Figures corroborate this: predictions see app market turnover rocketing to a whopping $17.5 billion in 2012, against $6 billion this year. The number of app downloads should also reach new highs with an estimated $50 billion in 2012 against $7 billion this year. But interestingly, it seems that apps haven’t reached their full potential yet. What the stats also tell us is that gaming and social networking dominate the app market whereas retail apps trail at the rear of the wagon. However, despite mobile retail apps trailing slightly right now, they have a huge power to unleash.

It’s small wonder that retail apps are lagging behind. The whole app concept is fairly recent and most of us are not yet fully ready to embrace mobile shopping: security and payments on handheld devices remain a concern, we’re not yet so keen on purchasing on the go, and we want to feel we’re making informed mature decisions. In the end, why would we use a small device when we’ve got laptops and computers available most of the day? This trend, though, is about to change.

A recent study conducted by miBuys indicated that 85 percent of surveyed women used the mobile internet daily, and 95 percent of them browsed the mobile web at home when they could potentially access computers. Also, 67 percent were interested in receiving mobile vouchers or coupons, whilst 57 percent had already clicked on mobile advertising. Another study from Deloitte revealed that one-in-five consumers plan to mobile shop in the future, 25 percent of whom intend to make a purchase through their phone. The explosion of mobile commerce is therefore scheduled – now how can big e-commerce firms ensure they make the most of mobile apps?

The power of retail apps is two fold: not only do they boost online sales; they also leverage offline sales. In the former case, the added value of apps is clearer. Online revenue is not only limited to the download cost of the app but is also generated by in-app content. Apps can indeed be used as a portal to access product listings or ad hoc services, which can ultimately lead to online transactions. The Ocado app is an interesting success story. Available on multiple platforms including iPhone and Android, the free-to-download app yielded a turnover of more than £15 million in Q1 2010 (five percent of Ocado’s total sales), by enabling users to go food shopping on their phones. Another example is the Sky Sports Live Football app. The app gives football results in real time as games are being played, for free. But if they register within the app for an extra £4 a month service, users can get video clips of the goals on their phone.

The offline value of mobile apps is less obvious yet it is still there. Apps can boost offline sales by acting as a promotional medium. One way to exploit this opportunity is to create a catalogue app, just like Ikea recently did. The app allows users to browse the latest Ikea store catalogue. One of its main strengths is that the catalogue is offline and can therefore be accessed regardless of network signal. Another option is to create an app that sends periodical push alerts to users (e.g. about new clothes collections, promotional vouchers and so on). Desktop websites would then finish the job started by the apps and convert visitors into buyers. US venture company Shopkick is taking mobile retail to a new level by merging mobile and offline shopping. Its app, to be released at some point this summer, will work across a certain number of stores (including Macy’s and Best Buy for a start) and will provide augmented product information. While strolling down the aisles of brick-and-mortar stores, users will be able to use the cameras on their phones to scan items in order to get additional information (such as reviews).

So the power of retail apps is still to be realised. If well thought and well designed, this channel can become another consistent stream of online revenue. If you’re considering designing an app for your e-business, here are a few tips to ensure you make the most of it:

• Know you audience – What type of phones are your customers using? If they use smartphones, think ‘apps’. If they use more primitive phones, think ‘mobile friendly website’
• Track your traffic – Knowing the share of your visitors that access your site via their phones will help you plan your online strategy
• Establish you goal(s) – Do you want to use your app as a sales channel, showcase window or interactive in-store guide?
• Engage with your customers – Apps are different from the traditional web, demanding new marketing strategies
• Make payments easy – Should you decide to implement a checkout process in your app, make sure it is quick, user-friendly and secure. Think Google Checkout, PayPal or similar
• Most importantly, make sure your app is usable – Don’t skip user testing while arguing your app won’t generate enough revenue to justify user-centred research.

This post was written by Xavier Klingenfus

This article was written as part of the Foviance July/August Newsletter

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.

• World’s first* neurological experiment into poor online customer experience proves existence of ‘web stress’
• Brain wave analysis indicates that consumers need to concentrate 50% more than normal when using a badly performing website
• Two most stressful points of the online sales cycle are search and checkout

* Based on extensive desk research in February 2010.

