With something like reverence, I take it out of the box.

It is thin, it is light and it feels quite solid. Maybe a tad bigger than I expected – one gets so used to mobile phones – but not much. Definitely an improvement on the brick-like paperbacks I’ve carried around before.

Hiding underneath the device, a concertina leaflet – brown, recycled-like thick paper, adorned with a jumble of printed letters surrounding “Amazon Kindle” and “Quick start guide” – a very understated design – which describes getting started. Beneath this, a deeper recess holds the power/USB cable, also in a brown card wrapper. Full marks for branding and packaging.

The first surprise is that the display does not look or feel like a screen – and this was also experienced by the few people I showed the device to – both asked whether it was on or just the “dummy” print on the plastic cover. By comparison, my computer screen seems positively garish. It really is quite an amazing rendering of black and white text and images, very close to what one experiences on paper.

I’m not saying that the device is perfect. By virtue of being so thin, it takes a while to find the best way to hold it, though one’s fingers do tend to naturally be positioned over the “next” buttons on either side. Unlike a book one holds open, with both hands far apart and holding on to something, here both hands are quite close together (both hands need to be involved, since you need to press the “next” button to turn the pages). It is unfamiliar, but not uncomfortable – though this remains to be tested for an hour at a time. One solution is to invest in a Kindle cover: the drawback is the added cost and weight, but the form factor makes it more comfortable to hold, and also protects the screen from various hazards in my purse, such as keys and pens and sundry items.

The books I purchased on the Amazon UK Kindle store are already loaded, with no delay – since the device was on in the box, they must have loaded as soon as I purchased them online, over the 3G connection. I’m looking forward to reading on the Tube tonight…The actual buying process and usability of the device will be covered in my next post – so stay tuned!

Despite all the known issues and problems with the way we measure the effectiveness of acquisition marketing activity such as the use last-click attribution models, I often wonder whether we’re measuring the right thing at all. By that I mean the point at which we define “acquisition” and therefore the point at which we determine the return on investment (ROI) of our marketing budget.

In the old days we generally considered acquisition to mean getting traffic to the site. We measured the ROI of different channels and different activity using metrics like the Cost per Click (CPC) and we managed the budgets to try and optimise the CPC. To be honest we often didn’t care what happened when traffic reached the site, we were just interested in getting them there.

Gradually that began to change as the value of a business was determined by how much money it was making rather than how many visitors it had or how many page impressions it was generating. The focus shifted to defining acquisition in terms of some conversion event, such as a transaction, a registration or the like. The point of measurement changed to further down the value chain and new metrics were used to measure ROI such as the Cost per Action (CPA). This changed the way that we viewed the effectiveness of different channels or campaigns and we discovered that some activity might be great at driving traffic but it was generally of low quality and didn’t actually generate much value. So by changing the concept of what “acquisition” meant we added in the notions of value and quality into our measurement framework. But have we gone far enough?

Obviously the meaning of acquisition is dependent on the nature of the business and the organisation involved but as a generalisation most marketing activity tends to be measured in terms of the transaction rather than in terms of the longer term customer value. Let me give you an example from a type of business where this is more relevant. Often in subscription type businesses acquisition is defined as the point of registration or sign up. CPA targets may be set based upon an overall expected life time value. But often with any subscription type model there is churn and people stop subscribing or using the service. So the notion of value is not that they necessarily signed up but the extent to which they continued to use the service and for how long.

In some work we did recently where we tracked the customer lifecycle from initial acquisition through to the point at which people stopped using the service, we found that generally is people had used the service four times, then they were very likely to continue to use it. The point of true customer acquisition in this case was when someone had used the service four times, not when they had initially signed up for it. Analysis of the effectiveness of different marketing activity in different markets showed different patterns when you compared the ROI based on initial subscription compared to actual usage. Certain types of activity were great at driving registrations but the level of initial churn tended to be quite high and so not that many would eventually turn into longer term valuable customers, whereas other activity wasn’t so good at driving great volumes of registrations but the ones that did register were of better quality and were more likely to pass the magic “four times” mark. By shifting the point of measurement and focus, radical decisions about the mix of marketing activity could be made.

