Paul Rouke - Usability Professional

The business website for PRWD, our user experience consultancy and web application development agency, has recently been updated to provide potential and existing clients with detailed information on PRWD’s key services and facilities.

Key services PRWD provide are:

Improving User Experience

From expert usability critiques, eye-tracking and usability testing, through to wireframing and delivering full user centred design processes

Building Innovative Web Applications

Harnessing expertise in user interface design and leading edge web development, PRWD deliver innovative online applications and develop partnerships with businesses looking to engage their visitors and increase their market share.

Providing Online Marketing Strategy Consultancy

Using their extensive commercial experience PRWD work with businesses looking to innovate in their industry, providing expert consultancy services to deliver engaging, long term online marketing strategies.

Further key pages from PRWD include:

• How PRWD deliver Return-on-Investment
• User Experience and Customer Engagement Training Courses
• User Testing and Research Facilities
• User Experience Resources, including white papers, case studies and links

If your business is looking to improve its online user experience and subsequently the effectiveness of converting traffic into customers, feel free to give me a call at our Manchester office on 0161 918 6729.

Its been a while since my last post, due mainly to the intensive project work currently underway with my user experience agency PRWD, as well as an excellent holiday in New York (check out the new header image which captures 1 aspect of the unique Big Apple) for my 30th birthday.

Best Practice Driven E-commerce Platform

At PRWD we are really excited about the e-commerce platform we are currently developing for a client from the ground up, which is based very much on e-commerce best practice and is using considerable amounts of my past experience from Littlewoods Shop Direct.
Some of the key features which are being incorporated into the scalable platform for phase 1 are as follows:

• an information architecture which was derived from user input and card sorting exercises
• a dedicated tag engine which will allow visitors to navigate through the products in a fluid and dynamic way
• a user interface which started from paper prototyping, all the way through to final interaction and visual designs
• a personalisation engine which will provide returning customers with personalised products and offers
• a layer of richer user interactions to enhance the user experience, whilst remaining cross-browser compatible and fully accessible
• a checkout process derived very much from research, awareness and understanding of best practices in ensuring checkout abandonment rates are reduced where possible, and therefore providing the client with greater conversion rates
• intelligent methods of targeting product promotions to specific target customers, which we have established by working very closely with our client in fully understanding their existing and potential client needs

Along with this platform development we are working for one of the largest direct marketing agencies in the UK to deliver their new online marketing platform, which is generating huge enthusiasm between the clients project team and PRWD’s team, which I am heading up along with providing the user experience and managing the user centred design process.

These current projects follow some high-end user experience consultancy based work which I personally have been providing some large design agencies in Manchester, which I intend to provide some relevant posts on in due course.

So coming back to my blog, unfortunately content has been very sparse over the last few months, apart from the well received user experience review of the new House of Fraser e-commerce site, but at least the lack of posts aren’t due to the lack of work being put in on the key areas of usability and information architecture recently!

User Experience Training and Knowledge Sharing for 2008

Looking ahead to 2008, at PRWD we will be starting to provide User Experience and Online Marketing Training, at both our modern Manchester offices and in-house working directly with clients and their employees. We have seen a considerable demand from our clients, in particular blue chip retailers and established design agencies, to up-skill their in-house staff and therefore ensure user centred design processes are adopted on large projects, whether transactional or informational.

This blog will certainly be apart of the marketing strategy for promoting these new services during 2008 and in addition I’ll look forward to continuing with posting articles on all aspects of online user experience.

I have recently been asked if I would take part in another Q and A session on a wide variety of User Experience topics, such as conversion rates, best practice sites, UX methodologies, UX development processes and ROI. A previous Q&A session on Findability for e-commerce websites provides more specific business advice which you may also like to take a look at.

Questions were asked by Kevin Wei, from China, who is studying on a postgraduate course in Design and Branding Strategy at Brunel University. In his own words – “It’s a great course for students to develop design thinking and creative disciplines in branding or related industries. During this course study, most of my research projects related to the internet, like search engine branding strategy, e-advertising design and current dissertation research titled “user experience design strategies for e-retail brands”.

Below is the full session which on reflection should provide a variety of business benefits and industry insights which I hope you will find useful.