London, UK February 24, 2010 – CA, Inc. (NASDAQ: CA), the world’s leading independent IT management software company, today announced the first ever neurological study of consumer reactions to a poor online experience. The research proves that many consumers experience ‘web stress’ when trying to make an online purchase. The stress levels of volunteers who took part in the study rose significantly when they were confronted with a poor online shopping experience. In order to retain customers, attract new ones and prosper during the economic recovery, CA is calling for European businesses to focus on giving their customers the best possible online experience.

CA partnered with Foviance – a leading customer experience consultancy – to explore ‘web stress’ in relation to application performance, and its impact on consumer behaviour and buying habits. Brain wave analysis from the experiment revealed that participants had to concentrate up to 50% more when using badly performing websites, while facial muscle and behavioural analysis of the subjects also revealed greater agitation and stress in these periods.

During the study, volunteers were wired up to sophisticated neurological and physiological testing equipment, including an EEG (Electroencephalography) cap which was used to monitor brain wave activity. The volunteers then carried out a series of everyday online tasks such as finding and buying a laptop PC and travel insurance. Using all the data gathered, CA and Foviance identified the two most stressful points of the online sales cycle were search and checkout. At these two points, subjects experienced heightened levels of ‘web stress’. During the experiment, volunteers persevered and completed the purchase but in reality, more than three quarters of customers will abandon the site. The study also revealed that after a bout of heightened ‘web stress’, on average it took each participant up to a minute to return to a relaxed state.

“The results of this study sends out a clear message – businesses need to reduce ‘web stress’ and improve the online experience of their customers if they’re going to maximise returns from their web channel,” said Kobi Korsah, Director, EMEA Product Marketing at CA. “It’s not just about website design or internet connection speeds – the performance of a website is dependent on the performance of the web applications that support it. Businesses need an Application Performance Management (APM) solution which not only provides real insight into how customers are experiencing their web applications, but will proactively manage the performance and availability of these applications. This translates into better customer service, improved brand loyalty and increased sales.”

Catriona Campbell, leading behavioural psychologist, Director and Founder of Foviance, said: “Consumers have very high expectations of web applications and web sites – to be always available and instantly responsive. This experiment simulated the experience of underperforming web applications for our volunteers. The results show that when online expectations aren’t met, people quickly become agitated, confused and have to concentrate 50% more than normal. All these problems can be detected and prevented as long as businesses take a proactive approach to measuring the customer’s experience of web applications.”

The experiment builds on the CA 2009 Web Stress Index published last year which examined the frustrations associated with underperforming web applications. The research found that more than three quarters (77%) of European consumers blame either website owner or the website host (which is in any case chosen by the website owner) when an online application fails. It also revealed that if consumers encounter problems online, 40% will go to a rival website and 37% will abandon the transaction entirely. Only 18% said they would report a problem to a company, which means companies need to have their own measures in place to understand how their website is performing from the customer’s point of view.  

About the Experiment

Foviance carried out the study on behalf of CA at the labs of Glasgow Caledonian University in January 2010. Thirteen volunteers took part in the study – eight female and five male participants, aged between 22 and 42. The participants were from the UK, Italy, Spain, France, and Germany. During the study, volunteers were wired up to sophisticated neurological and physiological testing equipment, including an EEG (Electroencephalography) cap which was used to monitor brain wave activity. They then carried out a series of everyday online tasks such as finding and buying a laptop PC and travel insurance.

Download the study here

View video below: 2 minutes 34 seconds

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmYSLWGYZzA

Press contacts

Catriona Campbell – Foviance  info@foviance.com +44 (0)845 054 6500

Press Coverage

Financial Times podcasts: ‘The stressful side of web surfing’ featuring Foviance founder Catriona Campbell

Using an EEG (Electroencephalography) cap and sophisticated neurological and physiological testing equipment, volunteers were wired up during the study and had their brain wave activity monitored. Everyday tasks online such as finding and buying items were tested by the volunteers.

The results revealed that search and checkout were the two most stressful points of everyday processes carried out online, resulting in the volunteers exhibiting a heightened level of ‘web stress’. This type of stress results in more than three quarters of customers abandoning websites before they have completed the task that drove them to the site in the first place. To download the whitepaper a valid e-mail address is required, however Foviance will not contact you unless you specifically request it.

Rather than treating your customer research investment in isolation, identifying where your business has to pay for research, analysis and testing, it’s possible to view your investment from the opposite angle – if your business chooses not to work on customer experience, what problems will you experience, what dropouts will you see on your website, and what value is being lost as a result of you not conducting any research?

