we are: London

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

Alice.com is a shopping site with a difference. Not only does the site allow consumer packaged goods companies to sell products directly to the customer it provides a new shopping experience aimed at making the task of keeping up to date with your household good shopping a whole lot easier.

Users must create a free account to use the site

The site utilizes many features to create an experience that goes above and beyond other online and offline experiences. By creating a free online account users can keep track of their budget, utilize money saving coupons, set reminders to make sure they never run out of their household items and save their commonly used items to a personailised ’shelf’.

Users are provided with many options when adding items to their shelf

Your very own ’shelf’

By adding their favorite items to their ’shelf’ a user can purchase items simply by dragging and dropping what they need into their shopping basket. This metaphor creates an easy to understand mental map as users mimic the real life interaction.

The 'shelf' metaphor lets users easily purchase commonly bought items

Save with coupons

Coupons are integrated excellently into the experience of the site. No effort is needed on the users part to take advantage of the money saving offers. Coupons are automatically added when a user purchases an item, while the coupon offers are placed prominently when browsing available goods.

Coupon information is displayed clearly when users are searching for products

Never run out again

When an item is added to a ’shelf’ or from the advanced planning page a user can select how often they need to purchase the item. An item such as toothpaste they may wish to purchase every two weeks. Alice.com will then remind them before they run out allowing the user to re-order the item.

Allowing users to drag products between boxes provides an engaging and intuitive interaction

To sum up

Alice.com creates some interesting interactions. Using the visual metaphor of a ’shelf’ and allowing users to physically drag and drop their required items not only makes the repeat ordering of items quick and easy it also brings elements of fun and satisfaction. The site combines many features that help the shopping process, good quality photographs, detailed descriptions, customer reviews, price comparison tables. All these things combine to create not only a usable online experience but a useful and very interesting service.

e-commerce, user centred design e-commerce, Internet, usability

Lastminute.com - keeping customers happy

Booking a holiday online should be a great experience, right? Well it was in my case - up until a small design flaw on lastminute.com messed it all up, that is.

It’s Monday night and I’m booking a city break to Berlin. Now, I always thought that any overview screen must have a ‘back’  button, one that allows the user to go back and amend any errors. Lastminute.com apparently don’t quite agree with this and only let you “proceed to checkout” on the shopping basket overview screen. Well, I used my browser’s back button (that’s why it’s there, right?) to amend a passenger’s name and, to cut a long story short, this caused my entire shopping basket to disappear and my flights to get stuck in a database somewhere in the darkest corners of the Internet…

Can’t book, won’t book

Frustrated, I ended up booking a more expensive flight and feeling disappointed that a good overall experience was ruined by a design flaw and technical glitches. Lastminute.com kindly gave me the option to rant about this by filling in a very quick feedback form at the end of the booking process. And I mean very quick: 4 or 5 ratings on different aspects of the booking process, and a quick comment if I cared to leave one. I left a rather uninspired comment about the checkout process, thinking  no one will bother reading it, and shut my computer down.

The next morning I received a personalised e-mail apologising for the issues and asking for more information about the problem. I replied with details on what went wrong (including some weird text on the website and the confirmation email - everyone who’s booked with lastminute must have seen it!) and, again, thought that nothing would happen.

A personal touch

The bit that turned all this into a positive experience and made me think “wow, they really do care about their customers” was the response I received yesterday, again apologising for the problems and offering a refund of the extra money I had to pay!

Now, that’s what I call a great customer experience. Things will occasionally go wrong, we all know that - it’s how different companies deal with this fact that makes them better or worse than their competitors. And lastminute.com seem to be great at that: keeping their customers happy, even when things go wrong.

Turning a bad experience into a great one

Since yesterday I’ve blogged about this, told my friends, the guys at work, my parents, everyone! A simple feedback form at the end of a booking process, properly followed up by customer services can turn any customer experience into a wow-experience! And a wow-ed customer spreading the word about their great experience is much better than a frustrated customer ranting about how disappointed they are. Way to go lastminute!

Find out how we can help your business offer an experience that will wow your customers! Drop us a line or call Chris on +44 207 1991 321.

e-commerce e-commerce

 I don’t ordinarily consider gossip-blogger Perez Hilton a source of social marketing insight but on this occasion he twittered a report by Sysomos - a US based organisation specialising in media monitoring - and its actually quite interesting.

 

Sysomos analysed more than 11.5 million Twitter accounts, indexing user profiles and looking at the frequency of status updates and behaviours over a period of time. There is plenty of data to mine through but some key findings of note include:

 

• 21% of all registered users have never even posted a Tweet;
• More than 50% of all updates are publishing using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com;
• 65% of Twitter users are under the age of 25 ; and
• Just 5% of users - or Power-Tweeters as we shall call them - account for a massive 75% of all activity.

Twitter has experienced explosive growth in recent months and this report is essential reading in helping to understand why.

 

Read the report here

 

Blog, Community, customer insight, e-commerce, internet research, market research insight, research, social networking, Twitter

National Express Calendar

National Express launched their new portal nationalexpress.com on the 1st April along with a new lowest price fare finder.

Both were designed and tested by our usability and research teams here at we are:london and launched as part of our on-going work as National Express’ lead usability agency.

