For those of us who, like me, have never heard of Black Friday, Amazon explain that the name might come from retailers seeing their balance sheets move into the black in the final quarter of trading.  Whatever the history, as far as online retail is concerned it’s all about the search for bargains.

The reason that Amazon are at the forefront of the Black Friday buzz is that they have turned the hunt for deals into a race.

Their site counts down to the start of each new deal to whet your appetite.  Only when the timer hits zero is the percentage discount revealed.  Stocks are limited and with some expensive electronics discounted at over 50% off, the competition is fierce.

A comment on one news article suggests that some customers have gone so far as to download a bleeding edge developer version of the Chrome browser to shave extra milliseconds off of the page load times.  Every little helps when you and your mouseclicking trigger finger are in a duel to the death.

As the shopping experience migrates more and more to the online realm, retailers know that their sites sink or swim based on their checkout process.  The old maxim ‘make it easy for the customer to buy’ is all about the design and usability of a sites product and checkout pages.

Amazon however, are taking this to the next level.  They’re asking their customers to race each other for the privilege of buying!  If that’s the game they’re going to ask their customers to play then the checkout process had better be slick, intuitive and problem free.  Alternatively, those bargains had better be as good as the hype from America would have us believe.

I often don’t have a clear picture in my mind of what I want, just generally two specific things; what type of item (skirt/top/dress…) and what I need the item for (work/daytime/evening…) I do know what styles I like (classic/glamorous/urban…) and possibly thanks to Gok Wan, my shape (hourglass/apple/athletic…)

However, when I arrive on most fashion websites I feel overwhelmed by the choice and generally find myself trawling through endless pages of unsuitable items, and then giving up. Part of the reason for this, is that the filters provided do not help me narrow down the items using criteria that I actually have in mind. This is because, more often than not, the filters are based on the direct properties of the item (colour, brand, size) as opposed to the personal categories that users search by (purpose, style, shape.)

Adapting the filters like this could help users to find suitable items more easily, and, once reading about the items, I think that there is also scope for additional product information to help inform the buying decision. This could be things such as:

• Different ways to wear the item
• How the item looks on different sizes/shapes
• What others who previously bought the item think of it.

One website that takes a novel approach to shoe retail is stylistpick. Users are asked a series of questions about their fashion preferences before they are presented with a selection of shoes each month that the website thinks will suit them. I actually found that this narrowed the choice too much as there is no way to see all products, or re-do the style quiz if you need something for a different type of occasion. Although it’s not perfect it’s great to see new approaches being used.

The lack of customer centricity generally seen, surprises me given the size of the market, physical diversity of  people shopping and disposable incomes that many people have these days. Whilst I know that people’s clothes selection is very personal, I’m sure that there are others out there who wouldn’t mind a few more recommendations to help find the right thing. So, come on fashion websites, help me spend my money!

When it comes to determining the usability of mobiles, it’s vital to know how people use them and what differs to their use of PCs. Research by Foviance looks at the variances.

The phrase ’mobile usability’ is something of an oxymoron. While users are consuming more content on their mobile devices, the experience is blighted by download delays and awkward input. The lack of usability guidelines from platform owners means brands are struggling to create content that’s as emotionally engaging for consumers on mobiles as it is on PCs.

Part of the challenge for brands is capitalising on the different cognitive interactions users have with content on mobile devices versus PCs.

According to research by usability consultancy Foviance, an increasing number of 18-30-year-olds are using their handsets primarily for entertainment and social interaction.

Surveying 278 candidates aged 18-30 nationwide, the report found that a notable proportion (75.4%) said they only used their handsets to manage their social media profiles, while half claimed they only used their PCs for work-related activity.

In addition, nearly 70% said they typically spend between one and two hours a day on their handsets, compared to the 73% who spend four hours or more on a PC (mainly at work).

The instantaneous nature of interaction on a mobile suggests that people are thinking less about the content they upload to the web via a handset, whereas their use of the PC reveals more contemplative thought processes.

