Paul Rouke and PRWD on User Centered Design

After our branding and marketing strategy work we are delighted to officially launch UCDcommerce, our best practice driven e-commerce platform.

This follows our recent posts on what symbolises customer conversion, an inside look at brand concepting, and strapline brainstorming for UCDcommerce.

UCDcommerce Website Features

If you’ve not already taken a look at the UCDcommerce site, below is a summary of what we have decided to launch with:

An introduction to the platform, explaining how UCDcommerce allows us to deliver User Centered Designed e-commerce solutions

A page dedicated to why your business will benefit from using UCDcommerce, including the statement that “your business recognise the importance of user experience for increasing brand credibility, conversion and retention”

A page showing prospective e-commerce customers exactly who is behind the platform, the amount of credibility and blue chip experience we have, and our expert usability services

Additional areas we have included are:

• A definition of User Centered Design (UCD) for people who aren’t familiar with this method of designing user experiences
• Dynamic links into our most recent articles, on the subjects of UCDcommerce, retailing and best practice

Onwards and upwards

Alongside the development of our Content Management System and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system, the continual evolvement of UCDcommerce will now begin in earnest, as we attract the right type of serious online retailers to our business.

LinkedIn, the highly popular network for business professionals around the world, has recently relaunched their new user interface.

Brimming with good examples of personalisation, rich user interactions and intuitive navigation touches, I was just about to connect with Anish Kapoor, co-founder of Yuuguu, when I was presented with this jolly old chubby wizard informing me that the site is currently under-going system upgrades…

Picture taken from LinkedIn website.
Hopefully it won’t be offline for too long as there’ll be a fair few million people around the globe anxious to continue using this fantastic web application!

If you haven’t yet registered on LinkedIn then I would strongly suggest giving it a try. You can view

As a business and personal user of Google Analytics, along with being a user interface designer, it is great to now be using the new Google Analytics interface, which has been given a significant user interface redesign.

The amount of data that is recorded by Google Analytics and is therefore made available through the interface is vast, which makes both the information architecture and user experience of this interface critical to the software’s success.

For SME businesses I would thoroughly recommend considering implementing Google Analytics into your site, especially if you currently have no user friendly and multi-leveled way of accessing statistics to your site visitor behaviour.

There is already significant articles on the subject of the new Google Analytics interface, so rather than re-inventing the wheel below are links to my most relevant and useful articles reviewing the new interface:

• Avinash Kaushik, an independent consultant and now working for Google as an Analytics Evangelist, provides his view on the 1st 5 things you should do when using v2
• 27 Features That Make Google Analytics Best of Breed on Mashable
• The Google Analytics official blog

Hats off to the user interface designers and information architects responsible for the new interface!

Updated - I understand that there is actually a UK ‘£’ version (thanks Ian!), so I’ll be looking forward to using it soon.

Ian Jindal, the ex Group eCommerce Director for Littlewoods Shop Direct and a business associate, has just posted an interesting article on PlanHQ, some new online business plan software.

Its seems pretty feature rich and has a great user interface providing a slick and intuitive user experience - just a shame its US based with no current UK version, as it would be ideal for using for my agency business. Take a look at PlanHQ and let me know what other business people think..