we are: London

In January I made a few predictions about what the year had in store for the digital world. One that I did not put in but have talked about for ages is the end of free online services.

Basically as ad spend decreases and take up of online services increases, something has to give. A recent story on the BBC website shows BT’s new aggressive stance on asking iPlayer to pay for bandwidth.

More of the same will come as people watch more video, save more photos and re-post more content via social networks. Add to this the cut throat pricing of broadband, reduced advertising revenues and suddenly you are looking at an unsustainable business model.

So, a quick review of my predictions from January:

1. Video on Demand finally gets in to peoples homes for real (iPlayer) √
   
2. Video on Demand gets a new name (iPlayer) √
3. Interactive TV advertising (Sky green button) √
4. BT Vision moves from Microsoft to open platforms (Or Sky goes onto xbox 360) √
5. DRM free VOD (can’t win them all!) x
6. Mobile web (go go iPhone, Nokia and Andriod) √
7. Nokia Tube turns out not to be an iPhone beater (yep I own one, it’s pants) √
8. iPhone Nano (By Autumn, I promise) x
   
9. Mac tablet (See above) x
   
10. No one buys Twitter (still) √

So 7 out of ten is not bad considering we are only at the start of June. And whilst you may or may not agree with all of these it’s pretty interesting to see how fast things change.

Another foot note from January was my prediction that Apple would start to slip form wonder kid to main stream business and given the recent launch of new iPhone, this seems to be happening.

Although I would hate to see Apple done anything than succeed as I love how Steve has turned a business round by giving customers what they want! And that’s where we are, helping you give your customers what they want, although I am no Steve Jobs, I know we can help you make a big difference.

Let’s see where we are in another 6 months:

1. Windows 7 is just as rubbish as Vista?

customer insight Design, future, Interactive TV, Microsoft, Mobile, Predictive, 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

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

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

80% of your marketing budget is wasted as only about 20% of your site traffic finds their way through to their destination on their first visit.

That’s a staggering amount of wasted money when you think of it like that, which means either big problems or bigger opportunities.

Am I suffering mass revenue loss?

Here are a few, simple checks to find out if you need conversion management:

1. Do you spend money on marketing?
2. Do you convert over 50% of your visitors to customers?
3. Do you act on your website statistics?
4. Does testing new designs take more than 2 days?
5. Would you like to know how successful content, design and ad changes are?

If you answered yes to any or all of the above then you need a predictive, behavioral content optimisation engine on your site.

Find out how we can turn this figure around for you, visit www.cadinteractive.com/lost

Uncategorized Internet, Predictive, usability

Chris Averill, MD of CADinteractive explains why user-centric interface design should really be driven by compelling content, adaptive technology and direct customer insight.

In a recent pitch, I was lucky enough to put together all the learnings on usability that we have experienced over the past few years.

Central to the design strategy is that all those who visit a website homepage are, in principle, the same - they just want to get what they have come for, as quickly as possible.

As obvious as it sounds, and it is obvious, there are not that many people who really get it and, more importantly, are implementing it.

Here at CAD interactive, our team has been combining a little Myers Briggs personality-trait mapping with a dash of predictive web and basing it all on a framework built around the customer.

The end result is an experience that meets the needs of the customer, while ensuring increased conversion rates, up-sell and repeat visits.

The answer is out there, somewhere
As with all great ideas, none of the components we’ve based our design on are new, just the way they are being applied.

Why are so many potential customers finding it so hard to buy online and go for a call-centre route to complete their purchase? Most of us have done it, and it cuts right across e-customers, experienced or not.

There is an intrinsic fear of buying certain things online, but there does not seem to be any clear pattern as to which products, services, brands or experiences drive customers through offline channels.

But what is obvious is the companies that provide information to customers in a format that meets their needs, in a timely way, are much more likely to see successful online transactions.

Call centres work - sometimes
Proof of this approach can been seen or heard every day. The next time you want to buy something, go online, find it and try to buy it answering all the questions you have in mind; cost, availability, colour, weight, size, accessories, delivery, returns, upgrades, subscription, alteration, installation and so on.

Then phone the call centre and go through the process again. Very often the process will be quicker and easier, even if you have to wait to get through.

This is usually because you are speaking to a real person who understands you, is able to change their questions based on your knowledge and provide the sales information at a level of detail you can grasp.

So the more complex the proposition is, the harder it is to get it right online, or so it seems, and this dilemma covers everything from train tickets to satellite TV.

Seeing Everything Obviously (SEO 3.0)
Please excuse the pun, but it’s the reality of the way we all look at information and how we want it served up.

As with a call centre, having information put to you in a clear and obvious way works much better than many scatter-gun web-sites where you find yourself drowning in information.

Firstly, why segregate your customers at the start of their journey? When you search for a train ticket on National Express East Coast you are presented with the best value and most convenient ticket options on one screen, providing two very different customer groups, business and leisure travelers, with a single, shared experience.

Next, provide returning visitors with useful information, especially if you have a large or complex website. Amazon do this well, showing what I have looked at before and what others are looking at in relationship to my interests.

Testing times
At the beginning of this piece, I stated that, along with compelling content, one alsoneeds direct customer insight to make a website work.

To make the predictive web happen, you need to ensure that the site being improved already works well. You can then use this as a starting point for successful variant testing.

The key to testing this way is not to be afraid to try it, as one of my more forward-thinking clients puts it. “We should always be asking, ‘Why not?’, not ‘Why?’”
We will often use a combination of pre and post-launch testing tools, including:

• Rapid prototype, remote testing
• Functional lab testing
• A/B testing
• Multivariate testing

Once a site is live, there are loads of tools out there to run predictive content implementation, from Maxymiser to Vignette, that allow you to both change content displayed based on previous history and tune your site based on quantitative data.

Ultimately, successfully using predictive, dynamic content and personality-trait profiling is about knowing your customers needs before they do, through good insight and proven research.

Ensuring you partner with an agency that has a good track record in user centred design will guarantee you the best possible results and, as we have here at CADinteractive, demonstrate these through improved Key Performance Indicators, sales and happy customers.

interface design, internet research Internet, Predictive, usability