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Re: seeking data points reg business benefits ofaccessibilityimplementation

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From: Karl Groves
Date: Aug 6, 2007 6:50AM

Personally, I am always skeptical of these sorts of "business case"
arguments. Years ago, I used to list on my website that a redesign I did of
a company extranet had increased traffic by 1400%. The claim is completely
true, but really had more to do with how absolutely horrendous the original
site was than anything else. The original site had nothing on it of value
for the target population and the new one did. Add to that the massive
publicity campaign behind it and it isn't hard to see where a 1400% increase
would come from.

In the presentation you linked to, it seems pretty obvious that the site
that was replaced was indeed an awful specimen: "Ranked 92nd in FTSE 100
website" and "150+ links on every page" (Slide 8). Other slides on the site
demonstrate that the site seemed poorly managed by the company and proper
production methods were not a top priority. Looking at the Web Archive
copies of the old Legal and General site, there are definitely numerous
issues with the interface, navigation, and information architecture. In
other words, the old site was a dud.

That being said, the presentation seems to be an attempt at claiming that
all of those increases in traffic and revenue were made possible merely by
making the site "accessible". You can't take an old, ugly, non-user
friendly, poorly organized, hard-to-navigate website and replace it with a
new, attractive, user-friendly, well organized, easy-to-navigate and
accessible one and claim that all of this ROI is solely the result of the
increased accessibility.

What I want to see is one of these "case studies" which compare two visually
identical web sites where the only differences are in the markup itself.


Karl



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