Zayne

This article is based on a presentation I gave at the recent Rubyfuza conference, which was addressed at Ruby developers. The title of the presentation was ‘The Business of Ruby’ – specifically because it was given at a Ruby conference. However, it had very little to do with Ruby. In fact, it had very little to do at all with any programming language, any framework or any specific technology. I didn’t write any code or show any interesting snippets, explain the latest incarnation of this or that gem or plugin.

I wanted to step out a bit. Get to a higher level and talk about the people that usually cause developers the most stress (and no, I don’t mean Project Managers). I mean clients. Customers. The people that we are ultimately building our software for. The real people that (again, usually) don’t speak “geek”. These “real people” never seem to be interested in developers fancy, elaborate code or their highly elegant software architecture. The people always seem to be more focused on the design and how easy it is to use the systems or applications that we build. Because, at the end of the day, you have to admit that clients are the ones that are paying our bills, so we need to satisfy them.

Using Web Metrics to your advantage

You want people to have a great experience using your site. But how will you ever know? Will you ask them? Sometimes that’s effective, but how many people really have the time or inclination to fill in a feedback form or send you an email with their thoughts and experiences? Are all the people who are kind enough to do this an accurate representation of the people that visit your site? Your goal should be to track what people are doing on your site – where they’re clicking or where they’re getting stuck and inevitably leave your site.

You could bring focus groups into expensive testing labs and record your subjects actions on the site, asking them questions about the site and their interactions with it, but this takes time and money – time to find the right people that represent your target market and collate and document all the responses, money to get them interested in helping you test your application, and more money to hire the necessary equipment to perform these tests. Not a particularly attractive concept in the current state of our economy.

Metrics in our Projects Team

Those who work in software development are familiar with the initial questions a prospective client will ask: “What’s it going to cost?” “How long will it take?” and “When can you start?” Simple questions, yet the answers can lead to significant stress, both for the client and us, the service provider. Give the client bloated figures, padded to mitigate your risk, and you’re likely to lose the business; Give the client what you think are accurate figures, and you begin to panic, as there is the possibly likelihood of overrunning in both duration and budget. It is not an easy situation and doesn’t bode well for a healthy, ongoing business relationship.

Let’s assume that we have attained adequate specifications from the client and feel confident with our understanding thereof. We then need to make an educated estimation of the amount of work the project requires, and establish the cost. The word “educated” in the above statement must be emphasized, as estimation is, by no means, an exact science when it comes to software development. It does however, become more accurate when one relates the work to similar completed projects, and this is where the ‘educated’ estimation comes in. However, even with a historical precedent, there are factors and variables that could make the estimates inaccurate, but with experience, you learn to identify these variables and take them into account.

Making business sense from your website

More than 83 percent of Internet users are likely to leave a website if they feel they have to make too many clicks to find what they’re looking for.
(Arthur Andersen, 2001)

One of the most important aspects of any website or web application is the end-user experience. However, website usability is often neglected during the development process, and rarely considered after the development project has been completed. This could have negative consequences for your business, such as driving away visitors, or potential bad publicity. With this in mind, usability of your site becomes an important factor, not only for generating web traffic, but also ensuring user satisfaction and return visits.

In order to improve your site and maximise the user experience, it is vital that you understand how your visitors are using your site, where changes can be made to your site to increase visitor numbers, and how to retain visitors for as long as possible. There is no greater waste than visitors abandoning your site because they are unable to clearly see your value proposition or understand your products and services; therefore, implementing various metrics is a vital component to successfully track the usability of your site.