NEMOA Friday

Breakfast was a lot of fun, this morning. All of the speakers hosted a table, my table was filled with really nice people, folks willing to share details about their business. Thanks so much to everybody who spent an hour with me this morning. Pete --- sorry we didn't have more of a chance to compare notes, it was nice to meet you, in person!

There was a fun session this morning, hosted by Colin Hynes, the Director of Usability at Staples. We don't always consider the fact that Staples moved $4.9 billion of merchandise via its website during 2006. Wow. After Amazon.com, can you think of anybody doing more volume than that?

Colin brought a woman up to the stage, to join him in a brief usability test of the Geerlings & Wade website. The point of Colin's presentation was not to judge the Geerlings & Wade website, but rather, to show seasoned e-commerce leaders what an e-commerce experience is like for the average customer.

The presentation included a discussion of the use of Personas to improve the website experience (including a before/after conversion rate graph --- where conversion briefly dipped after implementing changes to the site suggested by research and Persona use, then improved nicely, up to 28% more than the prior version of the website).


P.S.: DMNews covered a few of the comments I made during my presentation on Thursday.