Giraffe Forum

Properly managed, your website is the most cost-effective environment in which your customers can complete their tasks.
While U.S. retail sales grew just 2 percent in the first nine months of 2008, ecommerce sales grew by 8 percent, according to a JPMorgan analyst. Amazon’s sales revenue grew by 31 percent over the last twelve months.
The Web […]

If a customer cannot complete their top tasks quickly and easily on your website, why would they trust you to help them with other tasks?
You’re in a giant shopping mall. You urgently need to go to the toilet. You go to the Information Desk. There’s a big queue. After waiting for ages your turn […]

Traditional managers often lack the skills required to understand if an intranet is successful or not.
I was once talking to a manager about how the intranet could save staff time and make things easier, when he shook his head dismissively. “It’s not the job of management to make life easier for staff,” he told […]

A self-service website can only be effective when people can complete the tasks they came to complete.
The toll booths on a motorway I regularly use were removed recently. In their place is an automatic system called Eflow that captures your car registration. You then have a number of options for payment.
I happen to […]

Not only do many websites have unreliable metrics; they’re usually measuring the wrong things.
“75% of the data Web marketers collect are either misleading or inaccurate,” according to MarketingExperiments, a website optimization research company.
According to MarketingExperiments, poor data quality can be due to:

Inadequate tracking;
Improperly configured measurement tools;
Faulty test structure and protocols;
Validity threats;
Inconclusive results.

However, many websites […]

The Web offers one of the most significant opportunities to communicators in modern history, but requires a total redefinition of what communications is.
Traditional communications is one-way, passive and past-tense. It is all about telling people what you have done, what you are doing, or what you are about to do. There is a core belief […]

Redesign is classic organization-centric thinking. It rarely has much to do with making things better for the customer.
Your website isn’t working. What should you do? Well, how about finding out why it isn’t working and fix that. But let me tell you this, the problem with your website has rarely anything to do with […]

The Web is supposed to replace manual service with self-service, but sometimes our number one task on a website is to find someone to talk to.
Over the years, I have noticed that a key task, particularly on intranets, is to find people. This is somewhat ironic when you consider that the business case of a […]

Every time I hear someone say that “every website is different” I want to rush outside, grab an ancient oak, rip it up by its roots, swing it wildly and lop the top off the nearest mountain.
Every time I hear someone say that “everybody is different” I want to rush outside, race up the nearest […]

Early website management was obsessed with volume. Today, an increasing number of page impressions can mean a website is failing rather than succeeding.
I still hear senior managers and journalists quoting HITS when they want to say something impressive about the Web. (HITS stands for How Idiots Track Success.) A HIT is a totally meaningless measure, […]