Autonomy User Experience White Paper

Autonomy User Experience

The Paramount Importance of a First-class User Experience
User experience is the overall impression and satisfaction one has with a service. A myriad of factors ranging from the quality of available products or services to the ease of navigating the system and obtaining an optimal result determine the end users impression of your companys offering. Regardless of whether the end user is an employee using your organizations intranet, an online customer on the lookout for specific products or a visitor to your website browsing for information, first-class user experience is a prerequisite for business success. Easy navigation and retrieval, robust and accurate search results, and hassle-free browsing ensure efficiency and enable users to harness the true value of the information at their fingertips.

Keeping Your Users Happy: What Really Matters

User experience is a key factor for business success in the spheres of eCommerce, Customer Relationship Management, enterprise search, non-commercial online browsing, and business process management. Failing to provide users with an efficient, highly rewarding and pleasurable experience can seriously impact your business as Web shoppers and browsers abandon your website in search of better alternatives while employees spend valuable working hours trawling through irrelevant information. Information overload and fierce competition demand nextgeneration solutions capable of swiftly guiding users to highly targeted results, thus substantially boosting efficiency, reducing abandon rates and encouraging repeat visits. Providing customers, browsers and employees with a first-class user experience is a strategic decision that will keep your audiences happy and create a myriad of benefits. No matter how successful you are, the key to building on that success will always be tied to continually providing a superior user experience. In this white paper, you will learn about: The primary challenges encountered by online vendors, website administrators and enterprises in their quest to keep users satisfied The technological requirements of a forward-thinking business model focusing on user experience Solutions from Autonomy, the acknowledged leader in the rapidly growing area of Meaning Based Computing, that can provide your audience with a first-class user experience

eCommerce
The Information Age has empowered customers. Shoppers now have the technological tools to compare competing offerings at the click of a button and swap providers instantaneously. An online vendor can enjoy an array of appealing characteristics such as an extensive product range, high quality products and competitive prices, but if the user experience is lacking, customers grow frustrated and quickly consider competitive alternatives. That is why forwardthinking retailers strive to ensure customers are satisfied with the services offered and the highest standards of customer care are meticulously observed.

eCommerce gravitates entirely around a retailers website, which is the main point of contact with customers. Competition is fierce, as Web shoppers enjoy enviable technological skills and low patience levels. Preferences shift constantly and product ranges need to respond to the challenge. With the proliferation of high quality products and services, vendors are hard-pressed to build customer loyalty. Providing an excellent user experience can set you apart from the competition and ensure buyers come back. Failing to meet customer expectations can have damaging longterm effects to the business. Legacy approaches to eCommerce such as keyword and author-generated metadata search often fail to produce accurate results for buyers queries, leading to customer frustration and ultimately high abandonment rates. Web shoppers expect relevancy and high performance simultaneously, mandating that each solution strive to achieve a rewarding shopping experience. To meet these expectations, eCommerce sites should be based on a next-generation information processing engine. To ensure a first-class user experience, businesses can supplement their in-depth knowledge of the respective market with Autonomys best-in-class technology to keep even the most discerning buyers satisfied, build customer loyalty and expand the business. Autonomy offers the most advanced technology solutions that can help your eCommerce site achieve its objectives and differentiate you from your competition.

The First Contact

First impressions break or make repeat visits. Therefore, it is essential the website is userfriendly with a powerful and easy-to-navigate search engine to avoid the frustration of having to understand how things work and how to find desired products.

Repeat Visits
Customers are more likely to make return visits if they feel that the website is highly customizedthat is, if they enjoy a personalized Web shopping experience and are guided to relevant results. An accurate profiling and suggestion function that alerts browsers to relevant products or appropriate alternatives if the desired item is out-of-stock is of paramount importance. A first-class user experience on a companys eCommerce site entails, at minimum, an easy-to-use interface, efficient navigation, fast and accurate retrieval, high performance, advanced functionality that guides customers to relevant products or appropriate substitutes for out-of-stock merchandise, a personalized shopping experience and multiple-language support for international chains. The ability to monitor customers preferences as they evolve is also invaluable, as are analytical functionality, powerful conceptual aggregation capabilities, and easy-to-operate visualization tools that enable retailers, manufacturers and distributors to adopt a proactive approach to branding and supply. Autonomy guarantees instant product discovery, alerting, profiling and suggestion functions based on each users individual interests, high performance and unrivalled accuracy, award-winning sales analytics tools that provide retailers with a snapshot of buyers behavior and evolving preferences, and Reputation Analysis capabilities that allow vendors to monitor and react to product and service reviews on blogs and other online forums. An optimal user experience delivers several key benefits including: An increase in direct revenues - if it is easier to shop, people buy more A boost in cross and up-selling, leading to higher profits and happier customers A reduction in the number of complaints or inquiries that need to be dealt with through costly customer service centers

 Reduced abandonment rates because shoppers can minimize the click-count and time spent between hitting the home page and order processing An increase in indirect revenues, as existing online customers recommend the site to others For further information, please refer to the Autonomy for eCommerce White Paper.