Maybe it’s time to move our understanding of the effectiveness of acquisition marketing to a CPC model again but this time evaluating the Cost per Customer rather than the cost per click. Acquisition is about customers rather than actions and certainly for some businesses it’s about taking a longer term view rather than focussing in on a specific point in time.

I’m not pretending that this type of analysis is necessarily easy to do. It’s not something that really comes “out of the box” from your typical web analytics tool or from your campaign management systems. It will usually involve some level of data integration between these tools and internal data sources such as the customer database. However as we continue to try and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our marketing spend we need to move the measurement capabilities forward and to get that “cradle to grave” understanding of the customer lifecycle.

As I see it, the Kindle does not try to be too many things at once: in fact, it’s a good old-fashioned, mono-activity device (think early Palm Pilots, as they were called in the late 90s). A Kindle is for reading books, perhaps a daily newspaper, and that is it. And for this purpose, it does seem to fit the bill perfectly. It is small enough, light enough, has a great battery life, is easy on the eyes with its e-Ink display, with the non-glare screen so you can read it outside in full sunlight, it boasts instant access to millions of titles through the online bookstore – which thanks to free 3G AND Wi-fi is accessible pretty much anywhere anytime. It also happens to be a no-brainer price-wise compared to the iPad, which comes at a much higher price tag and carries the burden of a carrier price plan for 3G access.

No, the Kindle does not do web browsing or email: but in these days of smartphones, do I really want (or need) to browse online or answer email on a crowded Tube or bus during my daily commute? If I were commuting on a train, perhaps, or if I were a frequent traveller, granted the iPad might be a better option. But for reading books, whether on a commute or on holiday (ever cursed the weight of those three paperbacks inside your suitcase?)…Give me the Kindle!

I am now impatiently waiting for Amazon to deliver – probably sometime in the next week…stay tuned for my “out-of-the-box” report!

I don’t know whether the number is right or not but a while back I heard that sophisticated marketing companies such as the world’s leading brands spent about 10% of their marketing budget on research and measurement. Irrespective whether the number is accurate or not, it’s a good benchmark I think – 10% feels about right. These leading companies have been marketing brands for over a 100 years and so over that time they have come to understand the importance and relevance to their business in investing in understanding the effectiveness of their activities.

I wonder what the equivalent proportion is for leading online businesses? How much do online businesses invest in measuring and tracking the effectiveness of their online activities? I don’t know the answer to that question but my suspicion is that the answer is generally “too little, too late”. We all know of companies that have a reputation for using analytics as part of their strategic armoury and have invested heavily in analytical technologies and also have built up formidable analytic teams. These are the companies that people travel to see and hear from at events like Emetrics and Exchange. However these companies are the exception rather than the norm.

What I write in these articles is often triggered by recent events in my consulting activities with clients. Customers and potential customers are a rich source of content! I went to visit one company last week where they had recently appointed a user experience manager and given him responsibility for web analytics and site optimisation. The client had been busy over the past six months implementing a solid and robust web measurement tracking programme. This had involved completely re-implementing their web analytics tool, hiring in a web analyst, revisiting all the business requirements and producing new reports and dashboards. He had also hired someone to specifically focus on site optimisation and to run their testing and experimentation programme. They had been busy laying the foundations and investments had been made in people, processes and technology. I could see how quickly they would begin to reap the rewards.

At the other end of scale I’ve also been working with a client who is developing a brand new site. New sites don’t come cheaply but all the way through the senior stakeholders in the business have been reluctant to invest in the appropriate measurement and analytics. The new site is close to launch and we’re now trying to shoe horn in the analytics requirements into the tail end of the development process. They use one of the free tools which can cope with most of their needs but not all of them and despite the significant investment in the new site itself, getting a relatively modest budget released to develop the data collection specification and the reporting configuration has been difficult. For me these two experiences highlight the difference between companies that “get it” and those that don’t.

