we are: London

Just a quick update on how useful my ipad is turning out to be.

Pre-editorial note; wait for the 3G, the reason will become clear shortly.

Having left hospital after an operation, I was forced to take a break from office life, so off too Sandbanks in Poole for 4 days.

On the way there the road was closed and we had to wait for hours, whilst I read a few chapters of my ebook, I could really have done with some online mapping on the iPad to get round the traffic, alas no 3G.

Once there, with the hotel kindly providing free wifi, 3.5mb so not too bad, we surfed the web, checked tv listings, found nearby attractions for the rainy days that did not happen and generally left the iPhones switched off, we even had a good laugh at the price of holiday houses in Sandbanks, circa £800k for a 3 bed apartment!

Now we all know hotel tv sucks and my 2.5 year old loves a bit of firman sam before bed, well luckily we had a few downloaded on the iPad, which my daughter Sophie can now happily use.

Then the power went off in the hotel from about 6pm to 11pm. No drama there, we finished up watching Peppa Pig, put Sophie to bed and then settled down to Harry Brown with our wine and fish & chips.

The battery is truly amazing on the iPad, hardly using any power at all for hours of videos. Once we had finished the film, drunk our wine and polished off a bag of Revels, we hopped into bed and I read another 100 pages of The girl with the dragon tattoo.

Once the power came back on, sadly the choice of TV channels was reduced to Sky news and Sky sport, so for the next two nights we streamed all our tv through Catchup TV, which I was very impressed with from a quality point of view, in fact it was flawless. (apologies to the other guest who had terrible wifi due to our streaming).

Whilst the iPad is no Kindle, it was for those few hours a lot better given we had no lights. And whilst my weekend away may not sound that exciting, a evening in a hotel room with no lights and a 2 yr old child has the makings of a murder.

So thank you Steve for saving my life and providing us all with some much needed R&R.

The iPad has proved to be a game changing device for me, my daughter and my parents. It’s simple, compact, so very usable and above all it does what it says on the tin.

Mobile apple, iPad, media

I’ve had my iPad for a week and I love it. Even with just a few apps it rocks at everything. It’s replaced our laptop at home, I use it out and about for emails, presentations and reading magazines which it excels at.

So all of this sounds great and it is, except that the launch in the UK is delayed for a month, so no iPads or apps for 6 more weeks.

The good news is that you’ll be able to buy the 3G version, which, if like me you plan to use your iPad on the go, will be something that you can’t live without. After all how prolific and affordable are public wifi zones?

And in return we’ll see our mobile phone companies offering new individual tariff bundles to add mobile, home broadband, mobile PCs and a range of tethering charges.

Opening up this new market sector will drive a price war, similar to the one Tesco has just started with their new iPhone tariffs, which is good news for consumers and for the companies making and selling ultra portal PCs.

So don’t complain that you can’t use one tariff to do everything right now, because I am certain that you will be able to soon. Once Google have launched their gPad and the rest of those that I’ve seen but can’t remember the the rush will start.

The only question is will the gpad and other clones hit the spot and be as good as the iPad?

Mobile apple, iPad, Mobile

I’ve spent the last three days loving my new iPad. Being bed ridden as I have been, slipped disk, I have been able to try everything out whilst reading reviews and tips and frankly a load of general rubbish about what the iPad lacks.

Well let me put the record straight, it’s brilliant! If you have ever wondered what might happen to the future of magazines, worry no more. In 24 hours I have spent £39 on everything from Wallpaper and Yachting monthly to Mac User and Cosmo, and I’ve even become a fan of USA Today, a usually dull free paper you get in your hotel in the states.

Families will love it for long journeys and rainy holidays, 20 episodes of Peppa Pig downloaded already. I love the films, even though we have access to loads through Bafta, the iPad is finally a device that you want to watch things on.

If you have a Bluetooth Mac keyboard you can link that up, whilst I am typing this on my lap unsung the on screen keyboard, ouch, but it works and it’s as fast as a normal keyboard.

Web browsing rocks, battery life is amazing and as a thing to own it takes some beating, although there are a couple of shady people here in A+E that look like they may give me a beating for it.

Other tools that will amaze you both visually and usability wise are the email app and the calendar . Both bring things to life on a screen like this that even my mac air struggles to do.

All in, it’s as big an advance as the iPhone and whilst many will reject it initially for not having a web cam or 16 USB ports, or what ever unknown need they suddenly find they have, eventually it will shape the future of ultra-portable computing.

Mobile, interface design, user interface apple, innovation, iPad, user experience

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.

UPDATE: Nexus has gone iPhone is back, read more here

http://www.weare-london.com/blog/google-nexus-one-the-real-review/

Mobile, interface design, user interface Design, future, iphone, 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.

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