Enterprise Search
Analysts estimate that 80% of information stored in the enterprise is unstructured, including email, IMs, Web pages, conversations and videos. Employees are hard-pressed to find the right information from a multitude of different repositories, and within very tight time constraints. In order to provide employees with a highly rewarding user experience, forward-thinking organizations rely on technology that locates data in an accurate and nuisance-free manner, thus enabling employees to focus on their more strategic responsibilities. These revolutionary technologies simultaneously search content from a number of different sources, automatically analyze and relate that content to other valuable information or people, and alert employees to relevant files as soon as they appear, whether they are on the Internet or within the firewalls of the organization. For an employee, a first-class user experience entails being able to get the job done well, efficiently and stress-free. The enterprise can realize genuine ROI from sparing valuable man-hours otherwise dedicated to prolonged enterprise search. Employees never again have to face the challenge of needing to find a specific document hidden somewhere in the organizations numerous repositories; they no longer need to worry about knowing everything on a specific topic. Next-generation technologies locate sought-after content instantaneously and feed employees relevant interest-specific information as they work, ensuring first-class user experience. Autonomys unique conceptual search technology has been widely recognized as the benchmark for enterprise search. Over 17,000 leading organizations around the world employ our award-winning solutions to: Boost efficiency Increase productivity while at the same time cutting costs Avoid duplication of effort Keep employees informed and up-to-date Reduce the cost of maintaining unstructured information within any environment Reduce the time taken to navigate to related information Retain interest through dynamically recommending further content View category results and summaries Detect relevant documents rapidly

"Autonomys search technology is becoming a de facto standard for companies

Financial Times, 4th July, 2007
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Online Browsing
Similar to employees, online browsers are on the lookout for information on a range of websites from health information portals, news, entertainment and investment sites as well as a myriad of government-to-citizen portals. Like Web shoppers, users can swap websites easily if their user experience expectations are not met. A decrease in visitors can lead to a critical reduction of funds for a website that is sponsored by a public institution or paying advertisers. By employing next-generation technologies, organizations can substantially enhance public-facing websites and create a user experience worthy of a return visit. Converting the website into a dynamic, easy-to-navigate and tailor-made portal can be the crucial step towards substantially increasing visibility and site stickiness. Autonomys pattern matching technology is uniquely suited to providing online browsers with a best-in-breed, tailormade user experience. Unlike legacy approaches which base their suggestions for relevant data on other users experience, Autonomy automatically creates a customized profile of each and every user based on search history, purchases, comments and reviews, blogs and any other interaction with the website. The award-winning Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) identifies links between disparate pieces of information that are not immediately obvious and guides users to information that is the most accurate reflection of their interests. Customization drives user satisfaction, repeat visits and ultimately a boost in a websites stickiness. With information overload posing a tangible threat to information channels, competition for drawing and retaining users attention is fiercer than ever. The stakes are high: failing to meet browsers high expectations might jeopardize not only your number of hits, but also your websites credibility. We believe Autonomy provides the only technology that can help you achieve a first-class user experience for online browsers.

Contact Centers/Customer Relationship Management

In every contact center around the globe, the main focus is on giving the right answer - instantly. The time spent awaiting a reply, the number of people users need to talk to before they obtain an answer, and the actual relevance of the answers are all determining factors for a customers overall impression. In addition to investing in human capital, a contact centre can benefit substantially from a powerful tool capable of understanding customers queries, retrieving relevant information automatically and guiding the operators to plausible answers. Autonomys meaning-based technology powers the Autonomy etalk Intelligent Contact Center, which enables organizations to run highly efficient and cost-effective contact centers thus boosting user experience and resulting in genuine ROI. Customer centers can derive several substantial benefits from an enhanced user experience including: Driving sales from higher customer satisfaction Increasing first contact resolution rates Accelerating issue resolution Reducing the number of calls to the support desk Improving corporate reputation as satisfied customers recommend the company to others based on high service levels

Business Processes
Employees, now more than ever, are working out of locations other than the office. But, they still need to communicate and activate certain processes no matter where they are at that moment. The frustration that derives from not being able to perform a task adequately can affect the overall performance of an employee. By employing revolutionary technologies such as Autonomy-powered Cardiff LiquidOffice, organizations can substantially improve efficiency, reduce costs, relieve undue stress, and boost performance. LiquidOffice enables employees to focus on their work instead of worrying where they will be when they need to do something urgent such as approve a work order or a purchase requisition, thus improving workers welfare and boosting revenues due to increased productivity and efficiency. LiquidOffice redefines business process management (BPM) in the enterprise by accelerating cycles, ensuring compliance, and connecting people with information and processes, regardless of location. Plus, its integration of Autonomy's market-leading enterprise search makes LiquidOffice the first and only BPM solution that enables real-time access to, and use of, time-sensitive content throughout the process lifecycle. As a result, LiquidOffice provides an outstanding user experience that leaves even the most fastidious employees satisfied.