For those companies that struggle to recognise the value of investing in decent measurement and analytics, I’m reminded of one of my favourite quote from A C Nielsen. Arthur Nielsen used to say that “The price of light is less than the cost of darkness”. The point is elegantly made – it’s not a question of whether you can afford to invest in measurement, it’s a question of whether you can afford not to. For me the point of measurement and analytics is to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of decision making and to reduce the risk of failure. It also leads to better accountability, which is possibly why sometimes it’s not welcomed with open arms!

Determining or justifying the return on investment in analytics can be hard. In some cases, like multi-variate testing, the ROI can be very explicit and indeed that’s how the technologies are often sold. However, working out the ROI on an analytics team and general analytics technologies can be harder, particularly in non-transactional environments. But there is always “a cost of darkness” and the trick is to try and work out what that cost might be. For transactional environments it might be not knowing how to improve the conversion ratio, for media environments it might be around not understanding how to monetise the traffic more effectively and for service environments it might be about not understanding which content is helping to deflect calls from the contact centre.

Although hard to prove I believe that even small investments in measurement and analytics can return a significant ROI particularly in the early days of adoption. Perhaps “The price of light is less than the cost of darkness” should be in the footer for every business case for investment funds for measurement and analytics.

We did the usual searches, frustrating at the best of times, but what soon emerged was a similar pattern. Booking sites are not very well geared up for taking bookings from large families, and actually calling up is the best and quickest option. I fully accept that every piece of functionality needs to have rules to work. But what this highlighted to me was that booking sites are geared up for either people booking one room, or a family paying for two rooms. More than this and ‘computer says no’.

Let me show you why. Here are the possible online booking combinations for two adults with four children that I have come across so far.

Option 1: 2 adults with 4 children in one room (hell on earth)

Option 2: 2 adults in one room + 4 children in another room (bliss for all)

Option 3: 1 adult with 2 children in one room + 1 adult with 2 children in another room (half way between heaven and hell)

Option 4: 1 adult with 1 child in one room + 1 adult with 1 child in another room + 2 children in another room (sleepless night thinking about the two children on their own in another room ; heaven for the two children on their own)

So I can either book one room, two rooms or three rooms depending on how a site is set up. The problem I have got is that I don’t know how a site is set up, so it becomes a frustrating guessing game. A game made even worse because on so many of these aggregated booking sites, there are no suggestions on what to do next. Telephone numbers aren’t displayed either.

What in theory should be a fairly straight forward experience, is in reality one that needs a lot more understanding of the online user experience by the booking companies which build these sites. An understanding that actually realised that sometimes a phone call might be the best option to offer.

What’s the cost these days of taking a phone call for a room booking for six people?

Today, apart from being Friday 13th, is also National Complaints Day. Research conducted by ComplaintCommunity suggests that over the course of today more than one and a half million complaints will be lodged across the UK.

Against this backdrop, I was fortunate enough to bring together a variety of people from the public sector, retail, financial services, customer experience and social media monitoring to discuss the impact of social media on complaints specifically, and customer service more generally.

What was interesting from the discussion, was that whether you were a large enterprise living social media, through to one yet to take your first tentative step, the journey was clearly more about mindset than toolset. There was also a need for organisations to understand that the rules of engagement were changing, and with it a different type of lexicon was being defined. Customers were now shaping the service they wanted, and whether companies liked it or not, the bottom line was: get used to it!

Echoes of one of the theses from The Cluetrain Manifesto, written some 11 years ago, still ring true today: “If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel!”

Some of the other common themes that ran through the conversation were:

• ROI – return and investment doesn’t have to be financial
• At what point does a company engage with its customers?
• How do you identify where your customers are?
• How do you define ‘complaint’? Negative sentiment, direct issue or poor experience
• How best to establish internal procedures?
• Social media becomes engagement media
• How do you manage customers’ expectations?
• Identifying ways to best ‘handle’ customer complaints? Who is responsible? 
• Localisation of social media for online customer service

It became evident as the discussion progressed that what we were all really talking about, in the words of Rob Skinner (Head of PR, PayPal UK) was the ‘re-invention of the corporation’, with perhaps social media and smartphones, the catalysts of this business change.

