Bill On Business

“Usability and accessibility” was mentioned to a potential client recently while we were reviewing their online portfolio of properties. The group energy that had been present in the discussion of SEO versus PPC waned at the mention of accessibility. If speech bubbles were real, we’d have seen “Oh here we go…AAA accessibility…focus groups, usability eye tracking… yady yada.”

While it was not required that the Search team lead should intervene when a perfectly capable usability expert was speaking, I couldn’t help myself on this occasion.

Knowing the main conversant had a background in Airline Yield Management I bucketed all the tasks and disciplines into one activity, declaring the whole of the parts to be “Online Revenue Optimization”.

Here we had a single discipline that I cannot believe does not exist already. This “Online Revenue Optimization” would unify SEO, SEM, and Advertising Managers with usability expertise backed by a rock solid analytics person. Suddenly what sounded like yet another overhead to serve minority interests had become an integral part of the cash funnel. Of course, it’s semantics.

It’s sad that agencies and clients tend to only fully commit to usability ahead of cool design in troubled economic situations… but like Silicon Valley geeks in Ubuntu t-shirts who can fly their private jets over the prom queen’s trailer, every dog has its day.

The credit crunch is concentrating the minds of clients requiring online work and while 2008 may be a great year for advertisers, design and build agencies should make quite sure that their solutions don’t just look great but are revenue engines that can achieve their clients overall financial goals.

For a little while, some of the expensive bells and whistles that have taken hold over the last few years in web builds are going to be swapped out of new website projects in favour of sites that can prove their ability to generate traffic and convert efficiently. I would not be surprised to also see websites increasingly launched in phases that only roll forward if each previous phase hits its financial performance targets.

While I may choose to downgrade my Itsu lunch and pay off my credit cards I hope we will see the strained economy deliver Laissez-faire driven usability and overall better site design across Europe and the US in 2008.

If I’m a good boy I might even get to see Online Revenue Optimization become a discipline in its own right and the first thing we discuss is financial targets for a website not what colour it should be.