Catriona Campbell

Catriona's bio

Catriona Campbell is a leading web usability consultant; Director and Founder of Foviance.

“I believe in working hard and playing hard. I play golf, and use Edinburgh’s Hallion Club and a range of London clubs, including the Groucho Club and Soho House, for networking. My interests also embrace work as a mentor with the Prince’s Trust, and taking disabled children on holiday through Round Table. Passionate about living life to the full, I have always been successful at managing a large and varied portfolio of activities – long may it continue!”

In a recent article in Business Week’s Innovation section, Bruce Nussbaum investigated the impact that poorly executed, inadequately modelled and negligibly stress-tested financial instruments may have had on the ongoing global financial crash and pervading economic climate.Nussbaum captured the concept in a nutshell when he wrote: “Hundreds of hugely complex products based on hugely complex mathematic financial models were created and sold around the world-without first being tested out. There was little or no real-world iterative process… …In short, the innovation process was flawed. New inventions were not stress-tested in a real environment.”

It is obvious to draw parallels between this theory and how much effort our own industry puts into soft-launching and stress-testing online systems before unleashing them live on the wider community. Is it possible that similar attention to modelling by our investment banks and a reduced emphasis on getting to market as quickly as possible to reap the highest theoretical returns, might have avoided much of the mess we are now in?

In our experience, there are no shortcuts that can replace the benefits of thorough modelling and testing. We are experienced, working with financial service organizations and employ a range of financial modelling systems when creating products for that sector, regardless of the type and scale of banking application. We test, and retest with customers, conduct user surveys, and run real-world modelling. We listened to the top decision-makers from all sectors of global society at the annual Economic Forum in Davos back in January when they warned of just such an oversight, and we learned. Why didn’t the finance institutions and regulators do the same? Is it possible that they got ahead of themselves, bending over to product guys in order to reach a perceived sweet market as rapidly as possible, rather than following a risk-averse approach?

We work with high-profile financial clients like Barclays to ensure their online customers are provided with easy-to-use, highly secure, no risk products. Of course we are somewhat fortunate in that internet service modelling is logical and predictive – thanks to artificial server loading techniques we can run scenarios that see services oversubscribed by 100 percent and so on. But we also run pilot schemes, test groups, live tests, plus continuous testing and modelling post launch. We find real users to test products, and we ensure they are able to deposit and withdraw real funds long before products reach a wider market.

It appears that the investment banks we all rely upon simply skipped all these logical steps, going straight to market with poorly thought through products. Take the US public credit situation – if loans to citizens had been thoroughly modelled, it is probable that the disastrous toxic loan situation could have been avoided altogether. It’s important to ask the difficult questions – what if 20 percent of citizens can’t pay their loans back? What happens then?

Perhaps it is true that if organisations take the time to research, and model critical products and services carefully and thoroughly, they might miss out on early financial opportunities from time to time. But surely these steps should be considered vital, if not mandatory, to ensuring a solid, risk adverse financial landscape?

Social networking sites have been banned by a great number of businesses in the UK, and mostly because IT departments fail to understand ‘bottom up technology’; that is, adoption before the IT department has had a chance to fully understand it.

Earlier this year, researcher firm Cutter Consortium narrowed down the motives of businesses choosing to block social media to three key reasons: security concerns, productivity loss and bandwidth ‘hog’. Senior consultant San Murugesan claimed that “to ban or not to ban social networks at workplaces is an ongoing dilemma” but also highlighted the fact that social networking simply reflects modern communications trends, and by failing to embrace it, businesses could well be making costly mistakes.

In business, we cannot fail to realise the benefits of mass communications of any medium, US President Rutherford B Haynes said of the telephone in the early days: “An amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one?” Just like social media the telephone was soon usurping face-to-face communication, just as social media is doing the same to the voice-to-voice communication of the telephone.

It is essential we embrace new technology if it is user-led, working out how best to exploit it safely for our own brand means.

Analyst organisation Beyond Analysis believes 2008 will continue to witness a great deal of evolution in the way in which social media is used, particularly regarding its impact on business. Strategy director Will Beresford has said that the customer experience in particular will only be enriched by data found on the social web, often superseding traditional sources and research tools, such as questionnaires and focus groups. Certainly, opinions and discussions circulating social media platforms are having an ever greater influence upon our purchasing decisions and our brand perception.

A good example of a company exploiting social media effectively is www.zappos.com, a US online shoe retailer. At Zappos all 429 of its employees, including the CEO, have a Twitter account. But instead of merely uploading a few words around where they are (like I do), they use it to better inform customers in an open forum. They share information about where their stock or order is, as well as any updates on other issues. If you log into the Zappos section of the Twitter site, you can see all the Zappos people communicating with their customers.

Publicly displaying information like this can be a dangerous game, but if you aim to be a transparent organisation, and get your customers loving you for you openness – then why not use media which they are most comfortable with, instead of creating long call centre queues or websites support quests that lead nowhere.

Oscar Wilde said the old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, and the young know everything. There’s a nugget of truth in this today: My research into how different age groups use travel websites found that the old are easily sidetracked by affiliate sites, the middle-aged wanted to phone to check the site was legitimate, and the young soaked up all the information you threw at them.

The Travolution Generations project asked users to perform tasks on travel websites under the scrutiny of eye-tracking technology.

Young surfers (aged 16-24) mainly used search engines to find travel websites. They used short generic keyword strings (such as “UK holiday” and “18-30 break”) which returned a lot of search results. This was a price sensitive audience that found it easy to compare prices and research other offers offline. Young people were very trusting of peer reviews and trip advisor reports. They read almost all the text on a page to ensure that they had fully understood.

The next group (aged 25-34) also used search engines, with Google having prominence. They tended to type in specific brand names (such as “Virgin holidays” or “Sandals”) rather than generic keywords. Possibly more aware of URL spoofing and re-directions, users in this age group did notice the URLs in the search results. These users were distrustful of peer reviews but they did trust destination guides provided by the vendors themselves.

Middle aged surfers (aged 35-54) used search engines and entered generic keywords but these users were more cautious than the other age groups when reviewing results. Upon arriving at websites, many of these users were keen to find contact information. Being newer to the internet, they tended to use the website for research, but liked the idea of speaking to a “real person” to make their booking. These users were less tolerant of online advertising than the other groups, and tended to leave sites where too much advertising was pushed upon them.

Senior surfers (aged 55+) had the highest amount of disposable income, and were often looking for luxury holidays to book. They tended to type very long search strings into search engines, somehow expecting that the longer the list of words they typed in, the more exact their results would be. This “non-pinpoint” approach would often return a high number of affiliate websites and users often visited these “by mistake” when they were trying to get to a vendor’s main website. This age group does notice advertising and will often follow special offers from it. Silver surfers will use online booking tools, but need hand-holding throughout the process. If a confirmation of booking is not immediately shown at the process conclusion, senior surfers will look for a phone number to call so they can confirm their booking.

So what do these findings indicate? While there are differences in usage between the generations, all users would be catered for by a travel website which offers clear navigation across the site; easy to follow landing pages relevant to search engine results; a compelling mix of vendor provided destination guides and user-generated content; limited push advertising; and contact information clearly available from all pages and throughout the booking process.