Usability

Welcome to the latest edition of your Foviance newsletter.

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

By Carina Brahmania 

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

NMA Live will be introduced by Foviance’s Head of Gaming User Experience, Mariana Da Silva – From usability to user experience. What user-centred techniques can bring to businesses.

User experience is the evolution of usability. Adopting a user-centred approach has moved on from making web sites easier to use and become a crucial part of understanding customer behaviour and developing digital strategy. The NMA Live event will look at the benefits of adopting a user-centric approach and how to go about doing so.

The importance of ensuring that customers are having a good experience interacting with a company is key to its success. The internet today allows customers to share their views on companies loud and proud and it is up to that company to manage their customers experiences to make sure it’s a positive one. To do this they need to understand what their customers are thinking so the uptake of user research in the last decade has been huge. Techniques such as interviews, usability testing, focus groups and surveys are very common now and can generate great feedback from users. All in all it’s fantastic that  businesses are becoming so much more user focused. ‘Hooray!’ us user centred people say. Read more…

To mark this year’s World Usability Day, Foviance has been discussing the topic of communication with the ‘man on the street’ and today, every hour we will be uploading short Vodcasts. These short videos will concentrate on people’s stories about their good and bad experiences of communicating with others and their views on how they see communication changing their lives in the future.

It will also come as no surprise that the favourite way of communicating for most people is face-to-face. Through this exercise, Foviance would like to discover how people actually use technology and other services to communicate and how these experiences really impact everyday life.

Video questions asked – please feel free to comment below with your own views!

• Favourite form of communication
• A good experience (related to communication)
• A bad experience (related to communication)
• How communicaiton has changed in the past 10 years
• How communication will change in the next 10 years

Video interview #9

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9_FvTZ8ieE

Read more…

I have owned an espresso machine for close to 10 years now, and until recently did not find the ordering process for capsules that tedious. However this has now changed, in part due sto a site redesign (gone wrong, in my opinion) to the point where when my machine finally clonks out, I will be getting a Lavazza.

The other day, when landing on the nespresso.com website, I was greeted by a large “welcome to your new website” banner. Well, to start with it’s not my website, it’s Nespresso’s. And although the photos are extremely high quality (the coffee cup here for example  the back-lit look and fade out when mousing over the selection at the bottom is not great – the whole site is quite dark too. But, let’s get over it and try to order some capsules, the reason I was there in the first place. Read more…

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

I walk past a Gap store everyday on my way to and from work. Usually I don’t have time to go in, because I have to get home for the kids, but I do see the advertising board they put out on the pavement promoting their “Best fit” jeans. Having lived in New York some years ago, at a time Gap already had a US transactional website – which I used – I thought it would be interesting to see how the newly launched UK (sorry, European!) version stacked up. Read more…