Kevin Milnes, Head of E commerce for National Express,  said:

“We set out to create a booking system with unrivalled simplicity and ease of use. The low fare finder delivers a wide range of £1 fares to the customer quickly and easily giving them the choice of when and where they want to travel within seconds.”

Read our case study or check out the National Express Group press release.

e-commerce, information architecture, interface design, market research, usability research, user centred design Design, e-commerce, Internet, Predictive, Travel, usability

$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

Here’s a great example of how we all do things in “real life”.

Happy holidays

A recent survey of UK adults for a travel industry consortium found that nearly 70% valued word of mouth over price.

The big barriers to holiday bookings include hidden prices or extras that only appear at the final stage of booking.

A lack of contact options to find out more detail about a holiday or venue also rated a a real issue, whilst 35% of people still have trouble actually booking the holiday, having battled through all of the above.

Beach holiday anyone?

For many the above issues are know issues. Those who choose to bury their head in the sand and chuck cash at driving traffic will gain nothing in the down turn, except some difficult questions from their CFO.

Samson vs Goliath

But those who embrace the challenging market place and deliver what customers want will build loyalty now and reap the rewards as the market grows. Small firms such as Sovereign.com, with whom I jsut booked, will no doubt be best placed to take on the mass market firms like Expedia.

They have a reasonably easy to use site, great value products but more importantly a person on the other end of a phone who can tell you all the things you need to know.

What next?

The approach needed varies by company size and budget, but firstly you need to know what you customers really want, so run a survey or read their feedback or call them up and ask.

Secondly you need to provide what they want effectively; small companies can afford to employee a few people to answer phones, large companies need to invest in intelligent content presentation, driven by FAQs, search and call centre input.

Thirdly, and this has been proevn time and time again, don’t hide prices or try to trick you customers. If value is not the key decision point for them, then show the cost upfront and sell them the dream.

It works, I know as we have just parted with the better part of £3k for a holiday in Tenerife of all places.

customer insight, e-commerce e-commerce, Travel

As unlikely as is it may sound, now is the time to spend money on your website with particular focus on your customer’s experience. Chris Averill, MD of we are:london explains how a small spend now will result in a much larger return on investment in the very near future.

As reported early this year, companies like M&S saw a big rise in online trading up to and including Christmas, whilst their high street stores saw a worrying drop in over the counter sales.

Yeah, I know everyone knows about this, but what most don’t or aren’t thinking about is the fact that as money gets tighter for marketing budgets, less is invested in their websites and more in advertising to drive customers their.

Recently I wrote about the fact that most sites waste  up to 80% of their marketing budget as only 20% of people achieve their tasks online. Combined with the finding of a recent research project by Harris Interactive that shows more than 50% of people who experience problems with online shops will not return to that site, more often than not dropping that brand for a rival.

This makes for some interesting reading, and what worries many of our clients the most is the fact that the first budgets to go are in web development.

So to combat this, we have partnered with Maxymiser to provide a range of rapid prototyping tools and reporting services that allow us to help you try out new ideas online, with very little spend and guranteed results.

If you would like to find out more about:

• User centred design
• Rapid prototyping
• A/B testing
• Multivariate testing / research
• Eye-tracking
• Dynamic content deployment

Then contact Chris or call on +44 207 1991 321 after all we are here to help you succeed.

customer insight, e-commerce, usability research, user centred design e-commerce, Internet, Predictive, SEO, usability

Website sales are up!
As predicted by many, the downturn in the economy is seeing an uplift in online sales, M&S alone saw online sales grow nearly 30% up to the end of December, whilst shop sales were down 7%.

Some of this is driven by more and more people becoming used to buying online, but it is also driven by the search for bargains, better service and ease of access.

I recently went to Westfield shopping mall, which is an amazing place and well worth a visit. But I, like many others, drove there and paid for parking, then had a coffee and a cake, then bought some clothes in the sales, then fought to get out of the carpark.

So in saving 30% on a jumper which works out at about £15, I actually spent £10 on fuel, £4 on parking and £15 on coffee and snacks. Yes the balance would have been better if I bought more, but I didn’t.

If you get it right online now, you’ll rep the benefits for years to come. However, get it wrong with a high delivery cost, poor online experience or bad customer services, then even the best shopping experience won’t save you.

See how CADinteractive can help you turn your site into a truly amazing experience with rapid improvements through our high value, low cost methodology call Chris on 020 7199 1321

e-commerce e-commerce, Internet

…take me to the 80’s

Windowsmarketplace.com, the promise of instant software downloads, archived programs and easy access to the world of software online.

In reality, I could have walked to the shop, bought the software and installed it in a quater of the time.

The great thing about shops on the high street is that what you see on the shelves you buy, there and then, no waiting, easy access.

The issue with Windows Market place is that some software is available for download (instantly) and some is only available for physical delivery.

However it’s not that simple.

The software I bought was a download, sadly it was from a 3rd party, who took 3 days to check my credit card, even though the transaction and subsequent account debit was instant.
They then took another 2 days to tell me I could not get the software, reason not disclosed, and refunded my card.

The result of all this is that my trust of Microsoft is no better, Windows Live should be Windows Mort and I am writing this email from my new Mac Air.

e-commerce