we are: London

Nexusness

“Wake up, time to die.”

Bladerunner is possibly one of the best films ever made and all of the companies whose neon signs float in the sky during the film have gone bust, or be taken over. Not a good omen for a phone named after one of the main characters.

Is it any good?

And what’s it really like to use one in anger every day? Well I’ve handed over my iPhone to the wife after loving the Apple for 3 years. For the record I usually struggle to keep a phone for more than 6 months.

And the answer is yes, it’s good, in fact it’s really very good.

I had high hopes for other HTC phones and desperately wanted the Palm thingy to be good, but they were all pants compared to the Apple.

What’s hot!

The screen is sharp and clear and the phone is easy to navigate. Setting up email is easy, the app store is much better than I expected; forget Unix geek, think Apple chic.

Email works offline for reading and deleting, unlike the iPhone. Email, address book and social media stuff rocks. I love the widgets for news, twitter and facebook that live on the home screen.

The voice dial and dictate email is not bad either, a long way to go but it’s tempting to start everything by speaking and not navigating.

Oh and it lets you play Spotify in the background which is now the only source of music I have .

What’s not!

The only real hardware bug is the use of the back, menu, home and search  buttons printed on the bottom of the screen. Why bother? you click them by mistake and it’s a real pain.

Software bugs are wider, but with time they will get sorted and remember that Apple have had 3 years to sort out the iPhone.

1. Why does the calendar not sync with MS Exchange when mail and contacts do?

2. The screen redraw speed is slow compared to Apple, but not bad.

3. Cut & paste is not anywhere near as neat or intuitive.

Should I buy one?

Yes - not sure why but yes get one.

Time will tell.

Now that I have committed to use it for work and home life I have no choice but to get on with it, warts and all, and I guess learn to fix the issues and watch as new software updates bring all of my life, blogs, tweets, photos, music, friends, work and life together.

Or I might buy the Apple tablet, nick my iPhone back and delete this post.

Mobile, interface design, user interface Design, future, Mobile, usability

Would you buy one?

It’s been a mad year and next year is set to be even more crazy.

2009 has seen luxury good sales boom, e-commerce sites explode and the final mass adoption of digital video and e-ink.

Mobile internet has taken off thanks to Twitter, Facebook and the iPhone. Social has started to be more powerful than most could have hoped and TV has gone down hill so fast it’s breathtaking.

2009 retrospective

Early this year we predicted a few things that have happened, some clever and some obvious. BBC iPlayer has seen an amazing take up across the country and handled 70 million requests in October,  which is about 7 Petabytes of data or 12.5 Gigabytes per second.

Top 10 key changes in 2010

1. The end of free. Well at least as we know it owing to a drop in ad revenue and cold feet amongst media owners.
2. A new media monster. As the old guard struggle to reorganise, one or two new, media goliaths will take over, buying paid content from the old order and giving it out for free to meet the needs of us consumers.
3. Mobile web will overtake fixed line. For key content mobiles will become the only way to access key info, buy stuff and keep in touch.
4. Visualisation goes mainstream. With the increase in e-commerce traffic the only way to get your head around the numbers is to change your view. Being able to represent numbers in new, visual ways will be coming to a vendor near you soon.
5. The customer will become king. Crowds are causing even more trouble for corporates, as I type, Eurostar is suffering huge PR issues; surely it’s time to wake up to what your customers want?
6. Content strategy is the new usability. Too much emphasis has been placed on cool tech recently such as augmented reality, but these are just shiny bows on a box of rubbish. Clients and customers will wake up to the power of well organised content.
7. Data will kill UK networks. As the iPlayer shows, and to some extent the iPhone, when people get going, they really get going. Streaming video and large file transfers are going to carry on causing the biggest customer satisfaction issues as networks fail over the sheer volume of traffic.
8. No one will beat Apple. When it comes to technology that has completely changed the world, the iPhone is an amazing example, and no matter how hard people try (Palm) no one can get close.
9. e-ink will become the norm. We all love our Kindles, those who have them that is, and finally there is some competition, which means cheaper, better ebooks for all. Migrate newspapers from print to digital and you have a new outlet for old media. Shame about the latency of stories though.
10. Measure your customer’s empathy. Stats, conversion and marketing data standalone to offer a crutch, but only when you bring these together can you really measure how successful your business is. 2010 will see customer empathy ratings used as the standard metric for success.

