Paul Rouke - Usability Professional

Just a quick update from PRWD HQ.

After just completing work for the N Brown group, our very own Usability expert, Paul Rouke, was head-hunted not only once but twice in the same day! Don’t worry though he’s not going anywhere, but as an upshot PRWD might be working with a major player in the British food retail market. Not to mention currently strengthening a partnership with a Manchester based (2008 NMA award winning) digital agency, who work with some major sporting authorities. Things are moving very fast, my feet have barely touched the ground in my first two weeks here and it shows no signs of slowing down.

I am delighted to welcome Katie Brunt into the PRWD team, as our new marketing and brand development executive.

With my business PRWD having already worked for blue chip companies such The Co-op, Nationwide, N Brown Group and Shop Direct Group, it’s certainly long overdue that recognition of PRWD being a well respected usability consultancy and web application/software development team is made much more visible in the digital sector.

USP’s, Clients and Specialist Services and Solutions

On coming on-board and beginning to fully understand the USP’s of the business, our client base and our specialist services and solutions, including UCDcommerce (PRWD’s e-commerce platform), Katie says:

I’m so excited about working within such an exciting, young and daring company who are not afraid to produce something remarkable for their clients. However I have got my work cut-out as most of our existing clients have come about from word of mouth, with little previous marketing of the business been done, but with such a great platform and service PRWD are going to be making waves very soon, so watch this space!

All that remains for me to say is “lets get this marketing party on the road”!

Following hot on the heals of our e-commerce platform launch, I am delighted to welcome Rob Knight into my team as Lead Technical Architect for PRWD.

Remarkable Individuals

Cementing the businesses strategy of only employing remarkable individuals, as part of the initial discussions on the strategy of the business and what Rob would bring to the business, he took part in our Psychometric Testing process, with our recruitment partner Psycuity.

The testing process, handled fantastically by Ian Hudson, Director at Pyscuity, provided the kind of insight into Rob’s skills, expertise, aptitude and long term potential which we would never have been able to determine through a traditional recruitment process.

Fulfilling Long Term Ambitions

With developing innovative web applications, business systems and enterprise level e-commerce solutions an integral part of PRWD’s services, not only have we recruited someone who can lead the technical architecture and system development process, but for Rob I am fully confident he has found the type of company in which he can realise his full potential and fulfil one of his long term ambition’s of being recognised as being a remarkable individual.

On joining the business, Rob said:

Working for PRWD is a fantastic opportunity for me to work at the cutting edge of web application development. I’m looking forward to creating innovative solutions for our clients, building on the excellent platforms already established.

As a developer, it’s important to me that I work to the highest standards of technical excellence, stretching my personal capabilities and learning new and interesting skills along the way. I hope to enhance the reputation of PRWD for delivering high-quality web applications and I hope that my contribution will be to deliver good value for our clients. On a personal level, I think that this is a very interesting time to be working in this industry, with the constant change and innovation that it requires. PRWD is well-placed to make the most of these changes and I am happy to be in a position where I can be on the leading edge.

Hitting the Ground Running…!

All that remains for me to say is welcome to the team Rob, and we can’t wait to kick-off the analysis phase of your 1st business modernisation project, not to mention driving the evolvement of our e-commerce platform!

This article is Part 3 of 4 focussing on User Centered Navigation and Findability within PRWD’s E-commerce Platform.

Dynamic Categories and Shop by Situation

To reference the introductory article on user centered navigation and findability, “No two web users will exhibit exactly the same browsing behaviour when navigating an e-commerce site”.

Similarly, different visitors will have different reasons for visiting the site, and therefore their ’situations’ can be very different.

Dynamic categories centered around user driven situations and customer groups provide a unique way for our client to group products across their whole catalogue which suit the wants and needs of particular customers.

Using Persona’s to Target Groups of Customers

During the initial analysis phase of the User Centered Design process with Contact Packaging, it became clear that there were specific situations which their existing (and potential) customers are in. From here we were able to develop a series of persona’s to reflect the customers in these different groups, enhancing the effectiveness of the User Centered Design process that was underway.

With this customer analysis and persona’s we developed a method for Contact Packaging, using the PRWD tag engine, to create dynamic categories which specifically target groups of potential customers.