Today’s customers expect excellent user experience as a matter of course from modern websites – a competitor’s web site is only a click away. Businesses pay a lot of money for their websites to be developed by design agencies, and sometimes whether the site is deemed a success or not can hinge on the highest-paid-person’s-opinion (HiPPO). Such flawed thinking often prevents the suggestion of objective changes that are grounded in data. But to be of any benefit to customers, this is where the thinking has to occur.

You must obsess about your own customers. What points are causing them problems? Why are some people finding it hard to navigate from these landing pages through to these particular items? It is often hard to see all the way down to granular issues from a very high viewpoint, but it is vital if you want to ensure a loyal following.

Of course the majority of companies are aware of the desirability of good customer experience; they just need to have a greater understanding of the impact of each change. They’re happy to invest some money in making their websites more usable by conducting customer surveys or audits and implementing design changes, and they know there’s a cost for this expertise but often have no way of grasping the potential ROI. This is why it is important that you understand more fully what is involved in quantitative analysis, and perhaps most importantly, what changes can be made that will directly improve your own conversion rates and at what cost.

One useful measurement might come from the concept of ‘engagement scoring’. You can identify the key actions that you would like customers to perform on your website. Making a purchase is right up there, of course. But how about watching your product demos, reading customer reviews, or signing up for more information? Are these tipping points that generally lead to future sales? And if so could they be assigned a score or value? Might your timely human intervention or a conversation with your customers at high-value points convert engagements into sales? These are ways in which the quality of your traffic can be valued, not simply the quantity. These are the first steps towards establishing a ROI for your customer experience research.

It’s important that you are able to focus on optimising traffic acquisition and retention. Why do people come in to your site on certain pages but not move forward? Expert analysis of your customer experience will enable you to more fully understand the quality of your visitors over time and to differentiate their experiences. If, for example, a supermarket can improve the journey towards transactions for a small percentage of customers, and increase order value again by just a few percent, the resultant revenue change can prove massive.

Through engagement scoring ground in data, your business can begin to assign commercial values to actions occurring on its websites, even if they do not directly result in purchases. Instead of recording that 3% of journeys end in conversion, it is just as true to state that 97% went through a certain process and did not complete, thus providing a commercial value for those people lost during the transaction or booking process. Not only are the vast majority of visitors not converting, but they may be causing performance problems which will impact the experience for those that do: Think of a 3% conversion rate in a high street supermarket!

A commercial value like this provides a tangible starting point from which to have a conversation about the corresponding value of conducting customer experience work and potentially reducing this lost revenue. The premise becomes: “If we make an investment to improve our customer experience and reduce dropouts, how valuable is that to our company?”

This process can be taken further still by conducting user group research or surveys to understand the ‘Why’ factor. If 97% of site visitors dropped out between stages, what was the average order value from those lost opportunities? Would most visitors have only bought small value items, and just a few bought high value ones? Did the percentage that did complete put up with poor user experience because they were getting good value they couldn’t achieve elsewhere? Were a large proportion unwilling to put up with their experience and so simply jumped to another website?

Multivariate testing and simple A/B or split testing, can help greatly in establishing the commercial value of your online processes and user interactions. There are also a wide range of tools available that can help, from Omniture’s Test & Target, Webtrend’s Optimize, Maximiser, Google’s Website Optimizer and other developers. These generally enable businesses to create pages and sites with far more modular structures and to then work out how best to display products and services. Along with the influx of greater customisation in web design, this modularity is reducing the time and overheads associated with customer experience testing. In a couple of years, more sites will become dynamically tailored to each user. But in the meantime even subtle improvements implemented as a result of solid testing can reward you with significant improvements in your conversion rates, and a potentially huge impact on your bottom line that easily exceeds your investment in testing. It’s not unheard of to read accounts of 1400% improvements in revenue following customer experience testing.

By ignoring the potential of an investment in customer experience strategy development, your business could be missing out on large volumes of untapped revenues. It’s vital that we reach a point where businesses like yours can justify a modest investment in testing far more readily. Customer experience agencies can empower you to please your customers, but if you don’t let this happen, you risk losing those customers forever.