We will have a review in the summer of 2010 and see what’s on, what’s not and what needs to be added.

customer insight, e-commerce, information architecture, market research, usability design future, Our news

Tobii eye tracker

During March and April we are adding eye tracking for free to all of our usability research labs.

The use of eye tracking to support other lab based research methodologies has greatly improved over the past couple of years with the development of reliable, stable hardware and software tools from Tobii.

Quick set up and the fact that the eye tracking hardware is housed in an unobtrusive way, in fact you can’t actually see it, means we can now integrate this research into our labs without the worry of system crashes half way through a session.

Leading experts

Becky Tindle, who previously worked at Bunnyfoot’s London research labs as Usability and Accessibility Consultant, has long been an advocate of eye tracking as a method of investigating user behaviour during lab based research.

Becky added, “eye tracking is an excellent tool that enables you to see your product through users’ eyes. Used whilst observing behaviour as users interact on screen and talk aloud, it can be a powerful tool. We also encourage the use of retrospective protocol where appropriate, for example, during summative lab sessions.”

BT Vision eye tracking

However, eye tracking is not a magic solution to the needs of all research projects and often we advise against testing using eye tracking as results can be misleading depending on the interface being researched and the audience researching it.

This approach goes against a number of established agencies who are guilty of pushing eye tracking on a client because it’s glamorous and tangible. Be warned, in the wrong hands or on the wrong project, eye tracking will do more harm than good.

usability research eye-tracking, eyetracking, navigation, usability

It’s news to us and in  a lot of ways it makes a lot of sense. Where simple, single column menus can confuse and usually just replicate what’s going on in the main page, mega menus give the users a fast overview of not just core navigation, but contextual offers and links.

Tesco is a good example of a simple utilization of this, whilst Jacob Neilsen’s blog on Useit.com shows a range of more exciting (can navigation be exciting?) uses of this new approach to drop down navigation.

Drop downs are bad

Typically we would not recommend them and have spent a lot of time reviewing, researching and trying to get them to work for clients who insist on them.

The obvious choice is the make sure the main navigation elements are represented in the main page as this is where the user typically looks and clicks first.

But for many clients, there are too many choices and too many priorities that need to be highlighted and this new approach does allow a much broader view of what’s on offer.

We are currently testing more versions of this approach and looking at how it can be better used by some of our clients, if you want to know more or see our research, please get in touch.

What’s also nice is that you can start to offer contextual navigation and target content within the panel based on behavioural targeting; search term used to get to the site, previous behaviour, currnet customer, etc.

information architecture, interface design, usability design e-commerce, Google, Internet, navigation, usability

How much can Twitter really do for a business? Should companies be looking at it as a commercial channel? Can you make money from Tweeting?

The answer is yes to all and I know because we tried it out recently through an experiment during Red Nose Day, @wearelondon.

Pay for punters

Our origianl idea was to raise money by donating for every Tweet we were sent instead of an email; email free Friday.

Some clients, Kevin, Christy, et al from NationalExpress were great at it, but others were a little slower. So I put out a message saying we would donate 10p for every Tweet.

This was re-Tweeted by a load of people, including Dave Gorman www.twitter.com/dave_gorman and off we went, loads of Tweets, lots of funnies as we asked for jokes.

Follow me and we’ll donate

Quickly word spread and hundreds of people were Tweeting us, so I raised the offer to donate 20p for everyone who followed us. Jemima Kiss kindly gave us a shout and we quickly went from 40 followers to 270.

In the end we donated over £500 to Red Nose Day and traffic to our site went up 1,000% which is a pretty good PPC investment for an even better cause.

So why didn’t more big companies do something similar? It’s was so quick and easy to do I can’t believe others did not do the same, but I guess it comes down to the same old thing. No matter how quick and easy the enabler it (Twitter) the process of a big business are way behind.

Skittles are there doing it now, not sure if it will work, but hey at least they are trying.

Want to know more, then call or email and we can give you the inside track on taking free and making it pay.

Blog, Community e-commerce, Internet, Twitter

$236m spent on retail online trading in 2008

Oman’s internet users spent $236 million (Dh866 million) in 2008 on retail e-commerce, according to a latest report by Arab Advisors Group.

About 40.2 per cent of adult internet users in Oman have used e-commerce.

