Interview with Dan Zambonini, Technical Director for Box UK (clickdensity)

Dan Zambonini is the Technical Director for Box UK, the company that brought us clickdensity.

How do you position clickdensity on the market? What does your target audience look like?

We’ve always been careful to position ourselves away from standard web analytics, and more towards usability and information architecture. We prioritize features that aren’t available in existing products, and especially those that give insight into how users interact with the page.

Whereas most analytics packages are used to reactively analyze basic success metrics, clickdensity users tend to use the system to pro-actively evaluate and refine their websites. This is very much our direction and vision, we want clickdensity to become the first port-of-call for organizations that want to assess their existing web presence, and then be given concise, visual feedback on how and where to make improvements. With this grand vision in mind, we’ll be expanding our current feature-set quite broadly, so as to not just cover usability and IA, but also have visual means for assessing online marketing, SEO, buzz, accessibility, and other factors that are important to a modern website. Within each of these areas, we’ll be bringing something unique, innovative, and easy to use.

Our current audience is made up largely of commercial organizations of all sizes, from niches to multinational brands, across the world. Within these organizations, we’ve largely been targeting the marketing and IT users. However, with some of our upcoming features, we’re hoping to expand our reach, and get more interest from the online geeks (such as me), bloggers, developers and people who shape the web.

What is your advantage to competing solutions?

We’ve actually recently put a page on our website about this, as we don’t talk enough about how sophisticated our product is, in comparison to our nearest competitors. Basically, I think if you’re interested in performing any kind of real analysis of your site (rather than just using these products as some kind of one-off ‘
“novelty”), clickdensity is the only real option (I say this with utmost honesty and sincerity!).

With that in mind, I fully encourage your readers to try all the available options on the market (like ours, most of them are quick to set-up and try out). It should quickly become obvious that if you want to get down to the really useful information, across your entire site, then ours is the only system of its type that offers the kind of filtering and reporting tools you need. Apart from the feature-set we currently offer (including our unique click-time graphs and integrated A/B testing suite), we also update our product with useful new features more often than any other competitor.

Do you have any particularly exciting case study you could tell us about?

Ah, good question! We’re currently working on two incredibly interesting case studies with existing clients (that can’t be named as of yet!). These case studies are really interesting because the clients in question spend a lot of money on their websites, on focus groups, usability studies, surveys, and high-end analytics packages. Even with all of this money invested and previous work, we managed to identify simple, quick, valuable refinements within minutes of putting clickdensity on the sites! We’ll be publishing these case studies in the next month or so (once they’ve gone through the relevant sign-off procedures).

All I can tell you at the moment is that customers already benefitting from clickdensity include multi-national banks, global charities, national newspapers, and some of the largest retailers in the world. Even though this is quite an impressive list, what excites me most is that we also have small, independent websites also benefiting from clickdensity, as they have access to exactly the same tool as multi-billion dollar companies, which levels the playing-field somewhat!

Do you have any new features planned that you can tell us about?

We try to keep as much secrecy as we can around our upcoming features. We’ve noticed that some of our past improvements, like differentiating non-linked clicks in our click graphs, or introducing click-time recording seem to suspiciously appear (albeit in reduced form) in competing solutions a few months later.

I’ve just taken a look at our internal road-map, which is divided into short, medium and long-term goals. In the short-to-medium term (3 months), we have sixteen planned additional features, and that will probably increase as we think of new ways to maximize the value of the datasets we’re building.

Within the next month, we hope to launch (or at least begin beta testing with customers) our API, which will be something of a first for our industry. This will also allow us to create other new features, such as a browser toolbar that gives you access to your reports whilst browsing your website (without needing to visit the central reporting website). We’ll also start to introduce some new features that take us into the online marketing/SEO/buzz analysis market, like RSS feeds for various metrics (such as a feed for new referrers). We’re certainly not going to be bored any time soon!

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