Paul Rouke and PRWD on User Centered Design

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.

To all online marketing managers, project managers, site owners, designers and developers (of commercial websites) - if you haven’t yet experienced user testing of your (or your clients) site 1st hand, then (budget permitting) I would strongly recommend getting your feet wet.

Instant benefits user testing can provide you and your business (or your clients business)

1. Provides immediate quick wins - you can then action and subsequently enhance the user experience and user task completion rates, in turn increasing site conversions and ultimately your ROI
2. Establish why checkout conversion rates are low and drop-out (abandonment) rates for a particular stage in the checkour process are high - again for E-commerce sites, a serious issue effecting the majority of sites large and small is poor (or poorer than what can be achieved) conversion rates of customers who have begun a checkout process. User testing this key shopping journey can identify where users experience barriers to progression and any areas of frustration or security concerns.
3. The significant Search Engine Marketing company budget isn’t being wasted - rather than continuing to throw money on Google Adwords marketing and similar, driving more potential new customers to your (un-tested/poor conversions) website, budget is spent optimising the user experience of the site which will provide much greater increases in return on investment
4. Help identify key issues in information architecture - knowing that users struggle to find a key area/tool within the website can be invaluable, providing the necessary proof that key changes need to be made
5. Raises issues not even considered internally - perhaps an area that is considered optimal may in fact have room for improvement
6. Shopping behaviours can be identified and the website tailored to maximise conversion opportunities - for e-commerce sites, providing there are enough participants, user testing will provide insight into different shopping behaviours (hunters, followers, impulse buyers) which in turn can help a business identify how critical information and calls to actions should be positioned within a page hierarchy as users progress through a shopping journey
7. Quashes any in-house politics - real users provide the insights into what is and isn’t working on your site
8. Creative marketing messages and promotions ignored - the expensive, slick piece of on-site marketing is actually overlooked as users exhibit banner blindness, instead they go looking for actual site content and not forms of advertising or promotions

User testing, when conducted professionally, can provide an overwhelming insight into how real users actually interact (or attempt to interact) with your site.

As I have experienced on both transactional and non-transactional websites, from SME’s to blue chip companies such as Littlewoods Shop Direct, the return on investment by carrying out user testing can be outstanding to a businesses online operation

Understandably work is required on identifying your existing and potential target audiences, and ensuring the right users are recruited to carry out the user testing, but with the right user testing facilitator (a service I personally provide through my user experience agency) and the right structure of test scenarios, gaining the insight available through observing a user using your website can both shock and excite website owners, as they realise both the current failings of their site (whether in user experience, information architecture or technical errors) and begin to understand that by making sometimes subtle changes to their site will significantly increase user task completion rates.

What if you have no budget for user testing?

• For businesses and clients without sufficient budget - improvise! Use friends and family who use the internet to a level which fits with one of your customer segments
• Task these people with the same site objectives inline with your commercial objectives
• Observe them as they navigate the site, successfully or un-successfully, and you will begin to realise the potential of user testing

With reference to the title of this post, in addition to observing user testing, a second factor comes in to play - think out loud methodology.

What is think out loud methodology?

The user is encouraged to talk about their experiences when carrying out task and scenario based exercises, so when they may have paused their mouse movement whilst contemplating where to look/what to click on, the user testing facilitator encourages (but only subtly) the user to talk about what is going through their minds at this key stage - remember the more cognitive effort a user requires to complete their tasks can enhance their frustrations or limit their patience in carrying out the task

I have spoke to other usability professionals, some of who don’t like to rely on what the user says, and although this can be true dependant on a variety of factors such as a facilitator who wrongly provides prompts for the user, or when a users actual site interactions conflict significantly with what they are saying, for any user testing that I have facilitated or being involved in, the user is always encouraged to ‘think out loud’.

How to maximise the potential of think out loud user testing

I would like to point you to an excellent and comprehensive article over at UX Matters entitled When Observing Users Is Not Enough: 10 Guidelines for Getting More Out of Users’ Verbal Comments. A quick summary of the 10 points that Isabelle Peyrichoux talk about in depth are:

1. Be aware of your own judgments and projections
2. Be genuine and transparent
3. Adapt to each user. Do not ask users to adapt to you
4. Be conscious of the way users are interacting with you
5. Get users to speak about their own experiences
6. Notice when users are censoring their own comments
7. Get users to speak in terms of problems, not solutions
8. Ask “Why?” and dig deeper
9. Make objective and precise observations
10. Allow users to be spontaneous and follow their flow

Although this great article will be of more use to user experience professionals and people involved in user testing on any level, it should provide an incite as to how user testing and the think out load methodology can be combined using basic (but often un-used) human relationship qualities to provide optimum user testing data and results.