Social media was the most prominent activity carried out on both PCs and handsets, with 90% of those asked saying they accessed social networks on both platforms.

“Social media content is becoming the most important thing people do on both their smartphones and their PCs,” says Catriona Campbell, founder and director of Foviance. “The difference is what aspects of social networks people are using when on either platform.”

When it comes to determining the usability of mobiles, it’s vital to know how people use them and what differs to their use of PCs. Research by Foviance looks at the variances.

The phrase ’mobile usability’ is something of an oxymoron. While users are consuming more content on their mobile devices, the experience is blighted by download delays and awkward input. The lack of usability guidelines from platform owners means brands are struggling to create content that’s as emotionally engaging for consumers on mobiles as it is on PCs.

Part of the challenge for brands is capitalising on the different cognitive interactions users have with content on mobile devices versus PCs.

According to research by usability consultancy Foviance, an increasing number of 18-30-year-olds are using their handsets primarily for entertainment and social interaction.

Surveying 278 candidates aged 18-30 nationwide, the report found that a notable proportion (75.4%) said they only used their handsets to manage their social media profiles, while half claimed they only used their PCs for work-related activity.

In addition, nearly 70% said they typically spend between one and two hours a day on their handsets, compared to the 73% who spend four hours or more on a PC (mainly at work).

The instantaneous nature of interaction on a mobile suggests that people are thinking less about the content they upload to the web via a handset, whereas their use of the PC reveals more contemplative thought processes.

Social media was the most prominent activity carried out on both PCs and handsets, with 90% of those asked saying they accessed social networks on both platforms.

“Social media content is becoming the most important thing people do on both their smartphones and their PCs,” says Catriona Campbell, founder and director of Foviance. “The difference is what aspects of social networks people are using when on either platform.”

Whilst there, I travelled around the city using the metro system and being unfamiliar with the city, I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to navigate where I wanted to go to. Being thrown into this new environment highlighted how additional details in the communication of a metro system, allowed a much clearer understanding of location and route. This led me to reflect on the London transport system, I wonder if visitors to London struggle with the way that information is presented on the London underground and other transport systems?

So what was different in Delhi? One thing I noticed was the tube map on the platform. London underground platforms have a map of the line, however, it only shows stations in the direction which you are travelling towards. Whereas the Delhi metro maps show the entire line and greys out the stations that you are travelling away from, using an arrow to confirm direction of travel. I found that this gave much more context to my location, made me confident that I was on the right line and going in the right direction!

In London, the line on the underground map is displayed as a poster. Long term closures of stations are indicated on the maps but otherwise you mostly have to rely on the tannoy, or watch out of the window to determine where you are, and if there are any issues. The Delhi metro maps also have a poster but use an LED system, where a red light indicates what stations the train has already passed. It also shows a green light for the next station coming up and indicates which ones are closed. Meaning at a glance, I could see where I was on the route, how far I had to go to my station and if I might encounter any issues with closed stations. It also meant that I didn’t have to attempt to decipher a crackly tannoy in another language as I was already confident that I had all the information I needed.

These are just a couple of small differences that I felt positively impacted my journeys on the Dehli metro. There are so many more touch points, both online and offline, where a user of a system like this requires additional information. This highlights how the attention to detail in the way in which information is presented really does effect the usefulness of  information, and therefore usage of the system. It also shows the importance of user research for offline experiences such as these, as the decision about how something so simple is communicated, really can impact the lives of millions on an everyday basis.

The Sunday Times published a Top 100 list of the best apps a couple of months ago,  which I’m still working my way through. There are many articles and blogs all over the web talking at length about some of these apps, best of  articles, not to mention the App store’s own featured rankings.