I was nervous going into this roundtable with the calibre of people sitting round me, and the thought of ‘what happens if no one says anything?’. But by the end of the discussion it was absolutely ‘affirming’, not only at the level of discussion that took place, the breadth of topics covered, the openness with which BT, PayPal and the Ministry of Justice shared their insights, experiences and concerns, that this thing we white-label ‘social media’ is here to stay, signals a change for the good, and requires an honesty in approach that customers not only deserve, but are finally experiencing as well.

So to those who took part, I thank you, and to those who are yet to start your journey, I encourage you to do so now. If your children are already ‘doing social’ now via sites such as Club Penguin isn’t that a telling insight into their future and the future of your business?

For a summary of the discussion on the impact of social media on complaints please click here

If you would like to be notified when the audio and video are available from this event, or for more information about the the impact of social media on complaints or customer service, please feel free to contact Guy Stephens by email or on 0845 054 6545.

Up until a few years ago, complaining, if done at all, was a closed interaction between me and a company. I could write a letter, send an email or make a call to let a company know how they had let me down. But there was a disconnect.

Organisations for the most part were not set up to treat complaints as anything other than a commodity or product in itself. The interaction was functional, prescribed, scripted. Whilst my complaint might be acknowledged, the outcome was inevitably ticketed and soulless. Where I might express a whole range of emotions from anger to frustration, to annoyance, to disappointment, even the occasional surprise, organisations for the most part were not geared up to listen, to hear, to empathise.

But back to National Complaints Day this Friday. I’m not sure what verb to use to describe the day: am I celebrating complaints, commemorating them … do I mark the day by complaining at a predetermined time, do I stand silent for a moment and think of complaints-past that have never seen the light of day … do I send Tweets full of invective against any company with an overseas call centre, do I video myself conducting some ranting tirade against all broadband providers, banks and low-budget airlines, do I write a rambling blog targetting all companies which offer ill-thought through IVRs … or do I seek comfort and solace in the fact that I now live in a world where I can now do all these things?

I can complain in any number of different ways: video, audio, e-mail, letter, phone, blog, microblog amongst others. I can complain now, right now, at the moment when the cause of the complaint takes place, or I can complain later. The choice is mine. I can complain in private or in public. The choice is mine. I can complain on web sites that have nothing to do with the company I am complaining about, or I can complain directly to the company itself. The choice is mine. We live in an incredibly connected, voyeuristic and engaged time. How, when and where we complain is no longer in the hands of the companies which are the cause of the complaint: the choice is ours.

To help mark National Complaints Day, I am truly fortunate to be able to bring together a variety of people from different industries to discuss the impact of social media on complaints specifically and customer service generally. Ultimately, the discussion is about business change, and the fact that the way in which people and companies communicate and engage with each other is changing.

Perhaps companies are starting to get down off their camels, as the Cluetrain Manifesto demands.

Check out our Events for full details on our roundtable to mark National Complaints Day itself, and I will be publishing the findings from it this Friday 13th. Come back to this page to read the findings or listen to the audio of the roundtable.

You can also follow the roundtable on the 12th by using the hashtag #ncd2010

For more information please feel free to contact me by e-mail or call 0845 054 6545

According to Caroline Jarrett in her (very user-friendly) book Forms That Work, ‘Slot-in answers such as name, address, and date of birth are so well known to us that it is much easier and more natural to type them in directly rather than selecting from the list.’  For instance, she notes that it is difficult to scan options in a ‘Year’ dropdown because they look very similar.

I always find date of birth dropdowns annoying and would be able to type in my date of birth much more quickly, so I completely agreed with Jarrett. Therefore, I made the date of birth fields text fields in the first iteration of the prototype (desktop version), expecting that this would make it easier for participants to provide their date of birth. (Note: I know dropdowns prevent Americans from getting confused with the UK date format, but this form would only be used by UK residents.)

Well, half of the participants agreed with me. However, the other half made formatting errors during the testing session (e.g. D instead of DD). What I, a touch typist, had forgotten was that many people must look down at the keyboard to type and therefore may misinterpret or forget the field labels (YY instead of YYYY) or not notice that they have accidentally tabbed to the next field. These participants, who were less proficient at typing, welcomed dropdowns because they reduced the amount of typing they had to do.

