Tools & Techniques

Accessibility Services

Accessibility refers to the ability for any person, in any circumstance, using any device, to access content on the web. This refers in particular to people with disabilities and is of increasing concern to organisations for moral, financial and legal reasons (in the UK, this largely falls under the 2010 Equality Act).

The W3C, the Web’s standards organisation, has defined accessibility guidelines (WCAG 2.0) LINK which are a key aspect of accessibility. An audit of compliance with these is a good starting point for ensuring accessibility of a site.
However, ensuring a truly great customer experience for people with disabilities requires the combination of technical compliance with user testing. Foviance offers a full range of accessibility services – compliance audit, expert review and user testing – to help clients achieve this.

The deliverable is an accessibility report describing the findings with severity ratings and actionable recommendations. These can also be presented in a workshop format.

Foviance also provides Accessibility training, to promote awareness of accessibility issues within a design team or across a variety of stakeholders.

Benchmarking

Foviance carries out benchmarking for various customers and against a range of requirements. Two popular methods are outlined below.

Usability benchmarking: a qualitative expert review carried out across the client’s and a pre-determined set of competitors’ sites in order to score them on usability and user experience. The review may be carried out at a general site level or concentrate on a particular area or process. It may also include an assessment of best practices.

Quantitative usability benchmarking: an investigation of a client and a pre-determined set of competitors’ performance across one or more areas, using a panel of targeted users. This may be carried out in order to identify feature requirements and corresponding priorities, or to evaluate the results of a re-design for example.

The deliverable is a detailed benchmark report.

Card Sorting

Card sorting is a research method used for informing the design of an information structure, in particular providing suggestions for navigation, menus, and possible taxonomies. It involves users ordering and sorting cards, each labelled with a piece of content or functionality, into groups that makes the most sense to them. These groupings are then analysed using exploratory and statistical methods. Card sorting can be extended to the analysis of any system that incorporates a hierarchy or classification system such as an IVR system.

Foviance has been at the forefront of the innovative use of card sorting for exploring user requirements and developing attributes for a wide range of systems types and products.

The deliverable is a detailed report describing the process with the results of the card sort. A site map or other information relevant for site design and architecture may also be an output.

Customer Surveys

Online surveys provide an invaluable source of insight in areas such as web site visitor profiles, visitor intent, task success, user satisfaction (using an indicator such as the Net Promoter Score) and requirements gathering. They can be used as standalone pieces of customer research – for example to understand whether customers’ needs are being met – or as part of a larger customer experience engagement.

Foviance’s expertise encompasses everything from small, targeted surveys to elicit feedback and direct recommendations, to large and robust tracking surveys, used to maintain a constant heartbeat check on customer satisfaction levels. We use best of breed technologies for data capture and have a specialist team for the design, deployment and analysis of online surveys.

Foviance offers a number of different online survey options across many channels, including those delivered via mobile devices, and in almost any language.

The deliverable for a survey is a detailed report of the findings, which can also be presented in workshop format.

Data Audit

In a world where close to 75% of enterprises rely on analytics data to make decisions, reliability, validity and accuracy of data are of paramount importance – yet a recent survey (source: Tagman July 2010 survey) found that 86% of marketers surveyed had implemented tags incorrectly on sites they manage while 65% had lost campaign performance data through these problems.

Marketers and business executives also often have little understanding of the sources of the data: the resulting lack of confidence in data quality can lead to capabilities being under-utilised.

In some cases, there is indeed a minor, easily fixable glitch causing a major quality issue in the data (to quote an old IT adage, “garbage in, garbage out”). To identify and fix such problems, Foviance has developed a data audit solution: consultants carry out a page tagging audit that verifies and validates the current implementation against corporate KPI requirements.

The deliverable is a report and workshop if required, detailing any issues that arise with the data collection and the configuration of the system.

Data Privacy and Cookie Audit

Updates to the European Directive 2002/58/EC on electronic data privacy (processing of personal data and the protection of privacy), are to become UK law by May 2011. To help companies prepare for a fast implementation and mitigate legal risk, Foviance has developed a ‘Data Privacy & Cookie audit’.

