In the days and weeks after the meeting, eFrenzy's staff made piecemeal changes to the site: They linked the eFrenzy logo in the headers back to the homepage, improved the interface that customers use to request particular services, and changed the homepage greeting to display a customer's first name instead of his or her username. This, they hoped, would endear the customer to the site.
Ask other Vividence clients and it's clear that user feedback can net outstanding results. Move.com, which describes itself as a one-stop solution for all relocation-related needs, has used Vividence for four tests. "We can debate for hours about what people do in certain situations on a Web site," says Michael Tchao, Move.com's VP of customer experience, "but Vividence lets us hear from a large group of geographically diverse people." As an example, Tchao says Vividence testers recommended moving a clickable map, which was hidden "underneath the fold" on the homepage. "It seems like a 'Duh, of course they wouldn't see the map,'" he says. "But we thought it was obvious. It wasn't." Vividence also recommended changing some of the site's search functions, says Tchao, and page views increased by 40 percent.
EFrenzy would certainly love to see gains like these, but it's too early to tell if Lake and his team will make the changes necessary to create a better shopping experience. Lake promises a better site driven by snappier marketing language (he just hired an editor in chief), and says he plans to add comprehensive ratings of the different services. Edelman says they'll run another Vividence test as soon as they prepare for a site revision in the late fall. That's probably a good thing. It may be true that what you don't know can't hurt you - but in the case of e-tailing, what you do know can certainly help.
Gary Andrew Poole is a freelance writer based in San Francisco.
