognition in the general market. Outside of usability practitioners there was very little recognition and understanding even of the meaning of usability. As a result we found ourselves spending the vast majority of our time with potential clients educating them about the process and benefits of usability. This created its own issues as it was unclear in many organisations just who would or should be responsible for usability or the customer experience.
More recently we have found companies contacting us, and asking us to help solve their problems of low conversion rate or a website simply not achieving its mission. We find our enquiries extend significantly beyond the area of Intranet and Internet, and although this has always represented a significant portion of our business the difference now is that the enquiries are coming not only from specialists within organisations, but also from business owners. There has certainly been a significant shift in understanding and as a result the market is improving in the face of a potential slowdown.
So why is this? Unlike two years ago, there are now far more cases of proven benefit as a result of employing usability within the development process. We were probably the first usability specialists to talk with any real conviction about return on investment and drive our clients to measure it. Now that tangible benefits have been realised organisations are far more willing to invest in existing channels to market knowing their investments will be returned 10 fold. If there are fewer sales to be made, as an organisation you need to make sure you are winning a larger proportion of them than your competitors. This is without doubt one of the reasons may of our clients still work under non-disclosure agreement; they see improved usability as providing them with a competitive advantage.
So what of the lost opportunities we have had? As with any business we lose business sometimes because we have misunderstood the brief, sometimes because the client is testing the market and has an incumbent supplier or for a variety of other reasons. Lately we have found ourselves forgetting that the market for usability is still embryonic. Recent activity from organisations that now understand usability has blinded us to those that still don't and we have sometimes not focussed on the need for education. This sees us losing business to market research companies because we haven't helped the client understand the difference. They evaluate us against criteria that we cannot meet, and were we to try would devalue our offer. The lesson for us is that the education must go on.
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