A thorough audit of current cookie practices is carried out for various technologies and processes (such as flash media, checkout process, emails, banner ads) across your digital properties, using a tailored automated tool to ensure thoroughness. Foviance then performs a gap analysis against the new legal requirements, and feeds the results into a detailed roadmap for evolving your company’s privacy-related governance and processes in compliance of the new legislation.

What you get:
The following are the deliverables for a Foviance cookie audit:

• Cookie usage audit report
• Advice on compliance with the new rules
• Roadmap for managing cookie processes
• Assistance with implementation

Emotional Engagement Measurement™

Emotional Engagement Measurement™ provides an objective assessment of a customers’ emotional response to a variety of brand assets, ranging from an online experience to a paper advertisement. This can be particularly useful in some specific sectors such as retail and gaming where marketing often calls on emotional leverage to gain brand awareness and increase customer engagement. It can also be used for more research oriented projects for example on ‘web stress’ (see our white paper on web stress).

Our solution combines Electroencephalography (EEG), which measures the electrical activity produced in the brain in response to stimuli, with Eye Tracking technologies which capture data points linked to participants’ gaze when the stimuli are presented. The data is collected while participants attempt tasks, carry out scenarios or are presented with brand assets in a controlled environment. The two sets of data are combined, using the criteria such as cognitive, visual and emotional attention as well as emotional engagement and an apprehension/excitement index.

The deliverable is a report providing visualisations such as heat maps and actionable recommendations for improving the user experience from an emotional perspective.

Ethnographic studies

Ethnography is a research method carried out in the context of people’s real world environments rather than in a lab. Findings from ethnographic research can identify users’ latent and explicit needs, and inform requirements for a new product or identify possible improvements.. They can help challenge assumptions about a system or product, or highlight particular issues or gaps in the overall customer experience.

Foviance offers two main types of ethnography studies: diary studies and contextual inquiry. The choice of technique will depend on the specific objectives and budget for the research.

Diary studies
Users are asked to record in detail their experiences with a particular system or product: what they did, when they did it, why and how, as well as what they thought about their overall experience. The method is adaptable to a wide range of investigations, from “out-of-the-box” experiences to longer studies across different target groups.

Contextual inquiry
Contextual requires detailed on site observation and interviewing of users, in order to obtain a more “natural” understanding of user behaviour in a real life situation. It is much more time and resource intensive, but can yield more reliable information – such as the level of criticality of an issue – as it is not self-reported.

The deliverable for an ethnography study is a detailed report, covering the the main findings from the research – analysis, excerpts of verbatims and “ah-ha” moment, diagrams, suggestions – which can also be presented in a workshop format.

Expert Reviews

Expert reviews provide a cost-effective method for gauging the overall usability of your offering. Such audits are generally used to quickly improve your offering’s general usability. These usability audits are sometimes referred to as a heuristic reviews or usability audits.

The main benefits of expert reviews are:

• Major usability issues can be identified the without performing in-depth studies
• Show-stopping usability issues can be resolved very quickly and cost effectively
• Prioritisation of areas of your offering requiring redesign

This type of usability service is ideal for:

• Companies wanting an initial assessment of how usable their offering is within a limited timeframe and budget.
• Companies looking for a high level review of their website to help inform improvements and changes.

Eye tracking

Eye tracking is used to:

• identify potential usability issues early on in the development lifecycle or on fully functional interfaces in order to improve the customer experience
• provide recommendations on design and optimum advert placement

Eye tracking is a sophisticated and rigorous quantitative tool that captures the movements of the users’ eyes across an interface whilst they are engaged in a particular task, providing access to otherwise unmeasured behaviour. Foviance can then identify what areas attract attention and in what order, which elements users ignore, or where users look if they face difficulties during a task. In addition, when correlated with data sourced through other research techniques, such as task completion time, error rate, verbal comments or memory tests, eye-tracking can provide an accurate measure of an interface’s efficiency and a detailed picture of how well users interact with it.