1. Could you tell me a little bit about your current work that relate to user experience or usability?

Through my specialist user experience agency PRWD I am working on a variety of projects at the moment which have user experience as the central driver to the client solution. To name a few examples I have been working with Fast Web Media, a digital agency in Manchester, providing them with both information architecture services and the complete user experience and visual design solution for their client Nationwide. In addition to this project I have also provided the new user centred design for another one of their clients, the England Rugby Football Union (RFU), in particular for their new corporate website focussing on the up-coming Rugby World Cup.
I have also been working with CDMS, part of Littlewoods Shop Direct Group, providing an interactive online press gallery for one of the multi-million pound brands at Littlewoods Shop Direct, along with the user centred design and development of new fully personalised customer experiences which are expected to significantly increase online conversion rates, due to both the user centred design and the levels of personalised that they are introducing.

2. The term of user experience seems to be popular in the internet industry, do you think it is just new jargon to repackage usability, or beyond it?

The terminology used in our industry has changed over the last 10 years, starting with the likes of HCI (Human Computer Interaction) through to usability, user experience and customer experience. I wouldn’t class user experience as jargon, its just our industry is looking for the terminology which will resonate best throughout the online world. With an increased use of the term customer experience I feel this has evolved due to the importance finalised being realised as to how good (or bad) a sites experience is for the paying customer (more directly related to transactional websites of course) although I prefer to use the term user experience, as this discipline isn’t just focused towards e-commerce websites but any site where users have goals and businesses have conversion metrics (sign-ups, enquiries, applications, account management)

3. What do you think the current problems of online user experience on e-retail site?

This is a huge topic in its own right! For instance I I have recently answered questions posed by Dave Chaffey from Marketing Insights on the 1 single subject of findability in online marketing and e-commerce. My responses specifically related to e-retail sites, as its from my experiences as lead user experience at Littlewoods Shop Direct, a multi-million pound online UK retailer with brands across all target audiences, that I have encountered and solved a wide variety of user experience problems (or barriers as I like to refer to it, as users face barriers to achieving their objectives). Along with findability, another even more serious issue for e-retail sites are checkout conversion rates. Losing potential or even repeat customers during this critical stage of the shopping journey accounts for on average of 65% of sales loses on UK e-commerce sites – when you consider the UK e-retail market was worth £30.2bn last year, while worldwide online sales will hit £250bn during 2007 (Source IMRG), that is a huge amounts of lost sales revenue for e-retailers!

Another problem for e-retail sites is the lack of attention dedicated to improving the user experience of visitors arriving from search engine marketing campaigns on the likes of Google Adwords. Businesses are continuing to invest growing amounts of money in the acquisition and recruitment of new customers, yet due to no focus on where within an e-commerce site to send visitors from these sources and with a cumbersome and barrier littered user experience, the money it costs to get the visitor to the site is wasted.

4. Could you recommend any of e-retail brands that you think it tackling user experience design most effectively?

One recommendation would be looking at Comet who have invested significantly over the past couple of years on improving their user experience, with a particular attention paid to the checkout process, trying to make it as comprehensive yet user friendly as possible. An additional note on Comet is how organic search has been integral into the development of their site, but this is another topic altogether!

Overstock are another online retailer who put user experience at the centre of their strategic plans a few years ago, ultimately providing customers with an information and feature rich experience which tackles all the key issues of findability and checkout conversions that I have mentioned earlier.

Although not a perfect user experience, the Ajax driven diamond search facility on Amazon is a good introduction as to how technologies such as Ajax can be implemented with careful consideration to allow a customer to interact with your product range more intuitively and more customer focused. This is especially true for very large sets of products where the more intuitive and personalised a user can filter the products, the quicker and more likely they are of converting into actual sales.

5. What are the main elements of successful user experience design on e-retail site?

• Visitors should be able to find what products they want how they want to, whether that be through category browsing, filtering and sorting products to match their criteria, through the search facility and through promotional elements which specifically target different customer types.
• A visitor should always feel comfortable with what they have added to their basket, where they are within the site and where are the key shopping tools such as the search facility, help information and checkout options.
• Providing user reviews, comprehensive product information (if the user requires this), wish lists and detailed and clear delivery costs and options available
• Relevant and targeted cross selling of products which benefit the visitor
• Personalisation of site content where information is known about the user
• Checkout processes which are totally clear as to how long the process is, what fields are mandatory, summary of order and delivery costs, useful support information ie. why we need this information, this field should contain xyz, user friendly messages if a user has missed completing a field (perhaps using context sensitive messages as a user is competing a form) and not forgetting providing complete piece of mind on security measures in place

This list could go on for a while but there should be lots to think about here…

6. Could you briefly describe your ideal online user experience development process to e-retail, and what roles would you consider important?