I replaced the text fields with conventional date of birth dropdowns in the second iteration of the prototype (see below) and, surprise surprise, participants didn’t make any errors.

Despite this, for the mobile version of the prototype I had participants try entering date of birth using both text fields and dropdowns because I thought dropdowns might be more fiddly on a mobile device.

I got the same result: all participants preferred using date of birth dropdowns on their devices (smartphones with either touchscreen or QWERTY keypads) because it was much quicker and more accurate for them to select dropdown options than numbers (especially on QWERTY keypads).

So, reading books (and getting a UX person to create the prototype) is no substitute for user testing. And sometimes conventions are there for a reason. Even if they are annoying.

I read a piece of research sometime ago that looked into the different behaviour people exhibited in the way they got from one location to another. The researchers set up two different scenarios. In the first they created set pathways across a square in a university campus. In the second they created no paths and simply observed how people crossed the square to get from one location to another.

Unfortunately, I can’t remember either what the paper was called or what the outcome was of the research. But it got me thinking about the different approaches companies adopt in their use of social media within customer service specifically.

Perhaps I am being too simplistic, but in my mind there are those who create their own paths – Zappos, BestBuy, Dell, ComCast, ASOS, WigglyWigglers, (never heard of them, right?) amongst others, and then those who essentially follow in the paths of others – JetBlue, SouthWest, The Carphone Warehouse (Thanks, Frank and Tony!), BT, EasyJet, VirginTrains, Vodafone… 

What’s important to bear in mind is that there is no right or wrong path. Every company is different. There is only one Frank Eliason, Tony Hsieh, Lionel Menchaca or Heather Gorringe. There’s no best practice whitepaper, no set formula for determining your path. What’s key is to ensure that whichever path you follow, it’s the right one for you. And the only way to find that out is to take the first step and see where it leads you…

There are many different types of vision disorders that can affect a user’s ability to view web pages and way too many to cover off here. However, to give you an idea, I have simulated how the Foviance website homepage might look to someone with cataracts, macular degeneration, glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy. These are four of the most common types of vision disorders. Cataracts is the leading cause of blindness worldwide and in the UK, 2 million people are visually impaired with macular degeneration (40%), glaucoma (13%) and diabetic retinopathy (8%) being the three most common causes.

If the text size on your website is not big, flexible or clear enough, your visitors may encounter difficulties using it. You will hopefully understand from the following images and descriptions why it’s so important that web pages contain text of a decent size and is strongly contrasted against the background colour.

Cataracts can form at any age, but it mostly develops as people get older. It is one of the most common types of vision disorders and according to recent studies, more than half of Americans will have developed cataracts by the time they reach 80. A cataract is a clouding of the eye lens, resulting in blurred and faded vision. Its affect can be a bit like looking at everything through frosted glass and it makes it difficult to read small or poorly contrasted text.

Macular degeneration is the most common cause of vision loss for people over the age of 60. This condition causes a gradual blurring and loss of the central vision. This affects the person’s central area of sight, making it difficult to see objects that are looked at directly. Text on websites can appear fuzzy and small text is particularly difficult to read.

Glaucoma can affect people of any age, although it mostly affects people over the age of 40. Glaucoma is caused by an increase in pressure inside the eye, which damages the optic nerve. The end result is often the opposite of macular degeneration with the loss of peripheral vision and a blurring of the central vision. Having glaucoma can be a bit like looking at everything through a straw and makes reading difficult because text seems faded as well as blurry.

Diabetic retinopathy affects the network of blood vessels lying within the retina causing them to bleed and form scar tissue. The scarring pulls and distorts the retina, causing dark patches in the field of vision. Text appears blurred or distorted in these regions, making web content difficult to read.

So, how do you think your website would look to someone with vision impairment? Do you think your content can be read without significant difficulty? To be sure, you should always include users with vision impairments in the design and development process of your websites, and seek to gather their opinions and feedback on the quality of the designs.