I was cruising on Acura.com and a window came up asking me if I wanted to participate in a consumer research study conducted by Keynote for Acura. It would take 30-45 minutes and they would give me $10 Amazon gift certificate.

I was not really interested in the $10, I thought it was a little chintzy for a 45 minute session.

But out of curiosity, I did this.

It turned out to be a specific study on the Acura.com website itself. You had to download a program (which could be later uninstalled and deleted). They then asked you what you had intended to do on the Acura website, in detail, then told you to do it while they monitored you.

Later they asked you about difficulty in navigation, did you find what you wanted, etc.

They then launched through a series of exercises asksing you to find specific pieces of information, such as the base price of TL 5 speed automatic, and what offers were active in your area. They then quizzed you on the prices, and the finance deals you found available for the TL. There was plenty of room for free form comments. They gave you three exercises like this including one item, which I could not find, the size of the RDX nav screen.

They then asked demographic info, and intention to buy a car within a specific time period, and sent the $10 certificate 24 hours later.

It was an interesting variation on the usual questionnaire routine because they asked you to got through specific areas in the web site in detail, presumably monitored your clicks and time spent, and asked detailed questions on the info you encountered or did not encounter.

If I wasn't such a pro Honda fan, I might have given up. I did it more for the intellectual curiosity than anything else.

 

I'm more amazed that Acura went through that kind of effort to develop a program to evaluate customers usage of the site. They must be serious about improving the site.

I think they have a good site to begin with relative to others, but, you can always make it better.

 

I dislike sites that require the use of Adobe Flash Player. Acura.com has no ability to be viewed without Flash. Flash doesn't work at all on many small devices, such as the iPhone, and is not well recieved in the Open Source and Web communities as it is a non-standard format that cannot be implemented by anyone other than Adobe.

I e-mailed Acura's web site support about this, (I had to use a Flash enabled browser to even get to the page that let me complain about requring Flash!) and got a nice response from the (presumed) webmaster about how others their feel the same way. I got the feeling from his response that if enough people voiced an opinion, it might be enough to make a difference. Perhaps this is one of the things the poll is trying to ascertain.

It's interesting to note that automobiles.honda.com does not use Flash at all.

 

I agree, that is odd. You shut out a percentage of potential customers from accessing your website. Not smart business.

My companies website (and any sites we develop for others) always recognizes if you have Flash installed or not. if not, it automatically displays a non-flash version of the page. The page is not as fancy, but at least you can read the content.

Glad you complained about that. They need to address it asap

 

It may not have been Acura who was conducting the survey. It may have been Genex (genex.com if you are interested) who was doing the survey as they designed the website for Acura.

 

FWIW, Keynote is a web and mobile performance testing outfit.

http://www.keynote.com/