One great thing to come of the acquisition is that designers and usability experts like yourselves are excited about this. It’s woken the design industry up to the potential this acquisition offers to them.

@Jukka;

It remains to be seen how this will affect Web Analytics consulting. I am optimistic personally because we do user experience analysis and usability studies as part of our current offering and I see this as potentially something that can help us bring together the in house design teams with the marketers. In order to improve conversion for instance I use competitive analysis (based on personas), clickstream analysis and user experience analysis combined. Therefore I see this additional design angle helping us.

@Alex;

I agree, it sounds great on paper. However while I don’t doubt that they will integrate their tools in the manner you describe the fundamental problem Analytics has is integration within the enterprise. It’s a cultural thing. I don’t see how this acquisition will help this as most big companies outsource design. Also it’s a big change in the way designers work and will take a long time to be widely adopted unless it’s very easy, which I don’t think it will be (based on experience with Omniture).

WPP were my bet to acquire Omniture and that would have made a lot of sense because they could then use the tools to measure all of their clients campaigns taking the issue away from the enterprise and making it a necessary part of the marketing/advertising process.

@Sampsa;

I’m inclined to agree. It’s going to be a long time before Adobe/Omniture works for designers in the way for instance Alex described. Most designers work offline on their design projects, so they’re going to have to see the benefit very quickly to start using this new extra functionality, a lot of which they won’t be used too.

The way I see it Omniture products are ment to monitor and collect information about the interactions of people on the online, while Adobe products are usually something used offline, so analyzing them is not what this is about. Using tools designed to work with WWW and browsers will need extensive redesign to work measuring offline tools and I think its not even sensible.

Don’t get me wrong, I very much like the fact that this happened and I’m anxious to see what this merger will bring and how they will co-operate. Also, I might be wrong (which I’m not).