Customer-Effective Web Sites [Paperback]

Jodie Dalgleish (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 17, 2000

The best e-Commerce sites are the ones that enable customers to accomplish their goals better, faster, and more easily. In this book, leading Gartner Group consultant Jodie Dalgleish draws upon two years of exclusive Web customer research, showing you exactly how to build sites like that -- every step of the way. Customer-Effective Web Sites covers every element of e-Commerce site success: functionality, content, navigation, information architecture, visual design, technology, and more. Jodie Dalgleish identifies 17 key customer directives that every e-Commerce site should follow; then demonstrates exactly how to implement them on your site. Discover how and why current sites fall short; and identify real-world blunders that frustrate and infuriate customers. Learn better ways to identify your customer's true needs and requirements, and design sites that reflect them. Discover more effective site development processes -- and learn to communicate your goals to web development professionals so you'll actually get the site your customers are demanding. For all Web professionals and business managers concerned with creating more effective, profitable e-Business sites.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

Preface

Two potential book titles came to me while I was writing this book. One was Internet Services for Real People and the other was The Internet Service Revolution. Neither title was quite right, as pointed out by my editor, but each encapsulates my underlying motivation for writing this book.

In a nutshell, I want to see "real people" better served on the Internet. Real people need to do everyday things to run their hectic lives, and the Web can help them do that. I want to see the Internet come of age as a service medium because it has the potential, if harnessed correctly, to emancipate customers rather than frustrate and restrain them.

Over a period of two years I was actively involved in many forms of customer and internal testing of e-service concepts and Web sites, across a number of industries and in relation to many different e-service offerings and e-customers (for a comprehensive description of testing techniques see Chapter 3).

In doing this testing, a theme kept recurring: Give customers something useful because if you ignore what they're trying to do by visiting your Web site, your Web site will only be irrelevant to them and frustrate them. It was customers' frustration that first made me think about writing this book.

I feel that, if I encourage all parties involved in Internet development to ask their customers and themselves the right questions, for the right reasons, we will all be a lot better off. And this needs to be an integrated effort, within and between businesses and their development partners. I feel frustrated, however, because I observe many people with motivations fueled by the search for the "quick buck," rather than the search for lasting customer value.

For years, marketers have talked about the market-of-one phenomenon as the linchpin for creating lasting customer value. We now have a medium that allows us to market to individuals more effectively than we ever have before. And yet, people carry over their old, constrained, and ineffectual, so-called customer-relationship strategies to the Web.

Despite this, I feel encouraged because things are starting to change. I salute those people who realize that the Web needs to be a part of peoples' everyday lives, and are creating useful Web sites that address real customer needs.

That's important because we're on the verge of what I call the "e-service revolution"—a revolution than can be created equally by service providers and their customers. E-service providers need to take the initiative to talk to customers and do things differently as a result. There's nothing new in talking to customers; we just have a better chance of getting results with the Web in the mix, and we have a lot more to lose, a lot more quickly, if we don't find out what we need to know and change the way we do things.

And so, in the interests of helping e-service providers, and their development partners, harness the opportunity to do right by their e-customers, and create lasting value, I have made the effort to describe the necessary Web site development process from beginning to end. In doing so, I have addressed what it takes to create not just "Web sites," but Web-based e-service systems or applications that are integrated with an e-service provider's business.

It takes discipline to create a good Web site. Part of that discipline is talking to customers and effectively translating their needs, attitudes, and behaviors into the requisite Web site experience. And I hope what I have written helps you translate customer needs into strategies and practices at every step in your development process.

That doesn't mean that this book will give you a list of shrink-wrapped instructions you can tick off as you go. If that's what you're expecting, you're reading the wrong book. However, if you're prepared to be challenged to think about things differently, and to take concepts and ideas and develop them further in the context of your own e-customers and what they're trying to do, this book is perfect for you. And I hope you'll get a lot out of reading it.

To get the most out of this book, bear in mind that the pictures are an integral part of the story. If you skip the pictures, you'll miss a lot of the new ideas and concepts that make this story different. If you take the time to inspect and understand the pictures, you'll be rewarded with new ideas and insights, because I've put some things together in new ways.

In fact, exploration is a key tenet of this book. I see us exploring, together, how the e-service revolution can be brought about. And I'm thankful to those who have come before, because I've borrowed from their ideas to explore how they can be aggregated and applied to the Web.

