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Tech talk
From Six Sigma to 6P:
a new process for web quality assurance
S
ince it was invented by Motorola, and made famous by GE and Jack Welch, Six Sigma (techniques and tools for process improvement) has become the gold standard for ensuring quality in manufacturing. But what if your “product” is a website, and not some machine, widget or other manufactured good? Can Six Sigma principles help ensure website quality? For all its benefits, Six Sigma is notoriously
rigorous and hard-to-implement. Perhaps that is why it works, when done right: ensuring quality takes time and care, and product design cycles and manufacturing processes do not happen overnight. But websites require a more agile approach. One such approach is the “6P Cycle”. No company wants to be associated with an outdated website that doesn’t provide an optimal user experience. But how do you know whether you
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need to make changes? By measuring your website’s performance. Not once or twice either, but as an iterative process of constant improvement. “How do you I go about doing this,” you ask? By implementing the 6 Ps: Purpose, Picture, Plan, Performance, Pinpoint and Perfect. The Purpose step establishes the baseline of the cycle you must follow to optimize your website and improve results. Are you selling as expected? Where are your visitors coming from? Are they finding your registration process easy or frustrating? Traditional analytics tools like Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics will give you the numbers you need to understand what is going on with the site. Next is the Picture step, in which you use heatmaps, session recordings, funnels and other tools to visualize what is happening inside your site. These in-page analytics tools will enable you to understand the why behind your visitors' behavior. Why aren't they converting? Where in the funnel did they drop? Where did they spend the most time on a page before clicking the call to action? Once you have collected and ‘pictured’ the information, the next step is to create a Plan – develop a hypothesis of what can be done to improve your results. But how do you know whether your hypothesis is right? You must test the improvements to evaluate how visitors interact with them – in other words, identify the changes in your website’s Performance. This can be accomplished with A/B and multivariate testing tools like Optimizely, Monetate and Maxymiser. In the next step of the improvement continuum, you must Pinpoint and understand the causes of the measured performance, while at the same time developing ideas for future tests. This again is done with in-page analytics tools, which enable you to compare and visualize pre/ post-test data to understand whether the test was successful or not. Once you have these insights, the final step is to Perfect the site, making the changes necessary to provide your visitors with an optimized experience. But you’re not finished yet. In fact, the cycle never ends. Your visitors’ behavior is constantly changing, technology continues to advance, and new trends impact the market on a continual basis. And just as Six Sigma has helped countless manufacturers upgrade their production processes, the 6P Cycle can help ensure that you’re never stuck with an outdated website that no longer suits you. January 2014