InetSolution - Tweakers & Builders

Seth's post on tweakers motivated me to create this lens. That's what we do at InetSolution - we test, tweak, massage and eventually improve user experience on business websites.

We're a small company of six, each with our own area of expertise. I focus on marketing and project management. Donovan, our Creative Director, is a design genius (really) with a real knack for making usability look darned good. Mac is a saint, a comedian and our resident .Net and SQL Server expert. Mac makes me happy; he always figures out ways make code do what we want it to. Eric, he's a programming god and he's pretty good in sales presentations too. Justin, he's another one of our programming gurus and a good writer too. Finally, Erin and Karen keep the business afloat by handling all of the really important business stuff.

Little tweaks make big impacts. After three months of promotion, lots of traffic and only a few sales, the inventor of the Tailgater hired us to make his online ordering process easier.

An Example Tweak
Eliminate checkboxes to select color and grill/no grill option. Most people only order one Tailgater at a time, so we simplified the selection by putting the four choices in a drop-down list. Now it's one selection and one click to order any of the four combinations. Conversions are up and cart abandonment is down. It's better, but we're still not happy because we think there's more we can do. Maybe radio buttons would work better? We'll try that next, and we'll track the results, then we'll compare.

Another Example
Tweaks aren't always for the people visiting the website, but sometimes are for the people running it. Tri-Pointe Credit Union accepts loan applications online. They used to print the online loan application, then re-enter all of the data into another system so they could print a neatly formatted application. Why re-enter data? With a few CSS tricks and UI enhancements, Donovan created a style sheet that generates a printed version of the app that's ready to sign and file. The tweak saves them about 15 minutes per application and they process hundreds of applications per year.

That kind of work doesn't win many design awards, but it sure makes our clients happy. Making people happy is fun work. If you want to be happy, let's work together. Visit our site at http://www.inetsolution.com or call me at (586) 726-9490, ext. 201. We're in Michigan, but we'll work with anyone in the world, as long as planes, cars, horses or camels can get us there.