The Technological Challenges

Retailers, Web administrators and enterprises face a number of challenges on their way to providing Web shoppers, browsers and employees respectively with a first-class user experience. Next-generation technologies adequately address these challenges without costly and prolonged manual intervention.

Consistency over Multiple Channels

Users expect a seamlessly consistent experience over every touchpoint, be it a physical store, online shop, website, contact center, or intranet. Therefore, synchronization between the different industry streams is essential to avoid any inconsistencies that might be damaging to the business. Vendors who conduct their business both online and in shop, for example, need to simultaneously handle paper receipts and online payment, in-shop packaging and shipping requirements, and the return of merchandise both directly and in the mail. Unfortunately, many legacy solutions tend to be a patchwork of different products thus perpetuating the consistency challenge. Unlike traditional approaches, Autonomy can extract meaning from data stored in multiple repositories, in any language and format, and ensure an unprecedented level of efficiency and consistency. For example, an online vendor can analyze the patterns in buyers behaviour both from a loyalty card system and the online reviews entered by customers and do it all automatically and in real-time. A multi-channel user experience can increase retention rates, cross-selling, and customer satisfaction, thus cutting the costs and boosting revenues. For example, a unified Web portal and contact center can make customers feel they are well looked after, thus encouraging repeat visits. The technical issues of trying to keep all channels updated can be easily resolved through powerful tools such as automation and real-time indexing and processing in addition to the unique opportunity of accessing the same content through all channels.

Relevance
With traditional enterprise search solutions results are often only partially relevant. Legacy keyword searches, in particular, have the inherent flaw of retrieving the most popular rather than the most accurate results. Thus, traditional approaches fall short of locating desired products or pieces of information in a hassle-free and efficient manner. Anything from a spelling mistake to entering keywords with multiple connotations or query terms that are vague in meaning can trigger a laundry list of results requiring human intervention before any useful information can be derived from them. Autonomys meaning-based technology forms a conceptual and contextual understanding of data in any format and can distinguish between different meanings of the same word, understand changes in meaning over time, and even group documents in subcategories thus ensuring an unprecedented degree of relevance.

Scalability
As enterprises vary considerably in size, so does the amount of data they need to process. Some eCommerce websites, for example, have millions of pages of product description. The ability to leverage large volumes of data without affecting negatively the efficiency of retrieval is thus a key requirement for any technology provider.

An ideal solution should be volume-blind and capable of handling large volumes of users and data along with rapid and unpredictable increases in content. Autonomys innovative solutions have been recognized by leading industry analysts as highly scalable and are able to adequately accommodate virtually any amount of data or query traffic. In fact, Bloomberg employs Autonomy to process around 7 million documents a day with an ingestion peak of 1000 messages a second and a median response time of 150 milliseconds.

Format Diversity
Outside the traditional databases and structured information management solutions lies a wealth of information that should not be ignored when aiming to deliver the best possible user experience. According to leading analysts, about 80% of information in the enterprise is now unstructured including e-mail, IM, voicemail, audio and video assets. Employing a platform that can simultaneously process this rich variety of formats would enable online vendors, employers and Web administrators to provide users not only with the most rewarding experience but also with the richest, as next-generation technologies harness the true value of all available information. For example, in a contact center, audio analysis and information retrieval from audio tapes is an invaluable tool for the agents. Autonomy aggregates more than 1,000 formats including voice and video content, from the most comprehensive range of repositories thus allowing enterprises to make sense of information from the widest range of formats and sources available.

Performance
However accurate the results of a query may be, the user will not be impressed if the time needed to achieve this high degree of relevancy is perceived as being too long. Performance is a top requirement for a business website or portal that wishes to ensure the maximum satisfaction for users. Knowing that it will only take a second ensures repeated visits as any time users require information they will turn to the one website that retrieves the answer straightaway. Likewise, if users calling a contact center obtain answers almost instantaneously rather than being transferred to five different departments, and if these answers are consistent with previously obtained information, their level of satisfaction with the service would undoubtedly increase considerably. Designed to be completely modular, multi-threaded and using multiplexing sockets, Autonomy enables the provision of a demonstrable high performance platform for content exploitation both today and in the future.

Security
Ensuring a consistent user experience across multiple platforms, an unprecedented degree of accuracy and high performance does not have to come at the expense of compromised security. Just the opposite, Autonomy enjoys a comprehensive and modular security architecture that has multiple design attributes in place to form an optimal solution to the complex problem of entitlement resolution. Autonomy is the only technology in the world to offer Mapped Security, a highly configurable, secure, accurate, and fast method for respecting third-party security entitlements. Users enjoy a first-class experience while highly sensitive information is securely protected.

