Many companies active in web development are facing endless and therefore expensive discussions on usability issues of web projects. Everyone who has read one article on web usability feels the urge to share his opinion. In order to improve communication and the knowledge of web workers we are developing a range of products. Our first product, the UserPlus Advisor, will help web workers to incorporate usability guidelines into their work, by creating a page specific checklist. The checklist calculates a usability score with extra design patterns and best practices. Our second SAAS, the UserPlus Tester, offers a solution to those who are looking for real persons to do a remote usability test of a live website.
Both products will offer valuable feedback to those who are involved in a web development process so that the risk of delivering a unusable website can be reduced. Research showed that up to 50% of lost sales on e-commerce sites could be brought down to usability issues. Usability is not only about delivering a pleasant experience to your site visitors; it’s about optimizing your site goal. For many sites this goal is directly related to their business goal: generating leads & making profits.
Roadmap 2010
Q2 2010: Closed Beta of first tool (UserPlus Advisor)
Q3 2010: Commercial roll out of first tool
Q4: 2010: Closed Beta of second tool (UserPlus Tester)
The launch of these 2 product should lay out the foundation of the UserPlus usability label that can be rolled out later on.
More detailed information on our first product:
1st product: The UserPlus Advisor:
The UserPlus-Advisor gives a qualified rating of the usability aspects of a website. People are able to upload a series of screenshots of a website. Even while the site is under development, basic designs and wireframes can be uploaded and used as input for the UserPlus Advisor.
After uploading, users can annotate different zones on top of the screenshots. By drawing different zones and tag them with the names of website elements from the element library like ‘navigation’, ‘search field’ or ‘list item’.
Due to this tagging a personalized and highly relevant usability checklist can be generated and presented to the user. Example when a navigation menu has been marked: “Is there a link to the homepage from every page in the website?” People answer with Yes, No or Not applicable. By answering all these questions a weighted usability score can be calculated. Let’s say a website gets a score of 54%. Then there is plenty room for improvement. The UserPlus Advisor will offer a set of suggestions that web developers can use to optimize the user experience and site of the website.
At this point in time there is no direct competition for this tool.
Revenue model
The UserPlus Advisor will (probably) be launched at a price point of € 49 euro/month. Later on a premium version targeted at big web agencies will be offered at € 149/month
The UserPlus Tester will start with a pay-per-use model with a project price of 350 euro. Clients are also able to pay a premium price to have access to screened test users.
With this pricing model we expect to break even at the end of 2011. At that point in time we should be able to have at least 500 paying subscribers (product 1) and running a 100 remote tests a month. (product 2). These numbers represent a market penetration of 1% within Benelux, UK and Germany. This is just a reference. UserPlus will roll out globally. Already today many large companies are contacting us to run in-house beta tests what makes us confident that we are using rather conservative numbers today.
Team
Within our team we have a former academic usability researcher combined with 2 people with expertise in web development and new media business models.