The deliverable is a findings report with data visualization (heat maps, gaze plots, gaze trails, cluster maps) and analysis of the data providing actionable recommendations that address the research objectives.

Focus Groups & User Groups

Focus groups are used to assess and investigate a variety of qualitative user needs, feelings, expectations or even creative processes. They can take place at the beginning of a project to identify requirements or after implementation to identify potential improvements.

Participants, usually representative of one or more market segments, engage in a discussion moderated by a highly experienced Foviance consultant. Group dynamics bring out users’ spontaneous reactions and ideas in a way one-to-one testing does not, so Foviance often recommends using both when a complementary approach is required.
Foviance’s purpose built labs enable clients to watch and listen to the group in comfort and without intruding on the proceedings.

Foviance offers different kinds of focus groups depending largely on the emphasis of the user research: traditional groups with 8 or so participants; mini-groups with 4 or so participants for more focused investigation; trios for some specific cases (such as comparing three competing services) and user groups – which can be either standard or mini – in which one or more users also carry out one or more tasks.

The deliverable is a report detailing the findings as well as highlights from the sessions, which are often presented in workshop.

Implementation

The development of an analytics measurement strategy will often identify the need for a client to either upgrade or replace some of their existing measurement systems and tools. In this case, Foviance assists with the process of selecting an analytics solution and implementing it.

In other cases, a company might already have invested in new analytics technologies but not planned ahead how to use it, resulting in significant loss of revenue as well as wasted time and energy. Foviance’s implementation services deliver a plan for leveraging these new capabilities, to increase ROI and improve business performance.
Foviance implementation services ensure that the system has been:

• implemented correctly,
• configured to produce the right reports
• integrated seamlessly with the rest of the IT systems (in particular if there are other sources of data that need to be taken into account)
• does indeed capture all the relevant data

The deliverable is a business requirements document and where relevant provides a short list of vendors. Typically consultants are then involved in project managing the vendor selection process, and as a logical follow-on, retained as a partner for service implementation.

Information Architecture (IA)

Most people have had the frustrating experience of trying to find information or products on the Internet and not succeeding. This can have a significant impact on business performance in many ways, through loss of conversions or negative social media feedback for example.

Organising and structuring vast amounts of information, features and functionality so that they are intuitive for current users and are scalable for the future is the challenge Foviance solves for clients. This helps ensure a great customer experience that will enhance business performance. We use a variety of tools, depending on the initial brief and objectives of the project. A typical example might be:

• a content audit of the current site(s)
• a content matrix, documenting and categorising the current content according to type and subject, and any new content.
• a card sort, providing a set of category labels and groupings that make up a new taxonomy that informs the complete structure of the new site.
• a site map, visually representing the new structure

Typical deliverables may include card sorting output, content matrix, and site map in graphical format.

International Usability Testing

Many companies today operate on a global scale and need to test the usability of their designs across the markets in which they operate in order to meet the needs of local cultures. Understanding local issues – whether cultural, economic or political – is critical to their success. Similarly, prototypes need to be validated before launch and new designs tested.

International usability studies are complex and Foviance has developed a particular expertise in managing multinational projects thanks to its multilingual consultants (Foviance consultants speak over 10 languages) and a network of local partners in over 50 countries. This extends to local user testing, focus groups, ethnographic studies and panel based remote user testing and surveys.

The deliverable for international User testing is a cross-country report where more than one country was involved, and one or more detailed country-specific report, containing key findings, severity ratings, various graphical representations of the data, selected quotes and actionable recommendations.

Multivariate testing & analysis (MVT)

Success online today can depend on very small variations in conversions. MVT offers a way of testing for the optimal design so that the most appropriate offer or content is served to the most appropriate audience, for optimal performance.

It is a purely data driven method for optimising a web-site, involving automated tests on a particular page or area of a site containing multiple elements. The MVT tool tests all possible combinations of elements against predefined success criteria and identifies the most successful one. To offer these benefits the tests must be well designed, correctly implemented and delivered.

Foviance MVT services offer a robust methodology to ensure clients benefit from the most appropriate technology and suitable approach given their business needs.