The report estimates the number of those using e-commerce to be more than 158,000 - which is around 5.62 per cent - of the population in Oman.

The new survey was conducted by the Arab Advisors Group in January. It covered internet usage in areas of e-commerce, cellular and Pay TV as well as habits of the online community in Oman.

About 20.7 per cent of the total 696 respondents use special software packages like Skype and GoogleTalk to make calls through the internet, the report shows.

(source - Gulfnews.com)

arabic research, customer insight, e-commerce e-commerce

The National Archives created a framework agreement with highly experienced, customer focused suppliers to provide market research and usability services.

Following a successful two part qualification process, we are:london were shortlisted to provide a full range of services. This includes quantitative, qualitative research, user testing and evaluation and product and service development. We have just embarked on our first project, conducting remote testing and fieldwork research with the Archives’ visitors and look forward to working with the internal teams in the next four years.

Uncategorized

We love surveys. They are quick to create, garner invaluable insight and make us all feel that we really do understand our customers. But there is a problem, one which you have probably experienced many times, and that is inappropriate questioning during my online experience.

Yep, it sounds a little complicated, but really it’s about asking the right questions at the right time. Why ask someone at the end of the checkout process who well their visit went, when they are bound to answer well as they have just completed the task they came to your site to do?

Or even better, why ask someone how well things are going today with their visit when they have only just got to the site?

Our favourite is a survey that ran in the UK recently that asked customers why they were leaving and what could be done to improve their experience. Answer; nothing we all leave once we are finished!

Now of course there are some fantastic solutions to this dilemma that use amazing algorithms to track customers across your site before intercepting them at the critical point. But these are very costly to set up, run and report on, too much for most mere mortals whose dwindling budget can not cater for such expenses.

Opt-in, email out

The answer to our prayers took some finding and a little developing. The result is an enterprise level tool at a self serve price that allows us to do this:

1. Customer enters site, opt-in questionnaire is offered to xx%
2. A few simple questions are asked to understand their reason for visiting the site and their email is captured
3. They are then sent a post-visit email survey that they must complete within 24hrs of their visit

This emailed survey is linked to the initial opt-in, seamlessly joining both sets of data and is used to measure everything from what they actually did to how well it worked and their likelihood of return or recommendation.

High success rates guaranteed

The best part is that the users visit to the site is hardly interrupted and their attention is focused on completing their tasks not rushing through a survey. The resulting data is very high quality as we are able to compare initial drivers against actual tasks and outcome verses perceived success.

We have also seen a very high uptake of this type of survey due to the fact that it can be completed at a more appropriate time and in reflection rather than prediction.

Given the huge costs savings that this mini-enterprise survey provides, more and more clients are now running quantitative and qualitative research projects together, combing online surveys with lab based or remote usability studies.

customer insight, internet research, market research, usability research Internet, usability

How reliable are the views of six customers who fit a brief when it comes to feedback from a usability lab? The answer lies in the competence of the interviewer or moderator and the team who are implementing the research findings.

But six views are always going to be limited and, usually, geographically similar. Add to this the travel stress of getting to the lab, unfamiliar surroundings and someone else’s computer, only the best moderators can achieve good results from this audience.

Remote research, which follows the same one to one interview technique with moderator and panellist, allows a much wider reach in terms of audience location and numbers. The cost of lab hire can be used to recruit more panellists, typically twelve to eighteen.

These customers are now in familiar surroundings, using the same computer that they use to go online everyday and have much lower stress levels the only effort made is putting on the kettle.

When is a lab not a lab?

At this point we should state that lab based research does have a place and a need, and to be most effective can be run with remote research.

Lab research allows us to see how the customer is reacting visually, their change of posture, use of mouse and keyboard and facial expression which remote testing does not. It is also a great environment to use mixed media such as paper prototypes, card sorts, printed stimulus and multiple interactive models. And it’s a controlled environment where we know everything will work and a client can also watch the customer’s body language.

Results in days

The nature of remote research means that it is much quicker for us to recruit and run sessions as there is minimal effort required form the customers perspective. Even session lengths are shorter as there is no need for the panellists to take in new surroundings, familiars themselves with a new computer and get to grips with different screen sizes and browser settings.

Typically a project can be briefed on Monday, recruited Tuesday, run Wednesday and Thursday and reported on Friday. However, the more complex the audience, task or number of models the longer the recruitment, set up and facilitation takes.

