Prospective clients frequently ask us for tangible metrics from past projects that show a before / after improvement — or at least concrete evidence of the achievement of our client’s business goals. Although it’s fundamentally a fair question, it is also a frustrating one. The reason it’s frustrating is that our ability to provide this information is directly tied to our client’s ability to produce it, or their willingness to share it with us, or their willingness to let us publicize it. While we are perfectly happy to take credit for increased shopping conversions, page views per visit, or frequency of visitation, the reality is that many, many factors outside of a site’s design can contribute to these effects. And it is usually the case that all manner of new initiatives are tried in conjunction with a new design, so it can be quite hard to isolate the effect of any single aspect.

All that being true, we can’t help crowing a bit about some of the publicized data regarding iVillage’s most recent fiscal quarter. iVillage is a Catalyst client (case study here), and their redesign launched officially in January of this year. Usability testing of the new design was very positive, as were early reviews from both end-users and commentators. This week, iVillage released the financial results for Q2 2005. The results were great, but what interested us were some comments regarding the site’s performance since the new design launched. Here are some quotes from a Motley Fool article:

A key growth metric for iVillage is page views. Over the past year, page views increased 11% to 391 million — despite a fall in unique visitors (which was the result of the unwinding various distribution agreements due to the acquisitions of other companies).

Let’s hit that again: more page views overall (40 million more), despite fewer unique visitors. That translates to real money and, in theory, is a metric that will hold as the number of uniques climbs back to pre-redesign levels. Good stuff.

We’re not saying that Catalyst’s new design was responsible for all this. But, if you want to read it that way…

Seriously, a big CONGRATULATIONS to our friends at iVillage for a great quarter.