Personas

Personas are fictional – but realistic – character sketches, representing a “typical” user of a site or application, represented by various means such as cards, posters and profile sheets with photos.

They are built up around a name, a face (a photo), and include job, lifestyle and behavioural information drawn from user and market research (such as focus groups, interviews and surveys carried out with actual target users).

Foviance also uses market segmentation data to complement this traditional approach: the personas then highlight the different motivations, expectations and goals of the target groups of users/consumers in a way that reconciles marketing data with design.

Their use across the company has many benefits:

• Build a shared understanding of target users
• Keep the team focused on users
• Help prioritise features

The deliverable is a detailed set of personas on a slide or document with supporting documents such as cards, posters and profile sheets.

Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics can be used to tackle a variety of business challenges:

• to deliver the most appropriate messaging by online advert or email
• to predict the expected revenue return for an upcoming PPC campaign (to optimise targeting and budgeting in digital marketing)
• to develop customer segmentation

Predictive analytics uses a variety of advanced analytical techniques to exploit patterns found in historical datasets. These include research data from market research companies, transactional data from point-of-sale and behavioural data taken from web analytics solutions and typically cover key customer touch points. A data audit and technology review is carried out to ensure the data is reliable.

Foviance develops models of user behaviour by analysing the relationships within data about those users. These help predict how they will behave in the future in a particular situation.

The main deliverable is an Insight report that draws on Foviance’s deep analytics and insight expertise and includes a variety of visualisations and presents the predictive findings such as:

• Customer Lifetime Value
• Customer Attrition levels
• Customer Journeys
• Optimal Customer behavioural segmentation,
• Optimal Marketing mix (spend per channel such as digital marketing, direct mail, TV etc.)

Product Design

What sets a Foviance consultant apart from those that focus on wither physical or cognitive ergonomics in isolation, is that we can combine the two. We have the skills to investigate a product holistically by using our large, established and extensive range of research methodologies to investigate both physical ‘hardware’ and digital ‘software’ aspects of a product.

As well as being able to investigate the ‘whole’ product, we support product designers at all stages of the development cycle and not simply test a product prior to market launch.

For example:

• We investigate user reactions to new concepts at an early prototype stage.
• We look at how products are currently used in real world environments and measure users’ emotional reactions to product stimuli.
• We benchmark products to others available in the market

Remote Usability Testing

Remote testing is a relatively fast and cost-efficient method for testing users at home or at work, across local markets or hard to reach segments, in any language or time-zone. Participants can be recruited using a variety of methods and are directed to a web-based interface to carry out one or more tasks and to answer follow-up questions. Both qualitative insights and quantifiable usability findings can be collected in this way.
Remote testing is particularly appropriate for:

• Testing processes such as registration, purchasing, forms
• Testing concepts or prototypes
• Benchmarking competitors
• Getting feedback on look and feel or design elements

The deliverable is a detailed report containing key findings, severity ratings, a variety of graphical representations of the quantitative data, selected quotes and actionable recommendations.

Scenarios & Use Cases

Task-based scenarios leverage the development of the personas by placing them in a real life context. This helps bridge the gap in understanding between theoretical and actual use of the product or service, which is essential for developing websites or application that address users’ real life needs.

The deliverable is a set of storyboards, based around specific tasks determined at the start of the project.

Site map

A site map, also known as ‘flow diagram’, ‘process map’, or ‘site architecture map’, is a graphical representation of the navigation structure (groupings of content) and organisation (hierarchy of pages) of a website or application. It provides the underlying framework for site/application navigation and interaction. It is usually produced as part of the information architecture phase of a site/application development or re-development.

Using research drawn from a variety of sources – such as site analytics, card sorting, surveys or user testing – Foviance maps out the navigation structure of the site. Depending on the type of project, the site map can also highlight task-flows through defined tasks, identifying the individual steps in the task.

The deliverable is an ‘evergreen’ document – that is, an editable graphical document – which will continue to evolve during the course of a user experience design project and into the implementation phase even after delivery to the client.

