we are: London

Love him or hate him.

It all comes down to one single, tangible factor, which marks out the good from the bad; soul.

The reason for the Clarkson tribute on the left is this weeks Sunday Times Motoring article on an Aston Martin which sees Clarkson pitting it against design perfection in the shape of an Audi R8 V10.

And to save you the read, the Audi is just too perfect, where as the Aston has soul, something that can’t be created by following set rules, but comes from the heart of those involved and is a direct result of the creator’s passion.

All of which brings us nicely to the argument that has raged on since the start of website design; who is best placed to create the perfect site?

The Good, the bad and the ugly.

Let’s go back to basics and look at who the usual suspects are, in the red corner we have “visual designers” (brand and marketing) and in the blue corner we have “interaction designers” (user centred).

Whilst visual designers have a wealth of ability and passion, it is often focused to heavily on making something look good and the risk of making the same, beautiful creation completely unusable.

Now wheel in the interaction designers, who’s passions lie in the creation of the perfect experience, through usability testing, prototyping and more testing. However, there is a strong argument against all of this testing and refining as it can just blunt a sharp, creative idea, making the end result more function than form.

Experience is all, or read Experiential

For years I thought experiential was about experiencing a design, but it’s not it’s about experience, and this where soul comes from.

An experienced designer is passionate about the look and the effectiveness of a design and ensures their soul is applied to everything they do.

An excellent example of what not to do is a site we reviewed a while back that seemingly missed both design and ease of use steps during it’s development and almost certainly skipped public testing.

Help me help you

If you want to avoid the common pitfalls of digital procurement, ensuring your acgency has suol, then follow these easy steps:

• Check potential agencies have a proven user centred design methodology as well as a creative portfolio
• Ask for CVs of key staff and make sure they are guaranteed to be on the project
• Meet the team and chat to them about what they think is good and bad
• Don’t ever feel that it’s not your right to ask questions
• Ask for clarification on every point until it’s clear
• Remember you’re the client and paying the bills

If you would like to know more then give me a call or drop me a note and we’ll take you through our experiences and see how we can help.

global usability testing, information architecture, interface design, internet research, market research, usability design, user centred design, user interface Design, e-commerce, Internet, Mobile, research, usability

Raising the bar?

When first opened the new Greyhound UK site speaks of a slick simplicity. The clean, cool visual design of the site gives a classy feel not normally associated with budget travel. This good first impression also extends into the usability of the site. The booking process is quick and easy and within a few clicks I have chosen my desired journey. With the release of such a seemingly slick site is Greyhound UK raising the bar for competitors such as National Express and Megabus?

Greyhound UK homepage

Visual design

While the visual design of Greyhound’s site seems far more carefully planned and thought out than the design of the Megabus site, there is far more to consider about the situation. Megabus has a developed brand and targets a specific audience. The garish blue and yellow may not be for everyone but it is instantly recognisable as Megabus, a pleasure Greyhound does not yet have in the UK. The audience Megabus targets want the cheap no frills travel that they provide. Their aim is to get from A to B for the lowest possible price, a slick website is not top priority.

Usability

The Greyhound booking process appears quick and easy but when you consider that they only busses from London to Southampton or Portsmouth and back you would expect this to be the case. A company such as National Express who cover almost all of the UK and parts of Europe has a far more complex booking system to create.

Back to the bar

The Greyhound UK site definitely brings a bit of cool competition to the budget travel site market. Users will remember the slick visual design and the ease of use and this may well drive visitors to the site. The questions is will the online experience of Greyhound UK be enough to users to switch from their well established rivals who are by no means performing poorly.

information architecture, interface design, user interface Design, e-commerce, Internet, Travel, usability

Woolworths is back and it’s gone all modern: it’s an online only experience.

First impressions are very American. The homepage has three choices: ‘Main shop’, ‘Entertainment’ and ‘Pic n’ Mix’. The main shop has a distracting carousel and would benefit from some targeted products based on season, popularity or promotion line, as their main competitor Argos does. The overall look and feel is rather cheap, which does not match up with Shop Direct boss Mark Newton-Jones’ statement that, “The site is about quality, value for money and great service”.

A bit of a pic n' mix

Navigation

The navigation and search are generally pretty good especially the mega drop-down menus on the top, but the left navigation is a bit too much. Moving between shops is easy, unless you have something in a basket and you move to a new store, as they don’t share a common e-commerce platform so you get an annoying message and have to buy before moving on. Not having a combined basket cuts down on impulse buying.

Buying

Shopping and buying are pretty easy, with a nice, simple to follow registration process for first time users. Choosing colours and sizes gets a bit more complicated as the flow of interaction is fairly unintuitive so you generally see lots of pop-up errors. Delivery options could be better displayed such as, leave behind shed, etc and from this point on the e-commerce platform, shared with Littlewoods, feels very cheap and off the shelf, ironic really given Mark’s statement about quality.

Lowdown

This is a brave and bold effort to bring back to life a much loved, chaotic brand and in many ways it is not dissimilar from the past high street experience. You’ll have to judge for yourself if that is a good or a bad thing. It’s meant to be kid friendly, but most kids know more about online than most adults and they are far more scathing in their views, so a site aimed at kids could fall flat on it’s face when it is judged by the hardest audience of all.

Check out the blog site, woolieshq.co.uk, this looks great and from a brand view seems to be much more interesting, engaging and polished. In the end this site has been designed and launched in super quick time, which seems to be the norm these days, and having worked on similarly tight deadlines I am very impressed.

(Written by Chris Averill for Revolution.co.uk)

user interface Design, e-commerce

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

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

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

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