Objectives for Providing Dynamic Categories to Target Customer Groups

• There should be no limit to the number of customer groups that can be created
• Customer groups can be created and put live within 1 minute
• Customer groups should drive conversions from Search Engine Marketing campaigns
• Customer groups should be visible throughout the store, encouraging usage
• Customer groups should enhance the effectiveness of the tag engine, including the tag cloud available under the search facility
• Customers fitting any of the ’situations’ should be encouraged by how they are being recommended a range of products which may suit what they are looking for, which in turn provides a more personal and intelligent shopping experience

The key to the dynamic categories and shop by situation interactive tool is that it isn’t intend to suit all visitors, and even for visitors which fall into one of the situations, it isn’t expected that they will be interested in buying all of the product suggestions.

Instead, the shop by situation is intended to compliment the wide range of other navigation methods available, whilst providing a more intelligent and personalised way for visitors to browse products from a wide range of categories which may well match their buying wants and needs.

The 1st Step on the Ladder for Shop by Situation

The 1st iteration of our Shop by Situation functionality certainly meets all the objectives set out above, but from our business perspective this is simply the 1st step on the ladder for this type of functionality. As we strive to enhance user engagement and provide even more personalised product suggestions, the flexibility we intend providing our clients will provide even more intelligent ways to target customer groups and increase relevancy for these customers browsing the store.

Comments please…!

Have you seen this type of navigation method used? How effective do you feel this method of grouping products could be for different types of products? I’ll look forward to hearing any views and comments on this post!

This article is Part 2 of 4, focussing on User Centered Navigation and Findability within PRWD’s E-commerce Platform.

Online Search

Search is used by a large proportion of web surfers, whether its from the Google homepage, an integrated search toolbar at the top of their web browser, or within a particular site, to name just a few examples.

Best Practice Tips for Search Implementation

As a quick summary of best practice when implementing search within a site, here are my top 6 tips:

• the search facility should be consistently placed on each page within the site
• the search facility should be highly visible and not part of a cluttered user interface
• the search facility should be located as near to the top of the site as possible, close to the brand logo
• the search facility should look like a search facility, therefore its styling should be minimal at most
• the search facility should be an intelligent, accurate and integrated piece of functionality, part of a wide range of findability methods provided
• the search facility should provide intelligent content or product suggestions as a user is typing out their search term

PRWD Search Providing Intelligent Product Suggestions

For modern, standard compliant web browsers, the PRWD E-commerce platform features our dynamic HybridSearch feature which, based upon user input into the search box, delivers dynamic product selections based on an algorithm developed by the Sam Clark.

The product predictions this provides are based on both wildcard and fulltext searching, and in line with the previous article on the intelligent tagging engine, HybridSearch also looks at all the tags associated with each product.

Benefits of Suggestive, or Predictive, Search

• Suggestive search provides links in realtime to actual product or information pages which exist within your website, minimising the amount of ‘no results found’ search result pages
• Suggestive search provides suggestions for products and content that actually exist within your website which the user may not have realised existed, therefore expanding the appeal that your sites content has for that person
• Suggestive search provides customer engagement and intelligent feedback, increasing the perception of the visitor that your site is helping its visitors to find what they are looking for as quickly as possible, speeding up their shopping journey
• Suggestive search can not only provide basic information for each result, it can also be implemented to display user centered information such as % savings, date of content, relevancy to your search term and other valuable information, providing increased amounts of sub-conscious triggers in which certain types of visitor behaviour will respond to
• Suggestive search adds a valuable navigational method to a sites findability methods, increasing the chances of a visitor quickly locating the product or content that best suits their wants and needs

With all this intelligence you can almost guarantee that if Contact Packaging sell the types of products you are searching for, the predictive search results will provide you with all the suitable products in the store.

In addition to each product suggestion containing a small image, the product title and the price range, an additional piece of product information shown is any saving that is available on any SKU for each particular product. This was a key addition to the product suggestion display as this provides the price conscious/sale hungry visitor with essential information to encourage a positive buying decision, which in turns is one of the ways in which persuasion architecture is used.

Persuasion Architecture Explored

For more of my views on persuasion architecture my user experience of House of Fraser talks about this area of user experience in some detail.

Continually Evolving PRWD HybridSearch Feature

As with the bespoke tag engine, the search feature will be continually enhanced to add greater power, relevancy, speed and sorting of content/product suggestions, and the search feature is something which will be implemented on a wide range of sites, both content driven, transactional and other business systems, such as account management facilities.

Following this post going live I will shortly follow up by talking in depth about the Dynamic Categories and Shop by Situation available at Contact Packaging.

Your comments please…!

I’m very interested to hear about your thoughts on the effectiveness of predictive search features, especially when users quickly type in their search string and hit return, without their being sufficient split second pause for the dynamic suggestions to be delivered.

Apart from the Google search toolbar, which sites do you feel are executing intelligent suggestive search most appropriately?