1. Identify key strategic goals for the business
2. Involve all affected areas of the business which will be impacted with the e-commerce operation
3. Develop personas of the intended target audiences
4. Carry our user groups and other information gathering exercises to understand your target consumers
5. Based on all of the above, develop initial drafts of information architecture
6. Carry out card sorting with a sample of your intended target audiences to compare the in-house information architecture with how real users would expect to navigate and find your products
7. With an information architecture in place, specialist user experience designers to develop paper prototypes of key pages within a site, covering shopping journeys, checkout processes and account management facilities
8. During this process feedback requested and used where applicable to continually optimise the pages
   Produce the paper prototypes using the likes of Axure RP Pro to allow for engaging testing
9. Test the prototypes with real users and in-house team members, gaining feedback on the experience people have
   Enhance the prototype using an experienced visual designer to correctly visualise the importance of various elements within the site, and to develop the brand synergy which in turn will provide an exceptional brand experience for consumers
10. Design and develop the site based on all the above
11. Carry out user testing at key stages of the development to ensure the site continues to provide an exceptional user experience
12. Ensure feature rich web analytics in incorporated into the site so even the smallest detail can be seen which can be used for continually optimise the user experience of the site as usage increases
13. Once live, monitoring of site usage, conversions, drop-outs and other customer interactions
14. Periodically user test to continually optimise the user experience, especially on areas such as checkout
15. Constantly consider more ways to enhance the user experience by introducing more customer friendly tools and interactions

In terms of important roles to consider, as you will see from the above a large e-commerce development would involve a wide variety of roles, from marketing and operations to user experience designers and technical developers.
The 1 most essential role within the project is for the information architecture and user experience design – without the highest attention paid to developing the right user experience, ultimately the site will suffer in areas of user task completion and more importantly conversion rates.

7. Do you think user experience design alone enough to make a positive relationship between e-retail brand and customer? What else do you think can enhance it?

Definitely not. Brand proposition, niche or wide product ranges and customer service are 3 areas which all impact on a customers perception of a brand. Brands that are using business blogs to talk to their customers can also enhance the relationship between them.
On the flip side businesses need to be extremely careful who they partner with in terms of advertising, as this can have a serious negative effect on a brand perception. A recent example of this is the likes of First Direct, Vodafone, Virgin Media, the AA, Halifax and the Prudential removing their adverts from Facebook as there were appearing on the British National Party page.

8. What do you think ROI (return on investment) from user experience, especially like a totally personalization system is quite costly?

This is true, and its why its mainly the larger and blue chip e-commerce sites such as Amazon are truly embracing the possibilities of personalisation. ROI can be significant when businesses provide personalised shopping experiences, but for businesses without the necessary budgets for complete personalised experiences, there are lots of small user experience improvements which can be carried out to provide a ROI which far exceeds simply driving more traffic to your site via Google Adwords or similar.
I have recently posted an article on the business benefits of user testing, which again can be carried out with large or small budgets. This can provide conversion improvements from 2% all the way to 100% and above with the correct planning, testing and implementation.

9. How would you explain the benefits of an online user experience design approach to a project manager who is unfamiliar with it?

The simple (but highly powerful) benefit is that you are committing to ensuring your online user experience allows your customers to interact with your brand without un-necessary barriers, in turn optimising their chances of task completions and conversions.
A site with a strong user experience will be visited more often, receive much more referrals and convert more visitors compared to one where the user experience hasn’t been considered.

10. What positive future implications of online user experience to change e-retail industry?

• Single page checkouts will begin to be introduced into more into e-commerce sites, and when implemented correctly will help to streamline this part of the process and improve conversions.
• Richer and more engaging ways to shop will provide users with a more enjoyable and memorable shopping experience
• Sites will become more personalised and flexible so consumers feel much more apart of the brand, and that the site is working with them to provide a more intuitive and involving user experience.

Another day, another highly rewarding and insightful conference!