That’s the first big problem: the size of the market means it is quite hard to know what to buy or download, not what works or what is fun. It’s like the old saying, about spending your first year at university making loads of new friends and the rest of your time there trying to get rid of them! I find there is not enough good information out there to give you confidence in your purchase. The same applies to the ratings and comments within the app store, quite often there are too few for them to be reliable. While this has relatively little importance for free apps, it becomes more problematic when you consider the cumulative spend on paid apps which range from 59p to £5.99 or more. 

Navigating with one’s hands, tapping and swiping is becoming increasingly natural. So much so, that my 6 year old the other day tried to “click” with his finger on the family PC’s screen. Granted he’s had minimal experience with keyboards, and has much more experience with touch and gestural interfaces, from iPod touch to Nintendo Wii and DSi. Still, shades of things to come, I think.

One frustration however is the lack of consistency from app to app, beyond the general swipe and pinch gestures. Many of the text heavy apps react in quite different ways and have resorted to different modes of manipulating the blocks of text and images. Flipboard folds pages down the middle (almost so it looks like a three dimensional shape), Le Figaro (French newspaper) scrolls up and down as well as turns the pages, while the innovative PushPopPress has published Al Gore’s “Our choice” as a fantastic interactive book – with interactive graphics, video, and voice overs. In a similar spirit, Alice in Wonderland comes with interaction that hints at the future of books, I think. But the only consistent thing is the inconsistency. Tapping once or twice, where hidden menus might appear from, what some of the icons mean even – is anybody’s guess. This should take a while to sort out, and naturally companies like Foviance will contribute to the development of best practices for the user experience on tablets.

Photography on the iPad2 is stunning – the Reuters app, for example, showing an editor’s selection of the day’s news in photo – Flipboard is as great as Scobleizer said it was, allowing single point of access to your news sources and social media accounts. Too many apps are still not optimised for iPad and the rendering is fuzzy if you use the full screen space – like bad resolution on your computer screen when you over enlarge pictures. This should change as more developers upgrade their apps.

I’m not using my iPad as much as I hoped to – for one I still feel such a geek taking it out on the Tube! More to the point, it’s another device competing for my limited time: email and browsing tend to remain PC activities as the screen is bigger and the keyboard more comfortable, texts are sent from my iPhone (a wi-fi connection is not always handy, and watch those data charges on iPad 3G!)…I read a Kindle (more ergonomic to hold than the iPad) and paper books and magazines (but if there is an iPad version available, the subscription will not be renewed).

As a newspaper/magazine substitute it really comes into its own, but it’s an expensive substitution! Luckily there are other emerging uses, I have watched a film on it and found it surprisingly immersive. Literally holding the movie in your hands takes you into the picture much more than sitting in a huge dark room with strangers, and the screen is plenty big enough for this. Of course if you have to use headphones because others are present it becomes a little anti-social, just as listening to music can be.

There are also some excellent educational apps both for children and adults. From learning musical notation, playing the guitar, maths bingo, virtual visits to Ancient Rome and the fabulous photography available on the Nasa and the Hubble apps.

In fact I am seriously considering an iPad for the kids when they are a bit older rather than a first computer. I am also exploring using it instead of a paper notepad (saving the rainforest!). With writing apps – either with digital transformation or without – and a stylus, it’s becoming more of a viable option, and when you throw in productivity apps such as Instapaper and Dropbox you have the potential to completely change the way you work.

All in all then, I am thrilled with my purchase; it was well worth the money, the hassle of ordering, the wait and all. It’s a great device; one that you really feel is changing the game as you use it: and how exciting is that?

• Updates and insights into the industry’s emerging trends including ways to make them work for your business
• Practical advice on need to know topics including licensing, regulation and fraud
• New opportunities in emerging markets and how to make the most of them
• Ways to enhance and grow your business by sourcing innovative and cost effective new solutions

Jamie Barnett, Head of Gaming at Foviance and Shilpi Dahele User Experience Gaming Consultant will be looking at how companies can develop a UX measurement programme to support a strategy of continuous improvement. Based upon best practice from other sectors and how some of the larger gaming companies, more dedicated to customer experience, are focusing their current UX strategy. They will also be providing a 20 point step by step guide to establishing an optimum user experience on mobile.