Back to October Newsletter

The core task of the testing required the participants to simulate a loan application process. They were asked to apply for a £25k loan in order to finance the purchase of a car. The feedback from the task revealed that the current process was found text-heavy, long-winded and of moderate length, whereas the new process was deemed more user-friendly, shorter and quicker. But surprisingly, more than half of the participants commented that they preferred the current process. The principal reason highlighted, was that going for a £25k loan was a big financial commitment that should slowly mature in the users’ mind, as they go along the application process. Participants did not expect/want to be able to take out a loan online as easily as they would pay bills or transfer money.

This shows that, even if some fundamental usability principles should always be respected, the best way to achieve a goal is not always the easiest.

This post was originally posted by Xavier Klingenfus

Multivariate testing, or MVT, is an experimentation process by which a series of possible design variables are tested at once to see what effect, if any, they have on website performance. It’s a complex form of split, or A/B testing, employing algorithm-based software and constant monitoring of web analytics data. Small changes are made to single variables (such as the position of a menu, the colour of a background) and the impact of each change is measured. From series of changes, optimum design configurations can be narrowed down as a result of measurable evidence. With MVT it is also possible to experiment with structural, business rule and database driven elements, as well as cosmetic changes. We can even employ advanced rule-based targeting capabilities, including targeting by geographic location, traffic source (such as search engine versus email campaigns), cookies, and more.

Ultimately of course, MVT is all about converting ‘lookers’ into ‘bookers’ (or buyers, players, subscribers… dependent on the business being conducted).  We want to help our clients make their sites work as hard as possible, increasing transactions by fine-tuning conversion strategy. We can do this by ensuring user experience has both a strategic and data-driven focus, and by conducting an ongoing measurement process that ensures sites are truly customer driven.

One obvious way of doing this is to use experiments that identify which parts of a given site detract from bookings, and which contribute to higher conversion rates. Foviance typically employs three concepts in its multivariate testing: variables, values and combinations. Variables are the actual elements that are tested, eg. buttons or banners. Values refer to the different permutations of those variables, such as colours, or shapes. Combinations refer to a set of variables together, and by using multivariate testing we can discover what particular combination of variables lead to the greatest conversion rates. Simple!

One of our roles as a customer experience consultancy is to add real value to raw methodologies such as MVT. We wrap the technology in many years of knowledge of users, interfaces and best practice to ensure that we deliver better results, more cost-effectively. Because we have in-depth experience to fall back on, we are able to dramatically cut the time and effort invested by our clients, reduce test variables, tie in MVT with real business objectives and actual user behaviour, and apply rule-based targeting, personas and scenarios. Also, because Foviance is technology agnostic, we can cherry-pick technologies that best suit our clients real-world needs, and have often succeeded in unlocking ROIs of 10:1 or more.

Following thorough MVT work, a business can be sure that it is targeting its online marketing budget in line with measurable data, and not simply as a result of opinions or gut feelings. Creative types within organisations may sometimes worry that testing is stifling, but are much happier if they are presented with clear data that helps guide them in their work and saves them duplication of effort. Of course that is also how higher management views such decisions too. MVT testing helps our clients develop seamless online journeys for their customers, and increased conversion is the ultimate measure of their customers’ satisfaction – not with the business’s products and services, but with the digital journey that finally convinced them to make those all-important purchasing decisions.

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In short, no, it’s not but this question regularly comes up. I recently discussed this issue with our User Experience consulants and got some consistent responses:

“Keep it as one field per line. People will be able to use the forms more easily by having one flow rather than having to read across and down. I would have thought there would be a higher instance of people missing fields with two or more rows.”

“Not only will having two drop-downs on one line look more cluttered/complicated etc, but it will be less efficient as users will have to go left to right as well as down the form.”

“A long vertical list is better as it maintains focus and reduces error rate. No official stats, but just my observations from previous testing.”

This confirmed my recommendation: Keep one field (e.g. text fields, dropdown menus) per line and think of reducing the fields on the page instead. If the form is really too long and all the fields are necessary (and most of the time they are not) the form should be split in two and have a Step 1 and Step 2.

From an accessibility point of view two dropdown menus next to each other do not violate the DDA guidelines, however, it will make the form more difficult to read.

I hope this proves useful the next time you review the layout of an online form.

Turner Broadcasting, Cartoon Network’s parent company, chose Foviance following a 3 way pitch. After completing the UK based research, the findings were fed into the Polish and Spain phases.

