Client Context
The client company, which is active primarily in its home country, had a Web site to promote its products and associated consulting services. But the company never effectively used its site for lead generation, cross-selling or cost reduction through self-service features.

Why an external usability expert?
The vice president of marketing knew that the corporate site could be used more effectively to achieve business goals. But she was reluctant to invest any more time, money and talent on the site, knowing that the company and its external development partner lacked the usability skills necessary to boost site usability, thereby achieving positive business results. She understood that usability skills are very specific and generally not the core competency of development companies. So she turned to us to use our strong usability skills, industry-proven methodology and track record of generating positive business results to improve the corporate site.

The Engagement
As a first step, we conducted an onsite meeting to help us understand the client's context and company strategy. This kick-off meeting served as a forum for discussing the configuration for site analysis. The knowledge we gained at that meeting helped us select competitors' corporate sites for comparison, zero-in on specific concerns, focus attention on individual areas of the site and to clarify client expectations for the site analysis.

As a second step, we have performed the Web Design Assessment (WDA), consisting of more than 200 usability checkpoints, to:

• Determine the gap between the corporate home page and consequent product home pages, as compared with company strategy
• Detect navigation flaws that prevented prospects from finding products they sought
• Identify missing usability features, which would offer prospects, customers and partners effective site self-service
• Compare client site with our composite of sites demonstrating best practices

As a third step, we finalized the deliverables.

The deliverables for this engagement included more than 100 annotated screenshots that highlighted:

• Competitive gaps, in which our client had under-performed not only as compared with the leading competitive Web sites, but also as compared with the average competitive score.
• Severe navigation flaws that prevented prospects and clients from finding information available on the site.
• Deviations as compared to site design best practices.

In addition to the visual report (PowerPoint presentation), we presented a numerical report, with more than 200 points, which provided a neutral and objective comparison of the client's corporate Web sites as compared to competitors' and best practices sites. Furthermore, we included recommendations for short-, mid- and long-term changes, which will help the company modify its sites to surpass competitors' and implement best practices aligned with its own Web strategy. Our analyst presented this report during a half-day briefing with the company's Web team and Web steering committee, which included representatives of the organization's various business lines.

Client Value
The VP of marketing has used our recommendations and methodology to redesign the corporate Web site. The recommendations allowed the design team to prioritize implementation of site features and decrease specification time by 50 percent. The team was also able to eliminate a majority of specification ambiguities, which led to additional delays during previous site redesigns. The newly designed Web site has increased direct online leads by more than 250 percent and reduced phone calls for support-related questions by about 40 percent.