Usability

“Never try, never fail, those are the words I live by”, or so says Drew Carey’s character Crank in the animated kids film ‘Robots’. I heard these words coming from the back of the car a few days ago as I headed off on holiday with the family for a week in North Devon. You could run a business by that motto but I’m not sure it would last long or be an exciting place to work.

On the contrary,  it is the belief of both my team and I that we must try, that sees Foviance opening for business in China this quarter, with a new office in Shanghai. Read more…

As geographically separate regions of the earth are brought ever closer together by the pervasiveness of the World Wide Web, it is only natural that businesses attempt to extend their reach beyond national boundaries via their online presence.

However, ‘internationalising’ a site is a far more involved process than merely translating it, and without intelligent international research with native users, it is not possible to truly localise a site. Read more…

London, UK, 13 January 2010 – Foviance, the experts in multi-channel customer experience, were appointed in October 2009 by lowcostholidays.com to evaluate the user experience of their website, ensuring their position as key differentiators in the Travel industry.lowcostholidays.com had conducted research with Foviance in the past and the further opportunities for improvement identified through the latest round proved the benefits of regular interactive testing for enhanced website performance. The direct influence and importance of the design recommendations made was immediately evident by measuring the impact of changes to key areas of the site. Read more…

During a recent power failure at home, we all presumed it would be a short term problem; yet more than 12 hours later it was evident that this wasn’t going to be the case. By 4.30am it was time to find out what was going on so my initial thought was e-mail my electrical service provider, of course without power there was no internet so next option was to telephone them. Although I could have found a telephone number from a previous bill, I was reluctant about getting out of bed. Fortunately the blackberry came to the rescue, and with its service package I was able to get internet access and found the electricity company’s website. Read more…

There has been a new parking barrier set up near to where I live, which was very expensive to install yet has a significant design fault. When queuing up for a ticket, I would notice people in their cars sitting and waiting for a considerable amount of time in regards to collecting a parking ticket and for the barrier to open. The driver and the passengers were also as astonished as myself for their prolonged waiting time, which was down to one simple fault. Read more…

Self-serve checkouts/kiosks are transforming the purchasing experience; some shops are beginning to go as far as replacing all of their staff with self-serve machines. These machines are ultimately asking, or sometimes forcing, people to change their habits of a lifetime. From a motivational design perspective, these machines are a benefit as they promote autonomy – our ability to do our shopping ourselves. However it is absolutely vital that our first experience of using these machines is a good one, otherwise we are likely to lose faith and if we are given the choice, will revert back to staff-operated checkouts. Read more…

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 23/10/09 and is republished here with permission.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks on the conference circuit. WebTrends held their Engage conference in London and last week I was in Washington DC for the Emetrics Marking Optimization Summit . It was good to see WebTrends out and about in the market, showing off some of their latest stuff. They’ve been working hard on their messaging by the looks of it and getting a distinctive market positioning going. The core brand themes they talked about were “Power”, “Elegance” and “Openness”. Read more…

Top ten reasons what I love my iPhone:

1. Technology driven: It is a great piece of technology and a step forward in terms of mobile. I love the touch screen, video quality, weight and build.

2. User friendly: It worked straight out of the box. All of it including Bluetooth, WI-Fi, calling, camera, browser, Google Maps, everything. This compares very favorably with the Nokia’s and LG’s of my past which all required configuration, unlocking from my network, upgrading of firmware etc. Read more…