Back when I was writing a great deal about QlikView, I proposed that its fundamental value came from empowering business analysts to do work for themselves that would otherwise require IT support. (See, for example, this post, which has the virtue of pretty graphics.) This same notion of considering which users do which work has permiated my ideas of usability measurement for demand generation systems and usability in general. But to get back specifically to business intelligence systems, I think there is a particularly large gap between the capabilities...
Wednesday, 24 December 2008
Thursday, 18 December 2008
Simplifying Demand Generation Usability Assessment: No Obvious Answers
Posted on 08:47 by Unknown
My feelings are hurt, people. No one has commented on last week’s post about usability measurement. I know it’s not the world’s most fascinating topic but I really wanted some feedback. And I do, after all, know how many people visit the site each day. Based on those numbers, there are a lot of you who have chosen not to help me.Oh well, no grudges here -- ‘tis the season and all that. I’m guessing the reason for the lack of comment is that the proposed methodology was too complex for people to take the time to assess and critique. In fact,...
Saturday, 13 December 2008
A Modest Proposal for Demand Generation Usability Measurement
Posted on 10:44 by Unknown
As Tuesday’s post suggested, my thoughts on usability measurement have now crystallized. To provide a meaningful and consistent comparison of usability across demand generation vendors, you could:1. Define a set of business scenarios that must be supported by the system. Each scenario would describe a type of marketing campaign and the system tasks required to run it. These tasks would cover system set-up, materials creation, campaign design, execution and evaluation. Some tasks would be common to several scenarios, while others would be unique....
Tuesday, 9 December 2008
Measuring Usability: A Task-Based Approach
Posted on 12:09 by Unknown
I think we all know that the simplest practical measure of intelligence is how often someone agrees with you. On that scale, University of Ottawa Professor Timothy Lethbridge must be some kind of genius, because his course notes on Software Usability express my opinions on the topic even better and in more detail than I’ve yet to do for myself. Specifically, he lists the following basic process for measuring usability:- understand your users, and recognize that they fall into different classes- understand the tasks that users will perform with...
Two Interesting Blogs on Demand Generation
Posted on 08:18 by Unknown
I noticed a visitor to the Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems site from a new source the other day, which turned out to be a mention on blog by Jason Stewart of Demandbase. The context was a discussion of system selection and the Raab Guide was paired with a reference to a very excellent series of posts on system selection on Maria Pergolino’s Inbound Marketer blog. Actually, only two of promised three parts are posted, but the first two are well worth a look. In particular, part 2 has a long list of evaluation criteria. I haven’t compared...
Wednesday, 3 December 2008
Pardot Offers Refined Demand Generation at a Small Business Price
Posted on 08:01 by Unknown
My little tour of demand generation vendors landed at Pardot just before Thanksgiving. As you’ll recall from my post on Web activity statistics, Pardot is one of the higher-ranked vendors not already in the Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems. So I was quite curious to see what they had to offer.What I found was intriguing. While last week’s post found that Marketbright aims at more sophisticated clients, Pardot explicitly targets small and midsize businesses (or SMBs as we fondly acronymize them [yes, that’s a word, at least according to http://www.urbandictionary.com/])....
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