Designing for the Bottom Line
The Selling Points of Hard and Soft ROI
By Alex Wright
We've come a long way since the early, anything-goes era of the mid-'90s, when flashy marketing sites, gratuitous JavaScript, and gyrating logos were the norm. Thanks in no small part to a cottage industry of usability evangelists like Jakob Nielsen and Jared Spool, the Web community has come to accept as almost received wisdom that the user experience approach to design is a Good Thing (with apologies to Martha Stewart).
And a Good Thing it may well be. But can we prove it?
Achieving ROI
In today's cooled-down economic climate, with Web project budgets under increasing scrutiny and many in-house Web teams feeling the fiscal chill, managers are asking tougher questions about the return on investment (ROI) of Web initiatives.
"We're seeing more managers focus on proving the business case for Web projects," says Jeanine Cotter, vice-president of Web strategy and design for IBM.com. "Executives are asking tougher questions these days. Is this initiative supported by our brands and by our channels? Is there a revenue generation opportunity here? Have we done competitive benchmarking?"
Gone are the heady days of the Big Bang Web initiative, when companies would lavish millions on grandiose Web projects, often with fuzzily defined goals and objectives. Increasingly, corporate investments in Web projects are centered on focused, tactical, incremental improvements to their current Web properties.