1st off I must list the exceptional speaker lineup for Media Forum 2020, both from their status and levels of responsibilities within the media industry and also with the panache and comfort at which they delivered their talks:

• Jim Chisholm – joint principal of iMedia, the world’s leading newspaper consulting practice
• Alex Marks – head of marketing at Microsoft
• Jeremy Tester – Director of Insight at Sky Media, giving him responsibility for the development and execution of the marketing strategy in the division of Sky responsible for generating advertising revenue
• Simon Daglish – national sales and trade marketing director at GCap, with key objectives to drive revenue growth through innovation and collaboration with media and creative agencies
• Nigel Dean – senior manager with responsibilities for the development and sales of O2‘s interactive portfolio (based mainly around sms, mms and lbs)
• Robert Steven – director and co-founder of Bunnyfoot, a company (and with my ambitions of my own user experience agency being a competitor in the future) focussed on user experience
• Mathew Watkins – group sales director for The Telegraph, responsible for all advertising revenue

So on to the various talks…

Jim Chrisholm talked about how he expects the number of free daily papers to increase, along with a continued influence of user generated news portals, one example being an pan-asian individual whose personal news site expanded to such a degree that it actually influenced the countries political election.

Alex Marks posed a question with regards how, if a media firm today was trying to sell tv advertising as a new marketing channels, would it actually seem like worthwhile investment.

Imagine the conversation:

Media seller (M) – I have a fantastic new channel to market your product. In between tv programmes every break
Client (C) – How do you know whether the consumer watches our advert?
M – er, we won’t know
C – How will we know if our advert has led to a new sale?
M – mm, we won’t be able to tell you this
C – What kind of cost is this form of advertising?
M – It’s very expensive especially compared to your other forms of marketing.

– you get the point! Not very much accountability!

With regards media consumption in the future, Alex fully expects the mobile phone device to become intergral to how individuals digest content. For instance in a morning going on the tube, rather than picking up a daily metro on your way into the station, you ca choose what news tyes you want bluetoothing to your mobile device.

Ultimately Alex doesn’t see much future for the printed newspaper, a view which Mathew Watkins from The Telegraph later disagreed with strongly (as you would expect of course!).

Jeremy from Sky Media provided a great insight into the areas which Sky are looking at from both advertising opportunities for businesses on sky’s anytime tv channel (a medium which he fully expects to replace traditional standard scheduled channels by 2020) but also looking at a totally unique tv channel named Current TV (sky channel 193) from the US which uses its users to not only create the content but also the advertising! In case you think this can surely only apply to small brands Jeremy showed 3 user created ads for Honda, Yamaha and 1 other household brand which I can’t just remember.

Current TV has just arrived in the uk on sky channel 193, so I’ll be taking a look for sure. In the US they receive over 30,000 submissions for user generated ads and content per day for consideration in airing.

With regards the tv advertising opportunities for the anytime TV channel, Jeremey explained how they offer advertisers the chance to feature a small ad prior to the start of a show/programme, which would promote to viewers that they can see the full advertisement or perhaps an extended version after the programme has finished. He showed examples of when brand haven’t been too sensitive about having a strong message featured throughout their initial advert has much more positive results in viewers watching the extended version at the end of the show. This is in comparison to brands which don’t want to effect their advert visually so simply feature this message in the final frame of their initial advert.

Simon Daglish took us through how one of his radio stations Xfm is harnessing the possibilities of both cross platform personalisation and brand experience with user generated content and community creation. I addition Xu is also providing users the ability to control what music gets played during the day. All interesting stuff, which brought a few parallels to Last FM, the “social music revolution” which I use personally.

Robert Steven took us back over 35 years to help explain in his eyes how over this period we have passed between periods of individualism and collectivism, with collectivismnow becoming (once again) an intergral part of society (read Facebook, MySpace and Bebo to name just 3).

Rob’s talk used images such as 400,000 people gathering at Woodstock in 69 through to the Time’s Person of the Year 2006 front cover.

I understand all the presenters slides will be made available in the next week or so, which means I won’t provide more references from this presentation at this stage.

Finally on to Mathew Watkins views on The Newspaper in the Digital Age. Again providing another stimulating talk, one of the key points Mathew made on this was that in the future there will be a clear distinction between basic, free news resources and premium news resources which will be paid. Naturally he expects The Telegraph to operate in the latter space.

Mathew touched on the ways in which The Telegraph have made the digital channel an integral part of the strategy, which included completely redesigning what was a business operating on 5 levels with disparation between the different marketing channels, to a new open plan office space which encourages collaboration on all levels. He actively encouraged us attendees to contact him to make arrangements to be shown round these offices, an offer which I intend to take up for sure the next time I am visiting clients in London.

In addition Mathew explained how a long time ago The Telegraph began promoting readers of their broadsheet to go online for further information on a particular story, or for other relevant stories etc. This has ultimately led to more and more of their readers going online, and the business aims to encourage readers to use both the offline and online channels to read their news, rather than looking to channels the readers down a particular channel.