I wish you well in your endeavors to provide lasting value to real people and in creating the e-service revolution. And I believe that you are an important part of our collective learning process, and would like to hear from you as you have insights and create new ideas.Jodie Dalgleish

From the Back Cover

What your e-commerce customers really want-and how to give it to them! Tomorrow's e-commerce winners will be the sites that help customers accomplish their goals better, faster, and more easily. Now, top Web consultant Jodie Dalgleish shows you exactly how to build sites like that-every step of the way. Drawing upon two years of exclusive research on Web customers, Dalgleish addresses every component of e-commerce success: content, navigation, applications, information architecture, visual design, technology, and more. Customer-Effective Web Sites presents 17 rock-solid rules every site must follow to attract profitable customers-and keep them. Discover how to:

Define your customers' true needs and requirements

Manage Web development for maximum speed, value, and effectiveness

Fix problems that are alienating your customers right now

Integrate your site with "bricks-and-mortar" resources

Plan for "next generation" opportunities your competitors haven't recognized

Whether you're a dot.com executive, marketer, Web developer, or consultant, you're under the gun to deliver e-commerce results--now. Get the book that comes straight from the e-commerce battlefield, combining new, customer-centered insight with Web management techniques that work: Customer-Effective Web Sites, by Jodie Dalgleish.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 274 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR; 1st edition (May 17, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0130878278
• ISBN-13: 978-0130878274
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,888,393 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A "desert island" ecommerce book, but not the whole story., July 7, 2000

By 

Frank Lynch "frank_lynch" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Customer-Effective Web Sites (Paperback)

I kind of like this book, and I think you should buy it, because it offers some good strategic thinking about finding opportunities, calling in the right parties to a project, and developing a site. The author's recognition of the valuable role customers can play as part of the development team isn't often seen in web books (I saw it in Jeff Rubin's "Handbook of Usability Testing", but I haven't seen it elsewhere). Her recognition of the value that good marketing research can play is also commendable -- good, quantitative market research is an area that some other books will tell you to disregard, in favor of repeated user testing. But without a solid business proposition, a lot of effort could be spent on a too-small opportunity.

That said, I would also want to take other ecommerce books with me to my desert island. While Dalgleish gives attention to the importance of the user, I don't think the user gets *enough* attention. And the comments on the importance of user input and appeasing the user are diffused through the book, never achieving a critical mass, such as one gets in Alan Cooper's "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum." In my view, this is a missed opportunity. While it is good that Dalgleish makes comments such as "customers don't understand the way your Web site works as well as you do," it would be better to remind the site owner that the users failure to grasp the Web site is not due to any fault of the user. More evangelism on user-centered design would be very helpful here. And to round that out, I would also want Cooper's "Inmates" and the latest Jakob Nielsen book ("Designing Web Usability") on my desert island. As an additional item for my island, I would also want to bring Deborah Mayhew's "The Usability Engineering Lifecycle," as a strong reminder that user perspectives need to be gathered very early on in the process. (I don't believe Dalgleish discusses user task analysis explicitly, perhaps leaving that discussion to the experts she wants us to put on the development team.)

To reiterate, I do kind of like this book, and I think you should buy it. But don't expect to get buy on this book alone.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent guide!, June 21, 2000

By 

Catgetsdown "sspradley" (Moraga, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Customer-Effective Web Sites (Paperback)

If you are designing web sites for either business or pleasure - you need to read this book. It highlights what you need to be aware of in your target audience. Where do their eyes move on the page, how do you keep them from clicking off your site (no, it's not only speed).. how do you design the online experience to hold your visitors and keep them coming back? This book is really good! I have read waaaay too many of these articles in tech journals. There is no 'sponsor', no products being sold - just solid recommendations on getting an effective site up. As we know - putting a web page up is easy. Getting people to come once, and again is the challenge. Some of this information may be intuitive to those with experience, but for someone beginning to design corporate sites for ecommerce - better check this book out! Customers have very concrete expectations from an online presence ... and if you don't meet those expectations - all it takes is a click and your site is history. Very enjoyable, easy to read and very pertinent to today's web page designer.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gems, July 13, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Customer-Effective Web Sites (Paperback)

This book deserves two or three reads. There are some real gems to be discovered. The easy-to-read writing style might disguise some really unique thinking and concepts. The author presents the concept of "theming" (where customer scenarios create "doing threads" around which navigation, metahor, utility and dialogue are wrapped) for example as a whole new way to approach Web design. The author also shows how a company can do research to identify what customers need to do on their Web site and why - and how that gets communicated to the Web designer and incorporated into a "theming" approach throught the development and testing process. The author also presents new project management and business process design techniques. Not to mention the no-nonsense way the author establishes the fact that Web sites are currently falling way short of customer expectations (without berating the point and giving tangible examples). I was also intrigued by the fact that this book was written a few months before the .com crash - much of what was foretold has come about - the point in the last chapter about "the quick and the valued" and the need for companies to establish real customer value instead of thrashing the latest fad was well made. This book should be read by everyone involved in eBusiness, across the spectrum, for a reality check, and for some fresh thinking.