We have run a lot of very successful remote research sessions during information architecture projects that we have been involved in, the most recent being a two day turn around on a travel portal prototype that we had been developing.

Client participation

Most importantly is the fact that the sessions are equal as accessible to the client and other stakeholders that are involved. Each one to one session is scheduled in advance, an email sent out and all that is needed is for observers to download a small plug-in, which takes seconds, and voila you can now see what we can see, which is the panellist computer monitor.

Two way conversation, in real time, between the panellist and the moderator is available through a conference call facility that everyone can dial into and direct chat with the moderator is enabled through the observation software. This features allows you, the client, to direct each session and get the most from it.

Finally, everything that is done on screen and said during each session is digitally recorded and can the video can be hosted in full, transferred to DVD or edited into highlight clips.

Ultimately, every method of research has a place and the agency pitching for your work should justify not only the methodology but also identify the best solution for you, often this may seem more complex but ultimately it will lead to far better results.

global usability testing, market research, usability research usability

Driving people to websites is still the main objective of most marketing campaigns, and why not, surely that’s the end goal of all marketing.

But what happens to people once they get to the target site seems to be less important to many campaigns, as is the measurability of those converting from prospects to customers once they arrive.

National Express has successfully shown the power of multivariate and now we are putting behavioural targeting at the heart of their future, online business.

It’s about customers, content and profit

On average over 80% of a typical marketing budget is wasted as this percentage customers arriving on a site can’t find what they want and leave to go through another route, usually your competitor.

If you present information to a customer that matches what they are looking for, they will get through your site quickly and easily. Bearing in mind that many customers don’t complete their tasks on their first visit, presenting them with content that matches their previous visits to your site will, again, ensure their tasks are completed as easily as possible.

When prospects are presented with content that targets their behaviour, without it being intrusive, they are much more likely to become customers, and existing customers are much more likely to be loyal and therefore profitable.

One site fits all

The cost of creating micro-sites and campaign sites, that have short life spans, is hard to justify, particularly when a company has invested a large amount in a single, main site that should meet everyone’s needs.

Behavioural targeting allows you to customise a site to meet both a customers needs and those of the business.
For example, a financial firm is running a campaign to sell a new product or rate, and this will probably feature on the homepage hero space. However, other campaigns are running at the same time and need that space too, so either five of them share, on rotation, with a 20% chance of being seen, or compete altogether and get lost.

An example

The customers route to the site, in relation to the campaign for example , “Eurodutch bank low rate mortgage at 2.8%”, is likely to be through a search engine [Eurodutch mortgages]. A user following the search results would either be taken  to a microsite, through paid search, or to the homepage, through natural SEO.

Microsites are out, too costly as we know and the homepage has some information on this campaign but it’s battling for space with insurance, savings and investments.

Behavioural targeting allows the site to dynamically change the homepage to show content on the new mortgage, effectively acting as a microsite,  and because we know where the customer is in the country, also up-sell home insurance, as our data from CRM and collected online, shows the majority of new customers in this region are likely to buy both together.

The same technique can be applied to people coming from banners and affiliate links, or email newsletters and viral campaigns. In fact it can be used for anyone coming in from any route, Facebook, Twitter, blogs and texts.

Learned behaviour

Tracking and understanding what an individual is doing on your site allows you to speak to them directly when they come back, targeting content based on what they looked at, searched for or did on your site.

Presenting additional benefits for a specific product, on the homepage, to someone who has looked at that mortgage on the site before, along with a comparison chart of competitor products and an application form is much more likely to convert them as opposed to making them hunt through the site to find it on their own.

This learned behaviour can also be used to understand how wider groups of customers are using the site and create delta segments, where a wider set of behaviours are used to present content to first time users.

For example, customers coming in to a travel site from affiliates such as newspaper promotions will often group based on the quality of the paper. Daily Mail readers are more likely to be women and after more of a bargain then Times readers.

However, this profile is based on a very wide audience segmentation presented by each newspaper and may well not reflect the type of user that has linked to the travel site.

The solution is to track, over time, where customers are coming from and what they are looking at then buying, then use this data to customise the homepage accordingly. This approach will give instant uplift in sales without presuming to know what the customers want and can be applied to time of day, geo-location and a range of other metrics that to date have been difficult or impossible to attain.

customer insight, user centred design e-commerce, Predictive, usability