There are other areas to discuss but on reflection this is already a very extensive post so I will wrap it up here…

As a final comment, across all speakers the main focus for media in the future is the importance of the online channel, both at home and when out using more and more advanced mobile devices. Personalisation and user generated content will also play a key role within the media industry and the advertising world.

Whilst on my train back from this future of usability event tonight, hosted by Bunnyfoot and E-consultancy, I wanted to share some of the key messages and findings that came out of both the questionnaire and from the speakers.

Ashley Friedlein, CEO of E-consultancy, opened the event – he started by talking about the change in terminology over his 10 years within the online user experience and usability field…

…going something along the lines of HCI – usability – user experience – customer experience – UCD (User centred design)

Ultimately its about putting users at the heart of your online marketing decisions, a statement which can’t be emphasised enough.

Another of Ashley’s industry comments was on the continued trend of emphasis placed on the acquisition of potential customers.

To brake this post up I thought now is a good time for a 1 liner from Ashley -

“Driving traffic to your website isn’t hard – you can simply pay for it.”

This is certainly true for businesses spending significant marketing budgets using the like of Google Adwords.

But as Ashley pointed out, the continuing rise of cost in ppc and with affiliates looking to change their charging models, this will only increase the chunk of marketing spend that the acquisition area will take.

In contrast, what smarter businesses (who are looking to better increase ROI and conversions) are realising more and more is that improving the user experience and usability of their websites can provide much greater increases in conversion and retention rates.

People will spend longer on, convert more often and refer on a site with a good user experience which is intuitive and enjoyable to interact with.

Ashley feels that whilst usability is now being considered much more, looking further ahead he is also interested in the next level of user experience studies and online marketing.

This assumes that any usability flaws have been fixed, and now it is time to look at areas such as persuasion architecture and behavioural analysis. Ultimately a better understanding of what triggers online users to interact with an interface and pursue certain journeys, which can therefore allow the website owners to adapt the messaging/tone of voice/allocation of real estate to target different users.

All excellent snippets of views from a businessman whom I have much admiration for, not only for the business he has built in e-consultancy but also for his willingness to assist me in various aspects of establishing both my user experience agency but also me personally in the online arena (part of which is this blog that you are reading).

Next up was Linus Gregoriadis (Head of Research – E-consultancy) who provided a walkthrough of the questionnaire findings and what this means for the Internet now and in the future

Key highlights of the report were as follows:

• Over 700 respondants
• From what I recall this was made up of around 350 client side, 200 agencies/specialist usability consultants and the remaining as other individuals working within the online arena
• Usability is beginning to make a dent in the overall budgets of redesign projects
• Over the next 12 months across all areas of marketing investment, such as seo, ppc, affiliate marketing, mobile and usability, usability was considered the area whuch will see the biggest % increase in marketing spend, followed closely by seo and ppc – (to refer back to Ashley’s views which I share completely, until businesses place more strategy (And budget!) on the actual user experience they are effectively hemoragging money sending vasts numbers of visitors to a site which isn’t founded on UCD (user centred design).
• When asked where the responsibility lies when it comes to the usability and user experience of a project, over 70% confirmed that in-house teams and or/individuals held this responsibility. This left around 15% who use external expert ux agencies and consultants, along with another 10% who work alongside specialist agencies

Finally for this brief overview, the top 3 results for a business embracing the possibilities of having usability and user experience at the core of a project were as follows:

1. Increased brand perception
2. Increased brand loyalty
3. Increased conversion rates

The full report is due to be made available shortly at which stage I will provide a link.

In closing I haven’t touched on the redesigned Visit London website which is due live on the 5th July – this project featured UCD at its core and through the course of the project, using user testing and eye tracking to name but a few methods, the head of user experience at Visit London Jeremy Wilmott and his team have been able to ensure that the relaunched site is well positioned to provide visitors with an exceptional user experience. As with any such large scale redesign project on-going usability evaluations will ensure the website continues to meet its wide variety of visitor needs.

As I make my way back north this evening following this event, taking stock of both this assessment of the future of usability as well as my own knowledge and experiences in this arena, I am relishing the opportunities across all industry sectors which my specialist online user experience agency PRWD will continue to become a key player, both in forward thinking, intuitive web development projects but also in providing businesses with services such as user testing, information architecture analysis and solutions, eye tracking, behavioural pattern defining and persuasion architecture.

All in all an excellent evenings discussion and industry analysis, I hope you’ve enjoyed my summary!