Challenges:

Webroot, a relatively new yet rapidly growing endpoint security firm, had successfully tapped the home computer security market but was having difficulty converting traffic on the business section of their website into leads. They engaged our researchers to learn how to increase the usability of this portion of their website.

Process/Methods:

We have enough experience in user testing to know that users will generally find a way to complete a task when they’re motivated. This means that standard approaches of measuring “eyeballs and clicks” may not be the best way to improve your site from your customers’ point of view. When clients ask us for usability testing, we take a step back – our goal is to understand what users hope to accomplish by visiting a website, or simply put “what motivates them,” then determining how well your website meets those goals.

With this in mind, we reached out to IT decision makers to learn how they research and select products and vendors. We learned that the people visiting the site are not necessarily the decision makers; rather they are team members charged with the initial research and recommendations for new products and services. We also learned that to make the short list of vendors they passed along to the decision makers, we had to do some of their work for them.

Results:

Our recommendations included creating new content such as engaging, yet brief, product overviews to explain the products; creating checklists and guidelines to support vendor comparisons; and bringing more of this content the fore of the site to mitigate losing visitors who did not want to register to view content. We also did some standard user task analysis during the visits that provided a list of quick hits to modify the site in the short term while Webroot worked on the new materials we recommended.