Cookies are small snippets of code that sit on your computer and identify you to a particular website or advertising network. Currently cookies are used in a huge variety of ways from remembering what you just put in your shopping basket so that the product is still there when you checkout, through to targeting specific adverts to you based on your previous browsing habits. The new legislation says that website owners should be getting explicit consent from visitors for their data to be collected in this way, used at a later date or even sold on. In effect visitors have to say they are happy for cookies to be dropped on to their computers by websites.

The legislation has its origin in considering how brands and advertisers should be allowed to use data they collect about us consumers as we browse the web. Should brands remember information about the products we browse, news items we read, how we prefer to personalise websites? Should they be able to use that data to sell us other products and services? Should they be able to sell that data to third parties? What is private and how much of our browsing history should remain private?

 Behavioural targeting

The EU legislation is not designed to ruin the user experience of surfers, nor to impact businesses with waffly laws. Simply the EU is trying to get the digital world to be on a similar footing to the rest of commerce, advertising and marketing. The direct marketing industry has been coping well with data privacy issues for many decades and the digital industry needs to be able to say in a similar way that it is responsive around individual’s privacy and reactive to their needs with regards to any data collected about them. The impact of the web on our lives has meant we are much more connected than before but consequently those connections mean we are leaving a trail of activity in a huge variety and number of places. It is this paper trail that the legislation is trying to get to grips with.

The average consumer is happy to have cookies that support their user experience, e.g. remembering that I live in Stoke Newington and providing me with local news and weather. This type of cookie isn’t going to be impacted by the legislation because it can be argued they are required to deliver a specifically requested service. But when cookies are used for behavioural targeting it can be a bit more off-putting for the average person and this is where the legislation will really affect our industry.

Recently I’ve been ‘stalked’ by Clarkes and John Lewis adverts wherever I have been on the internet. This is because when visiting their site some weeks ago they dropped a cookie on my computer and shared that data with a third party advertising network. The network now uses that information to recognise me and fires me adverts for the same products I looked at last month. If these type of cookies are not going to be used it could mean the death of some new digital industries that were expected to drive the development of online advertising. Could this be the end for whole industries such as re-targeting, behavioural targeting or multivariate testing?
 

How did the legislation develop?

During the last 12 months a number of industry insiders have been working with the government to help define how the legislation should be implemented. The government has stated that not all cookies will be subject to the legislation. If they were then it would mean that we would need to be served with a pop-up window asking for cookie consent nearly every time we clicked to a new web page.

This usability nightmare scenario was squashed by the government but with a rather broad statement that the legislation does not apply to cookies that are ‘strictly necessary’ to provide an explicitly requested service. This generated a lot of argument that have not yet been satisfactory resolved debating if automatic settings in your browser would be enough or if sites whose existence that depended solely on advertising could be exempt.

What next?

The upshot is a rather sensible wait-and-see policy from the UK government. They have been working with advertising bodies like the IAB, EASE, ASA to review current uses of cookies and support moves by industries such as behavioural targeting to educate consumers and move to an industry standard for behavioural ads. By 2012 expect to see a small icon in any behavioural ad to show that it has used cookie data to target you.

But with the legislation coming into effect in a month what should you do next? Large brands need to get an idea of how pervasive cookies are on their sites and also how third parties which may be advertising on their site are collecting data and subsequently using it. If your advertising or media agencies aren’t able to give a confident response on how they are proposing to react to the legislation then it is probably time to look for another agency.

Since the autumn of 2010 at Foviance we have been researching what impact this legislation is going to have on brands and also how consumer attitudes to data privacy are likely to develop in the next few years. With the legislation in mind we developed a tool that grabs cookies from a website visit, analysing the type of data being collected by the cookie and rating this data in relation to how likely the legislation will impact it.