Autonomy for User Experience

The Autonomy Group of companies offer a broad suite of products and interfaces to ensure the optimal user experience in every business area, for every need. In particular, the issue of consistency over multiple channels can be addressed and successfully resolved without the need to stitch together many different products from different providers. IDOL sits above an organizations multiple repositories and derives meaning from all information assets to ensure a tailored and smoothly uniform solution. Autonomys award-winning solutions for first-class user experience include: Portal-in-a-Box the most comprehensive and automated Information Portal, for both inside and outside the firewall Retina a powerful Web interface application that offers a full range of retrieval methods IDOLme (Mobile Edition) through which eCommerce retailers and corporate communications vendors alike can ensure their users are delivered the most relevant and targeted information wherever and whenever IDOL Answer an IDOL module to automate the process of responding to customer queries Autonomy Business Console through which site administrators, product managers and group marketing teams can react quickly to changing usage patterns and provide highly targeted results to end users without scripting Autonomy etalk Intelligent Contact Center a unified, scalable and centrally managed enterprise platform for multi-channel interaction analysis, real-time agent support, and contact center performance management. Cardiff Liquid Office a powerful business process management tool that integrates information, process and people in an adaptive, rapidly deployed environment.

Each of these products offers a combination of functionalities that can be flexibly chosen to meet the exact requirements of any enterprise. In addition to traditional functionalities like keyword and legacy search, some of the IDOL functionalities most relevant for User Experience purposes are: AQG (Automated Query Guidance) helps the browser through his or her query by conceptually and contextually clustering the results along the way Directed Parametric Navigation the search through catalogs or databases is made effectively hassle-free through the possibility of refining the parameters and combining structured and unstructured content Profiling - the portal administrators have a clear view of their users, and can see their individual or aggregate profiles, automatically generated by their queries and activity on the portal Channels regularly updated information feeds that are automatically generated according to a users implicit profile, as well as channels with the latest news from the company that could be of interest for everyone Automatic Taxonomy Generation to find information more easily within a given number of results Eduction to automatically obtain metadata, contextual meaning and relationships between different data, without the need to read through each document Conceptual Retrieval to find documents that are conceptually relevant, through natural language query, or using a text as example (show me more of these) 2D and 3D Clustering a visualization of the results by clouds of concept, as well as the relationships between different clusters. Personalized Agents and Alerting for a totally personalized browsing and searching experience Automatic Hyperlinking get suggestions to other relevant content while viewing a document Mapped Security access entitlement rights are fully respected and consistent with any changes, with a document-based security that has no impact on the efficiency Sentiment Analysis evaluation of whether an information asset is positive, negative or neutral in tonality, including the phone transcripts from contact centers

Case Study
The National Archives Win International Award for User Experience
The National Archives is a UK government department for preserving and providing access to government records. Its collection consists of over 30 million catalogued documents stored in 11 distinct repositories, and many more that are uncatalogued. Making these assets quickly accessible through a Web-based portal for researchers and the general public was of paramount importance. Legacy searches would fall short of adequately harnessing the true value of this prominent collection owing to the inability to access multiple databases and at the same time provide users with high performance and accurate retrieval. The National Archives selected Autonomy to increase the accessibility of electronic documents spanning 1000 years of British history, from the Domesday Book of 1086 to the present day. The management of electronic records is recognized as one of the vital underpinning elements in the governments modernization program, as the majority of government records are now produced electronically and need to be both stored securely and made accessible. In November 2006, The National Archives Global Search received the Information Industrys Best User Experience Award 2006, a prestigious recognition that endorses the high level of the user experience attainable through a combination of excellent software and a user-friendly interface.

Autonomy Makes it all a Reality

Forward-thinking enterprises appreciate the importance of providing employees, customers and browsers with a firstclass user experience for boosting efficiency and productivity, improving sales and encouraging repeat visits. With markets getting increasingly competitive, choosing a technological backbone that is powerful enough to accommodate large volumes of data and flexible enough to respond adequately to newly emerged challenges becomes a strategic decision that can impact your business considerably. Autonomys unique technology is flexible and adaptable, as well as easy to fully integrate with any existing environment. By providing users with all the key components of a first-class searching, browsing or shopping experience, Autonomy makes a tangible difference in your organizations offering and helps outsmart your competition.

The information contained in this document represents the current opinion as of the date of publication of Autonomy Systems Ltd. regarding the issues discussed. Autonomy's opinion is based upon our review of competitor product information publicly available as of the date of this document. Because Autonomy must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be commitment on the part of Autonomy, and Autonomy cannot attest to the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication. This document is for informational purposes only; Autonomy is not making warranties, express or implied, in this document.