Social Media Research

Social Media Research is a set of research services to help companies understand the social space in relation to their sector, business and customers. These services can help them make informed decisions about a social strategy. Social Media is a very broad subject area that encompasses a whole range of technologies and therefore research methodologies. The entire online space is social, and the way that people are communicating with each other and with businesses is changing.

Social Media research methodologies help to obtain user research to help a company gauge their presence on the social web, along with the effectiveness of any current strategy they may have. This information can then be used to guide any future social efforts.

Why do I need to understand social media?

As the ways customers are interacting with each other and with businesses are changing, these behaviours are slowly becoming normalized. Through social media, customers are beginning to expect companies and brands to be more honest, accountable and accessible. Entering the social space in a way that is appropriate for any particular company will enable it to take advantage of this growing area.

In addition to this, every company is being talked about on the internet and has a presence regardless of active participation. It is important to identify conversations, understand what is being said and then choose how to participate.

How do we do this?

The social space around any company needs to be understood from many perspectives. Foviance use a range of methodologies, including:

• User profiles
  Understanding customers in relation to social media including attitudes to social media, current and predicted future usage.
• Social listening
  Listening to conversations happening on the social web. Companies need to understand what is being said about them, where these conversations are happening. They can also look at which are the most influential conversations, and judge what conversations need to be participated in.This can be used to build brand intelligence, measure changes in brand perception, increase sales or understand how to increase engagement with customers.
• Social audits
  Understanding a company or brand’s presence in the social space, and the effectiveness of any social media implementation, using social heuristics to allow for competitive and longitudinal benchmarking.This will include the effectiveness of active participation in such places as communities and forums, but also passive participation where a company needs to understand what is currently being said about them on the internet and therefore how they are being represented online through social media.
• Social Measurement
  Understanding the effectiveness of a social media strategy is essential to know how to steer future campaigns, and to provide ROI – we have a comprehensive history with web analytics, which has been tailored towards the measurement of social media.

Usability Testing

Usability Testing provides actionable recommendations to help companies improve the ROI of digital marketing initiatives, whether through an increase in conversion, in the number of returning site visitors or in reducing calls to customer support.
Usability Testing consists of having a representative sample of users individually attempt to perform one or more typical real world tasks while verbalising their thoughts. Foviance observes and records these interactions, which provide reliable insights into how specific elements of the interface impact the quality of the user experience. In some cases eye-tracking is also used. Foviance’s purpose built labs enable clients to watch and listen to the group in comfort and without intruding on the proceedings.

This can be carried out using mock-ups and sketches or on a fully functional prototype or live web site or application, depending on the product cycle.

An ‘Express’ version of this can be carried out to fit in with Agile development cycles. Usability tests can also be administered across a wider audience using remote usability testing methods.

The deliverable is a Usability report describing the Foviance methodology, presenting the results in detail, including severity ratings, and providing actionable recommendations. Video highlights of the evaluations are available as an option. The main findings and recommendations may also be presented in a workshop format.

User journey mapping

User journey maps are a visual representation of the various paths a customer takes in his interaction with a particular product or company. This includes all of the touch-points across multiple channels that a user might engage with, all the people they might speak to, the services they might use, and the other interactions they might have.

A user journey map provides a holistic view of the whole process a customer might go through in making a purchase decision or any decision relevant to the company’s products and services (sign up, subscribe – etc.) and is usually developed as part of a situation analysis prior to, for example, developing personas.

The deliverable is a set of infographics showing these paths and interactions, usually built around key customer types.

Wireframe and Prototype Development

Wireframes are fast and cost effective illustrations of the functional elements within a page in a website or mobile device. They are low-fidelity diagrams

• representing the structure and placement of all the elements on specific templates or pages
• outlining the basic behaviour of the elements with numbered and colour-coded annotations

They are developed using research from sources as diverse as site analytics, card sorting, surveys or user testing and can be developed in parallel to creative concepts and revised easily based on feedback from iterative user testing. This helps iron out any potential usability issues that may appear later on.

Wireframes are typically delivered for all templates along with a small number of illustrative pages as a document. Depending on the brief, these can be either low-fidelity or high-fidelity, and in some cases can include an html prototype.