Newsletter

The theme for World Usability Day 2010, to be held on 11 November, is ‘communication’. Over 200 events organised across more than 43 countries will be held in an effort to create greater awareness for designs, products and services that help to improve and facilitate communication around the world.

Each year World Usability Day serves to remind the general public and industry professionals of the many issues that are central to good usability research, development and practice. The day’s tagline, ‘making life easier’, underlines the ambition of everybody working in usability and customer experience today to ensure technology is developed first and foremost in a way that make the every day lives of people that use it simpler and more user-friendly.

As an active member of the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA), Foviance will also be marking the day in its own way. Since 2006, World Usability Day has proven a great opportunity to promote what we do, not only to our existing customers and prospective clients but to our peers and the usability community as a whole.

Inevitably the majority of events will focus specifically on the use of new technology – innovative methods of simplifying daily communications that place the emphasis on efficiency and effectiveness rather than gadgets and services themselves. With so many varied events taking place, the theme of communication is very much left open to interpretation, so this years we decided to communicate ourselves – talking directly with the public in order bring their views to a professional usability audience.

Foviance consultants have taken to the streets to see what ‘communication’ means to the people we engage with or pass by on a daily basis. We decided that the candid reflections of everyday people would provide a fun and interesting balance to the considered views of industry figures, while revealing the practical nature of the individual relationships we have with each other and the devices and channels that connect us together.

To keep public responses focused and straightforward, we decided to ask each person just five key questions about their own communications:

• What is your favourite way of communicating and why?
• Describe your best experience when communicating with others
• Describe your worst experience when communicating with others
• How has communication changed for you in the past ten years?
• How do you see communication changing in the next ten years?

In tandem with technological progress, face-to-face communication continues to play and invaluable role in all our daily lives. In order to provide a genuine reflection of opinions, we left the structure of the conversations entirely open, and have received some extremely varied opinions. We took our Flip video camera out to the pavements, in to coffee shops and even on stage at the Comedy Club to capture responses. We hope you enjoy the results!

You can see the results for yourselves uploaded to our website and if you would like us to send you the link when all the videos are live,  just drop us an e-mail and we’ll be happy to send it to you on November 11th.

This article was written as part of the Foviance October Newsletter

Marketers and product development executives in businesses with both offline and digital channels face a difficult problem – how can they reconcile two or more different customer descriptions? Customer profiles derived by market segmentation will differ from the user profiles produced by digital teams, since they are drawn from different sources and have a different purpose. Yet it is vital that this gap between marketing and design descriptions be bridged. At stake is the creation of a design tool that is grounded in market reality (as are the quantitative, somewhat abstract segmentation derived profiles) and yet granular enough (as is richly descriptive, qualitative user research) to inform designers of user needs when interacting at a touch-point.

Personas are fictional characters that communicate the primary characteristics of groups of users to enable businesses to design better user experiences for customers at all touch-points – an essential requirement in the modern business environment. Traditionally, personas distil large amounts of qualitative data into a more usable, representative character – a typical or archetypal user – that all stakeholders across a company can relate to more easily. Ideally they are created at the beginning of any design process. They ensure that all members of a development team understand their target users and work towards the same objectives – satisfying their requirements in order to create a great user experience.

Of course personas can have issues of their own. If they are developed with no reference to real customer data, for example, they can be hard to defend when bottom-line driven decisions have to be made around features. They also run the risk of being oversimplified and compromised by senior executives’ personal preferences. The more ‘real’ personas are therefore, the more believable and effective: so it is truly very important to use the right data to create them. In fact some recent academic research has been exploring the use of statistical methods applied to traditional quantitative and qualitative user research (including ethnography and contextual research) to develop personas.

At Foviance we believe that segmented personas are key to bridging the divide between marketing and design. In combination with more traditional qualitative research sources, including ethnography, segmented personas can be built to act as a reference for designs across businesses, supporting operational alignment on customer-focus.

We go one step beyond our expertise in developing traditional personas: we also select and incorporate rich segmentation data into the persona development process. This results in strong, believable personas that also truly represent our clients’ key segments. We also create visual representations to help our clients’ key stakeholders keep their main users top of mind. In a multi-channel, customer-centric world, segmented personas reconcile marketing and digital channel customer profiles while supporting the growth of businesses as customer-centric businesses, committed to improving and enhancing customer experience across all touch-points.

This article was written as part of the Foviance October Newsletter

Would you recognise your typical customers if you saw them?

In a multi-channel, customer-centric world, its vital that business are able to reconcile two equally important but overlapping sets of customer profiles – those identified by their marketing teams, and those targeted by their digital channel.

Foviance segmented personas enable these marketing and digital teams to work together with greater focus to align their customer focus more effectively. They also serve as a communication tool, enabling stakeholders across various departments and senior management to be aligned behind the same set of customers.

