Keynote Systems (Nasdaq: KEYN), announced WebEffective 6.0, it’s on-demand, self-service user experience (UX) research tool. WebEffective is the market-leading, online research product used by companies to improve their Web site effectiveness and online business performance by conducting in-depth customer experience research. WebEffective 6.0 delivers a bevy of powerful new product capabilities including: comprehensive support for Web 2.0 sites; a new customizable participant user interface; and real user performance testing from any of 160,000 desktops to captures connection speed, page load time and browse time during the course of a site evaluation. WebEffective 6.0 provides Web marketers, researchers and advertisers a customer experience research and usability lab without walls.

WebEffective 6.0 is the ideal tool for testing and measuring the effectiveness of interactive advertising and marketing micro-sites built using Web 2.0 technologies. Companies investing in such sites are starting to take a closer look at their return on investment. WebEffective 6.0 provides powerful capabilities for measuring such return.

The new version of WebEffective now facilitates fast, accurate testing of end-user interaction with DHTML, AJAX and Flash, a combination of client-side technologies gaining in popularity used to create highly dynamic and interactive Web sites which mimic the rich functionality found in PC applications. The ability to capture a user’s interaction with DHTML, AJAX and Flash is an important and much needed technical and industry advance. Until now, there have been no tools capable of accurately capturing and measuring the experience of users interacting with rich Internet applications (RIA), without a time-consuming instrumented approach requiring tags to be inserted manually on each piece of Web application functionality or page content wishing to be tracked.

“WebEffective provides companies insight not only into consumer behavior, but also into why they act the way they do,” said Don Aoki, vice president and general manager, customer experience management at Keynote. “The truly unique thing about Keynote WebEffective is that it allows companies to answer the ever present question “why?” For example, why are customers abandoning shopping carts during the checkout process or not seeing a particular interactive ad on the page?”

Lisa Erickson-Harris, research director with Enterprise Management Associates said, “Keynote is once again pushing the envelope with the latest release of WebEffective 6.0. The company continues to focus on the most important aspect of IT—the customer experience. While innovation marches forward, as is the case with Web 2.0 technologies, the ultimate measure of technology’s success is how the user experiences it.” Erickson-Harris continued, “WebEffective 6.0 sheds light on the nuances of the user experience where many competitive products are more focused on high-level details of the site or low-level transaction information. While these factors are important, they often miss clues about how the user experiences various aspects of a particular Web site. WebEffective 6.0 uses technology and real users to measure aspects of the Web site and provides corporate executives with information that can be used to tune functionality in a way that is more palatable to the user.”

Tracking Client Side Behavior
WebEffective 6.0 has evolved to keep pace with the changing nature of the Web. WebEffective has been extended to track user interaction with core client-side technologies ’ specifically DHTML, AJAX and Flash. Unlike an “instrumented” approach, tagging events manually is no longer required in order to monitor them. Consequently, WebEffective 6.0 works with any site, including competitors. With this new capability, WebEffective 6.0 will now allow researchers to trigger various actions based on client-side user behaviors (e.g. if a user scrolls more than 50% down page, display a specific question).

WebEffective 6.0 client-side events that will now be recorded are:

• Clicks: Not limited to clicking on a link, but also radio button/ checkbox selections and capture of on-page “jumps.”
• Hover-overs: Whenever the user action causes the page content to change in a meaningful way.
• Scrolling: Record the percentage of page scrolled, as well as total time spent scrolling.
• Text Entry: Characters typed into search fields and forms. The standard mode captures text entry when the user leaves the field. The enhanced OnKeyDown mode will now capture characters as they are entered.

Note: No other user behavior tool tracks this level of client-side user interactions.

Combining the Best of Market Research, Usability Labs and Web Analytics
Keynote WebEffective employs unique and proprietary technologies which combine the best aspects of usability, behavioral and attitudinal research into one integrated, on-demand research solution. Keynote WebEffective captures both customer attitudes and behaviors by leading customers through task-based scenarios and examining their online behavior as they interact with Web sites. Customers perform assigned online tasks – browsing, searching and shopping – from their own home or office environment while Keynote WebEffective asks relevant questions in context with their behavior (based on predetermined ‘action possibilities’) and records their actions and captures all the relevant click stream data.

Ability to Track Web Page Performance Using 160,000 Member Panel
WebEffective 6.0 now also allows marketers to better understand how Web sites are performing using any of Keynote’s 160,000 member panel. Marketers will be able to see connection speed, page load time and browse time. This valuable insight will facilitate discussion between marketing departments and Web operations groups as they work to improve the online experience.

Availability and Pricing
WebEffective 6.0 is available now. Enterprise pricing ranges from $15K to $25K for a single WebEffective study (including training and support) to a 12 month unlimited use WebEffective license priced at $150K. Special pricing is available for interactive design and advertising agencies and user experience research firms.

For more information on WebEffective 6.0 and how to purchase the product click here.

For more information please contact Mariana Kosturos, Citigate Cunningham, (415) 618-8786, mkosturos@citigatecunningham.com

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