Eye tracking - another level of user testing and customer insight

Coupled with the user testing and think-out loud principles, taking the testing another step further by introducing eye tracking can provide an even greater insight into exactly how users are interpreting a website and trying to find their way around to achieve the tasks/goals they have been assigned.

It would be diluting my points on user testing with the ‘think out loud’ methodology to go more in depth with the benefits of eye-tracking on this post, although it is certainly an area I will talk about more on a later post, especially as my user experience agency has now introduced this service to our clients.

Using Web Analytics To Further Identify Site Conversion Improvements

Although I’m a big fan of using web analytic data to uncover a vast range of improvement possibilities with site content and conversions, for this post the most useful think I can do is direct you to the following pages on the excellent blog of Avinash Kaushik dealing with all things analytics:

• Experimentation and Testing: A Primer
• Excellent Analytics Tip#5: Conversion Rate Basics & Best Practices
• Excellent Analytics Tip #8: Measure the Real Conversion Rate & “Opportunity Pie”

I hope you’ve found this article useful, and any feedback (and diggs) are greatly appreciated!

So its been almost 3 months since I first started blogging and a lot has happened. In a way I feel it has provided a kind of butterfly effect for me personally and my digital agency, so much so that our new business cards and stationery promote this blog as a resource for best practice advice on usability, user experience and information architecture.

So below I have provided a personal summary of why the inception of this blog has being a real success on a number of levels…

1. I have really benefited from focusing some of my energy specifically on my core skills on user centred design and usability
2. I am really happy with the articles I’ve been writing, with a good mix of purely my own thoughts along with comments and links to other relevant and interesting articles
3. When I’m promoting my user centred design and usability services, in addition to promoting my digital agency website I pass on my blog details which gives a prospective client or associate a much clearer idea of my experiences and expertise which I can bring to a user experience project
4. I am now starting to develop an online identity (a quick search for myself on Google (I can’t be alone in doing this surely!) provides an indication of where I have been and what I have been commenting on recently) along with establishing strong networks of great people
5. I have stepped up my visibility at industry events such as Internet World, Business Startup Live and Open Coffee
6. I have started taking on some exciting projects with forward thinking and innovative clients through PRWD which will allow me personally to further focus on my core user experience and interaction design strengths rather than including actual web programming, as we are looking at taking on highly skilled developers using the likes of Ajax and Ruby on Rails
7. PRWD’S clients are really benefiting from services we have provided, such as significant increases in online enquiries and search engine rankings
8. And not to forget whilst still working very hard I am trying to find a better work/life balance, which is beneficial to my wife, myself and friends and family alike - view a comment I made on this subject recently

So to rewind back to my very 1st post, I certainly won’t be blogging back, instead I’m looking ahead to what should be a very productive and rewarding 2007 (for the 6 months or so that are left!). I certainly intend on posting many more articles on all areas of online user experience which I am passionate about in order to continually build this resource of best practice advice and personal commentary…

Finally, if you’ve got this far thanks for reading, and I’ll be very interested to find out how you have found my blog so far?!

During my time at Internet World 2007 I was delighted to take a call from Lawrence at Out There Events, confirming that my agency PRWD has been shortlisted in the Big Chip Awards for 2007 in the Best Use of Search category.

We entered a London based client Blue Rhapsody Swimming Pools into the category, and you may like to view the case study on SEO for Blue Rhapsody, along with other case studies for the likes of Virgin Wines on the PRWD site.

The Big Chip Awards

These are the biggest and best digital awards outside London. Now in their 9th successful year, the Big Chip awards are bigger and better than ever, with 17 categories and 26 awards covering everything digital in the North West: from on-line marketing to TV animation, from games to mobile applications. This year there are new awards for brand development, search targeting and the Big Chip Best New Media Agency.

Other shortlisted north west design agencies include:

• Stardotstar
• Code Computer Love
• Lightmater (the designers of the new Manchester United website)
• McCann-I

PRWD will certainly be in great company on the 24th May

Its a small world filled with irony…

The shortlist for the Best Use of Search category (see all the category shortlists) will be contested by PRWD and just one other Manchester city centre agency, Fast Web Media, who ironically PRWD have been providing user experience design work for recently for some of their worldwide clients.

During my visit at Internet World I actually bumped in to the Operation’s Director (and my main client contact) at Fast Web Media, and we both sat in on Nicola Young, the Head of Marketing Communications for Coors and Carling, keynote speech titled Engagement: Leveraging pull marketing for online brand advantage. I will be posting more information on this along with other highlights from the show soon, but to finish, a large part of her very interesting speech was on SEO for the Carling website. The site, a Revolution award winner in 2005 for SEO, was designed, developed and optimised for SEO by, yes you may have guessed it, Fast Web Media!

It sure it should be an interesting tussle between my agency and Fast Web Media to win this Big Chip Award…