Used throughout every project, personas support the growth of the company as a customer-centric business, focusing on improving and enhancing the customer experience across all touch-points.

In our latest Foviance whitepaper, we look at ‘Segmented Personas: bridging the divide between marketing and design’. We examine how accurate personas informed by real-world data can help businesses effectively bridge the gap between marketing and digital channels, delivering a sharper focus on customer-centricity.

Download your copy of ‘Segmented Personas: bridging the divide between marketing and design’ today.

This article was written as part of the Foviance October Newsletter

On Friday 5th November Foviance is launching new research that will provide valuable insight about the maturity levels of organisations adopting customer experience as part of their corporate strategy.

The research, conducted in partnership with Econsultancy, indicates that most organisations see a direct relationship between long term business performance and customer experience and delves further to understand the barriers and opportunities they face.

The report will be available for download via the Econsultancy and Foviance websites or as a printed copy at the launch event to be held at the Hospital Club, Covent Garden on the evening of 4th November. The report will include exclusive interviews and comments from clients such as Barclays, Shop Direct and William Hill. It will also contain insight from key industry commentators including Russell Gould (formerly of Thomas Cook) and Richard Sedley of Cscape, as well as our own experts Catriona Campbell, Neil Mason and Simon Raistrick.

Multi-channel customer experience is a hot topic in business today as demonstrated by the oversubscription to Econsultancy’s JUMP event held just two weeks ago. It is an issue that impacts an organisation’s leadership, culture, brand, systems, processes, insight and customer touch-point strategies.

The report reveals that few organisations are currently getting it right and most are struggling with real barriers. Our launch event is a perfect opportunity to learn more and make new contacts with people struggling with the same issues.

If you would like a copy of the report when it is released on Friday 5th November, or wish to attend the launch event please get in touch with Charlotte Wilberforce.

This article was written as part of the Foviance October Newsletter

Welcome to this latest edition of your Foviance newsletter.

We’re getting social in this issue and offering you the opportunity to download our very latest Foviance whitepaper: ‘Social Media and Customer Experience: a perspective on the landscape’. Find out more about the evolution of social media, and its impact on businesses and customers alike.

In other articles, Pauline explores the concept of social media as a channel further, Guy examines the role of these emerging channels in customer complaint habits and Neil ties it all together by providing some valuable insight into multi-channel measurement.

I hope you enjoy this latest newsletter.You might also enjoy reading and commenting on some of our consultants’ thoughts and opinions on our regularly updated blog pages.

I would be very interested to hear from you directly with any feedback.

Paul Blunden, CEO, Foviance

In  this issue:

A Social Evolution
Complaining via your channel of choice
Multi-channel measurement
Social media and customer experience

Over the last few years since the term was coined back in 2004, an increasingly diverse range of ‘Web 2.0’ technologies have enabled the rapid development of a new breed of applications, loosely grouped under the term ‘social media’.

From the start, social media applications were ‘C2C’, as it were – interactive, collaborative and user-centric. Consumer generated content creation and networking were fundamental to early players such as Facebook, which when it was first unleashed all of six years ago held no promise for the enterprise. It was primarily used for sharing holiday snaps and anecdotes with remote family members while avoiding the complexity of bulky e-mail attachments. Social media platforms weren’t about business, they were about people – enabling users to connect across communities sharing similar interests while pointedly leaving big brands out of it. The buzz was about corporate blogs, RSS and VoIP. ‘Viral’ still referred primarily to e-mail, not YouTube. Read more about: A Social Evolution

A multi-channel world creates more routes for complaint about products and services every day. As each new platform evolves, so our avenues of complaint are broadening from purely manual actions to largely virtual ones.

It’s still possible to let our views be known manually through a letter or even face-to-face if we so desire. Most of us are perhaps more familiar with expressing opinions via electronic channels, such as telephone, fax, e-mail, forums or blogs. But now more people than ever before are also venting their spleens on digital or mobile platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, TripAdvisor –even FourSquare, Google Maps, and in the future on emerging applications such as augmented reality. Read more about: Complaining via your channel of choice

An organisation’s multi-channel customers are its best customers. The theory is that if a customer buys from an organisation through more than one channel – such as in the store, from a catalogue, and over the web – then the customer is more likely to be of higher value than one who makes purchases through one channel. But understanding the value of multi-channel strategies requires more careful consideration than simply looking at the average customer value.

To fully understand how multi-channel strategies are working (or not), you must have a grasp on the dynamics between the channel where the customer was acquired and the channel where transactions take place, particularly in understanding the role of the online channel in driving offline transactions. There are two important ingredients to achieving this. First, have tracking mechanisms in place to see multi-channel behaviour (and this can be easier said than done). Second, understand why multi-channel behaviours are happening the way they are, and then evaluate whether some of those behaviours are what you want or not. Read more about: Multi-channel measurement