Recently, Greystone.Net was helping a client hospital with a business plan for its Web site. As part of the arrangement, we designed, launched and managed a web satisfaction study for them. This is something that we are doing more and more these days, as organizations seek to add customer input into their redesign efforts. My background is in resea

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I don’t know if that’s really news, but sometimes you need the data to back up what you know to be true. In this case, a presentation today at Ad:Tech will report the results of a joint study by Performics, the marketing arm of Publicis Groupe's VivaKi Nerve Center, and ROI Research, an analytics and technology firm. Just one glimpse of the resu

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With all due apologies to McGeorge Bundy, considered by many to be one of the architects of the Vietnam War, I’m struck by the fourth of his lessons learned from the book “Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam”: Conviction without rigor is a strategy for disaster. Bundy’s point is that having strong beliefs alone

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"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” Dickens penned those immortal words a century and a half ago, comparing the cities of London and Paris. These days, things are seldom that cut and dry - especially when it comes to Web Analytics. It is very difficult to compare two Web si

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When I was trying to convince doctors at my last place of employment that allowing secure messaging from existing patients was a good idea, I heard more than once that it would be the “end of modern medicine as we know it.” One of our physician champions found a reference that I’ve never been able to relocate that quoted doctors saying the same thi

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With 185 hospitals using one form of social media or another, I’d say healthcare has clearly gotten the message. But I worry a bit about some of what I’m seeing out there. Let’s just say there’s evidence aplenty that while many have dipped their toes in the waters of social media, few have a real plan in place. So here are five signs that being

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You’ve probably heard the old adage that as soon as you make your Web site “idiot proof” they’ll go and make a better idiot. No offense intended to any user of any Web site, but people do the most amazing things. I’m in the midst of user testing for a client, and again I’m seeing people do things that I never would have expected. Here are some o

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I was part of a presentation recently where one of the speakers made this statement: “When you go to a Web site, what do you do? You search, right?  That’s how everybody finds what they are looking for.” As I was driving to Atlanta, I was thinking about that a lot (two digressions: first, the fact that I spend my time on a long drive thinking ab

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Those of us who hold dear the notion that the user of our Web sites is king are perplexed when that user does something that doesn’t make sense. Here’s a great example: We just completed some user testing in preparation for a site redesign, and there were a number of content sections that relate directly to the patient experience. Things like “w

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