Visual Sciences

I've recently become exposed to Visual Sciences , a tool that looks like it deserves its growing reputation as a next-generation web analytics tool.

I have a client who is going to do a test implementation on their site over the next couple of months. It sounds as though they will likely be the first major UK client for Visual Sciences, which was acquired by Web Side Story about this time last year.

They seem to be mostly 'under the radar'. The site is not particularly enlightening, and web searches for the product name don't through up a great deal of commentary that isn't ophthalmology-related.

Clickz.com has a good list of predictions for analytics in 2007 which suggests that Web Side Story enterprise customers will be gradually migrated onto the Visual Sciences. It certainly seems to be the case with my client, who sent an RFP to Web Side Story, and was pitched Visual Sciences in response.

It sounds like it's a pretty great tool. Apparently it does the sort of thing that you'd expect would be common place (but aren't) - segmenting data 'on-the-fly', giving evocative visualisations of the strengths and weaknesses of websites and merging different data sources.

I have a friend who has had a couple of meetings with the Visual Science team. He was very enthusiastic about the tool and its strengths. There do seem to be plenty of 'hooks' - rumours that the technology is based on algorithms developed by the CIA, an interface designed by 3-D game designers and anecdotes about vast amounts of incremental revenue earned by existing clients through optimisation and A/B testing.

It will be very interesting to watch and participate in the implementation. Hopefully the reported price tag of about $300k will mean that the client is ambitious with their allocation of human resources as well. Even a user-friendly analytics package needs trained and experienced operators, not to mention people to co-ordinate web designers, developers and agencies.