Linda El-Ali, Digital Media Research Director said: “Foviance brought tremendous insight to this project during the development stage and helped put into place a set of essential usability guidelines. Their approach to the evaluation sessions was well thought out, professional and allowed for our audience to engage and comment on the site while it was being developed.”

Mark Rose, Senior Business Consultant, Foviance, said: “Turner Broadcasting have delivered a solution that not only provides a more engaging experience for children to socially interact on the Cartoon Network site, but ensures their safety by giving parents governance through email notification and acceptance. The international testing carried out by us, enabled the provision of insight from three key European markets, by focusing on the overall user experience of the site.”

About Turner Broadcasting
Turner Broadcasting delivers some of the world’s most successful and well-known news and entertainment brands including CNN, Cartoon Network, Boomerang, Cartoonito, CN Too, TCM (Turner Classic Movies), and Adult Swim. The company now broadcasts 21 entertainment channels in 17 languages across approximately 100 countries in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Alongside its TV channels Turner Broadcasting is at the forefront of developing its brands via the web, VOD, DVD, gaming, mobile, merchandising, publishing and every other available platform. Turner Broadcasting is a Time Warner Company.

Press Coverage:

Sourcewire.com: Turner Broadcasting appoints Foviance to carry out European usability project
By Foviance, 30 July, 2009

Responsesource.com: Turner Broadcasting appoints Foviance to carry out European usability project
By Foviance, 30 July, 2009

Before we begin helping clients develop their websites, we try and learn as much as possible about the business, its objectives and its customers. This is because we are a user experience and research firm, not merely a design agency. Many companies will pay for a redesign that is essentially just a makeover that shuffles various content elements around to provide a new look and feel. This approach fails to measure the quality of the user experience when interacting with a website, and will miss even basic issues with navigation, such as inappropriate titles and taxonomy.

We take a user centered approach to design that examines exactly what a site needs to do to improve the experience of those who use it. We undertake benchmarking and user testing to see exactly how customers are interacting with a site. We look at competing sites in the same market as our clients, to see what they’re doing. We also study best practice sites, such as Amazon, or Flickr.

This is what we term the ‘discovery phase’. Sometimes we uncover content that a client didn’t remember it was hosting, or find long forgotten functionality that is no longer working. None of this is good practice. We conduct site audits and click on any and everything. If a site is particularly vast, we might suggest delving only as far as sections and sub-sections within the main site is the best use of time. Once we have gained a deeper understanding of what a client actually has on its site, we can begin building a site map, or an organisational chart that reveals whether all content is in its optimum place. We validate this with card sorting exercises to ensure customers are aligned with our thinking.

Think of this process as if we were taking all the goods from a supermarket out into a car park, then restack the shelves in the most logical way for customers. This is done by breaking content down into cards, Post-its, objects in online tools – it doesn’t matter as long as it makes sense when we show our thinking to a sample of real customers, this helps to establish trends of opinion. In this way we are able to either validate current structure or create a new recommended site map as a basis for the design phase.

In the design phase we use wireframes on Visio, PowerPoint or even whiteboards. At this stage we still work in greyscale, but we are able to define elements and inform navigation. A new recommended sitemap will reflect this as well as the improved taxonomy, enabling customers to find things more easily and enjoy their experience more. Multiple wireframe iterations and rounds of user testing refine the process before it is handed over to a graphic designer to lay on brand identity and image. The graphic designer benefits from the groundwork and has a purely design exercise, retaining all the navigation, organisation and content rationale of the wireframes while ensuring colour, palette and sufficient scalability.

So this is how we do User Centered Design. It’s a sound methodology that has been rewarded with many success stories. If a client comes to us with a site that isn’t performing and a set of targets, this is how we get them to where they need to be. Can a serious business afford not to do this? Well, we believe that it is vital to get user input into design and functionality of all services, otherwise redesigners aren’t informed, they are simply based on assumptions – a dangerous strategy. A business does know its customers, of course, but without user testing, these impressions can’t fail to be at least partly a reflection of internal opinions that require independent verification.

At Foviance we understand the complexities involved through experience, and know that user testing of services in the early stages will definitely save money and time – wireframes are cost-effective and easy to change compared to a finished site. Sometimes it pays to bring in a specialist. Everyone is a photographer, but can everyone take professional quality pictures every time?