Assessing the state of play:

Customer-focused assessment can span a wide range of activities, from focus groups and usability testing to more straightforward profiling and journey mapping based on site usage statistics and general market patterns. The output from these should be a clear set of results showing what customers do on the current site, what works well, what they like, and often the easiest to extract, what they dislike.

Assessing the peer group, the site's closest competitors, is essential. A clear understanding of how your existing site stacks up against those sites most likely to be visited and used by your own customers helps establish where your existing site is weak (and again, strong) in relative terms: an absolutely vital measure of performance.

However, it has far greater importance than this alone. We firmly believe that the most successful sites fit into their market as aggressively as they stand out from them: conforming to accepted standards for that market delivers an immediate level of acceptance among customers and increases the impact of the distinctive personality. The 'stand out' is enhanced by the 'fit in'. And in order to fit in, you need to understand what you are fitting into.

Beyond the direct peer group, there is much to learn from the broader market: assessing trends and developments in an equivalent market, or set of companies, can help understand what the broader standards expected by the same type of customer are.

Clearly everyone will move on: customers and competitors alike. But crystal-ball gazing is tough: predicting the future behaviour of anyone or anything is difficult, and is rarely truly accurate. Assessing today is the only certain analysis we can perform, and from this we can plot a course for the future that is based on solid information.

You can build for the future without this knowledge, but you'll always be building on shaky foundations. Given how accessible this information can be, why take the chance?

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