It has been fascinating and eye-opening to see the huge number of cookies that a typical website uses and the wide array of uses of these cookies. Using this approach we’ve been able to help our clients understand how the new law is likely to impact them across different types of cookies they use such as advertising, functionality and social media. I think it is fair to say that the impact of the legislation on large brands is going to be huge.

What about consumers? Most people think the internet is free and don’t understand that website owners need to generate revenue to support the delivery of content. Consumers also need to be educated in how data is collected, otherwise distrust will set in and people will never be happy to share their data. If that happens then slowly the amount of data and quality of that data that is collected through cookie technology will decrease dramatically. So, time for the digital industry to proactively engage and lead in the privacy debate.

For more about Foviance’s Data Privacy Audit

This article was originally published at My.Customer.com

This bumper edition looks back to the best of 2010 and makes a few predictions about 2011. In my own roundup I touch on some of the key themes Foviance and its customers have been focusing on recently – multi-channel experience, mobile usability, customer retention, social media, and the drip-effect from paper to digital ink.

Elsewhere in this final issue of the year, Carina looks back on the entertainment and insights we gained from World Usability Day 2010, Jamie looks forward to next year’s ICE gaming event, I talk more about the language of customer-centricity, and Neil points us all towards the latest multi-channel experience research from Foviance and Econsultancy.

If 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 page.

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

Have a great holiday.

Paul Blunden, CEO, Foviance

In this issue:

Another year over, a new one just begun…

Communication key to World Usability Day fun

Speaking the language of customer centricity

Living and thriving in an experience economy

Gaming sector warms up for ICE 2011

In our last newsletter you will have read all about Foviance’s plans for World Usability Day 2010. This unique collection of more than 150 events organised across more than 43 countries was held on 11 November in an effort to create greater awareness for designs, products and services that help to improve and facilitate communication around the world.

You’ll remember that we had been busy hitting the streets to discover and video what the event’s main theme of ‘communication’ really meant to the people we engage with each day. On the day itself we collated all our most interesting video response and uploaded them to our podcast section to share the wide range of opinions with the rest of the World Usability Day (WUD) community.

The greatest consensus of opinion among our interviewees was that on the whole they still preferred face-to-face communications over any other forms, however sophisticated. They concurred that just one poor example of communications could taint a business relationship indefinitely. People also generally agreed that the internet would only become even more pervasive in our future communications, but that progress wouldn’t stop there – our imaginative audience definitely fancied the idea of thought transmission before too long!

But the videos weren’t the end of our Usability Day fun here at Foviance. We also devised a communications game involving a large number of our consultants across the whole company. We split participants into groups, each comprising a ‘director’, a ‘runner’ and a creative team. Each team director was allowed a sneak-peek at a ‘top-secret’ Lego model before answering questions on the design put to them by their runner. The runner was allowed to go between the director and creative team in an effort to get an accurate copy of the top-secret model built.

Our gaming debrief threw up some interesting points. When asked, every team said that if they’d had more time to prepare, they would have liked to have put together some sort of coherent communications strategy for everyone within their team to follow. This would have helped establish the kind of information they wanted their director to share, and what format it would be passed on to the creatives by the runner. In the actual game, the teams rushed around for just 20 minutes and discovered just how clueless a lack of clear communication and vision can leave any team of individuals under pressure!

Foviance Communication Game for World Usability Day

Overall Usability Day 2010 was a great success. We advertised the Foviance activities on the WUD website and have been sharing feedback with lots of other event organisers across the community. We even took part in other group events, such as sending a video letter to Design Ltd. In Tokyo, a firm collecting video communications of the shared WUD experience.

Together, all participants learned a lot about how we communicate internally, externally, how we value the communications of others and how we all strive to make everyday communications more valuable.We’re now looking forward to discovering the theme of next year’s World Usability Day and hatching new plans to ‘make life easier’ one step at a time.

This article was written as part of the Foviance December 2010 newsletter