VIEW POP UP CHART - SORRY THIS CHART IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE On August 10, Valandra made her V-Day presentation to 12 people crammed into an overheated conference room at eFrenzy's San Francisco headquarters. Valandra did not seem nervous, though Vividence prides itself on telling clients outright whether their site is good or not. On average she makes one presentation a week, and while customers sometimes aren't eager to hear the cold, hard truth, she sensed that, in eFrenzy's case, the crowd would not be too hostile.
"I'm not going to keep you in suspense," Valandra said, and announced that the testers liked eFrenzy better than its competitor, Imandi, by a margin of 56 to 32 percent. The room erupted. The eFrenzy people seemed emboldened: Their site didn't suck. Much of the anxiety in the conference room receded. Valandra reported that, in most categories, the testers liked eFrenzy about 10 percent more than Imandi. Valandra then surprised the eFrenzy employees by telling them that 20 percent of the testers had visited an online services marketplace. "Wow," someone shouted. "That many!"
But the news became less comforting as Valandra continued. Although 68 percent of the testers said they were impressed enough with eFrenzy that they'd use the service personally, not one tester had ever visited eFrenzy prior to the test - its marketing presence was practically nil. And the news went from mediocre to worse as the testers criticized eFrenzy's site, basically ripping apart its entire methodology.
EFrenzy calls its site "outsourcing your life" and markets itself as a place where you can type in your needs and get help. Say a customer wants a housekeeper. She goes to the site, posts a request, then waits to hear from different housekeepers. Many of the testers were unimpressed by this system. First, they worried about what would happen next: Would they be hounded by e-mail? Naturally, they also wanted to comparison shop and see a list of service providers in their area. To satisfy this need, eFrenzy has a user button labeled Search For Service Provider, which allows a customer to search by either city or ZIP code. But all that search produces is a list, with little or no evaluation of the service providers. For example, eFrenzy lists three tax preparers in my ZIP code. But it provides no information about any of them. Are they any good? Do any of them specialize in particular types of tax law? Vividence's testers found eFrenzy lacking in such helpful information - in tech industry lingo, there is no "value add." EFrenzy seems to claim it's the Yellow Pages on steroids, but in many cases the site offers less information than a phone-book box ad.
The eFrenzy employees in the room nodded in assent. Yes, this is a concern. (CEO Lake says the company knew about the problem and already had plans to fix it.) One frenzied eFrenzy employee kept saying, "We're fixing it, we're fixing it." More bad news: Valandra said Imandi scored much higher in its range of services, and the testers thought eFrenzy favored the seller over the buyer. "It's just the opposite," someone muttered, irritated and defensive. "They wanted better site speed, too," said Valandra, repeating a complaint of a large majority of testers. Lastly, Valandra said, there is confusion around the eFrenzy name. Suddenly, the conference room was filled with people taking frantic notes. After we adjourned, I talked with the eFrenzy employees, who despite their earlier panic seemed almost nonchalant about the findings. Perhaps Valandra should have been harsher; or perhaps they were acting calm for my benefit; or maybe, as they all told me, the problems had already been identified in previous usability tests and would be fixed.
