What the Web

What is quality? This question has been haunting me for months now. To this day nobody has been able to answer this question. Not even me, though this is a word I use often at work. Working at a company which – for Dutch standards – is big, it’s hard to avoid talking about the subject of quality.

The term is usually surfaces as a contradiction. A marketeer is interested in sales targets. While I feel quality is our target. The webanalytics specialist keeps talking about conversions (meaning sales for most webanalists). I keep going on about this quality issue of mine. They seem to be opposite points of view. There is debate. Frustration on my end. A deadlock all around.

Confusion
In the mean time I started to suspect that there was actually no contradiction in our debate. No debate even. The problem was a matter of semantics. A problem which by the way confused both sides. Those who felt “my” quality was too expensive and cost them sales. But I was confused as well, thinking they wanted to reach their targets at quality’s expense.

Goals and such
In one of these debates someone stated: “reaching our website objectives can be done in many different ways. Usability or webanalytics but quality can also be one of the ways to reach our goals.” This got me thinking. Something in his story just didn’t sit right with me. It took me a while to figure it out, but then I did: webanalytics is not an angle to reach a goal. Webanalytics is a means of measuring. Quality however is a goal. More than that, it’s the central goal. Because really, doesn’t quality simply mean the point where everyone’s goals are reached to their fullest extent? Both visitor’s and publisher’s?

So to recap: what is quality? Quality is the theoretical point between customer goals on the one side and company goals on the other. Interaction design, W3c guidelines, IT infrastructure, content are all ways of reaching this point (on a website at least) and web analytics, usability testing, content quality testing etc. are all means of measuring how close to quality you are. All test results should be invested into the theoretical Q-point. Which means that all choices that are made after testing should serve both customer and company goals just as much. Adding to one, takes away from the other.

The focus of most marketeers however is on the company’s goals. The focus for most specialists is the customer’s goals. The trick is to find the middle together.

In my experience test results from any type of test are used to get closer to the company’s goals, thus taking away from the customer. This is a short term way of thinking. When the customer doesn’t feel his needs are met, he will take his business elsewhere. The q-model can help you find the middle. It doesn’t do much except tell you what place within the whole process the different items have (web analytics is not a goal, it is a measuring tool and should be used as such, visual design is a means and should be used as such). And it tells you what to strive for and by which means to do this and how to measure.

Oh well, it’s just a thought. Who know, maybe someone will find it useful.

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