Red Ant Blogs

Industry Changing

Digital strategy offers brands and companies new, unique ways of engaging with their customers and audiences to a far higher level than has been previously possible. Initial faltering steps in digital marketing such as PPC and SEO are just the tip of the iceberg as to what is possible. Well conceived digital strategies and campaigns will push brands ever forward in the consciousness of their audience and lead to lasting adoption, advocacy and over time increased expectation from industries as a whole. Digital allows the model to change from an audience perspective from being a monologue to a dialogue.

What is Digital?

The following post is taken from our whitepaper *Planning and Creating a Digital Strategy*.

Process Definition

In short, digital is about finding the best way of achieving goals, normally promoting a brand or service, through electronic connected media. This could be online on the web, through specialist Internet applications or through mobile phone applications (both network and Bluetooth connections). Digital consultancy can also tie into traditional media outlets either as traditional first (bringing an audience into a digital campaign) or traditional last (by using an existing digital audience as content generators).

Emotive definition

Digital is the great equaliser and relationship builder. Humans by their very nature are communicative and inquisitive, and digital channels allow brands to interact with their audience on both levels. The level of involvement required by the audience to engage with a brand, in many cases a simple click of the mouse, shrinks the gulf between interaction and offline brand perception. Relationships with audience are the great benefit of digital. Unlikely any other broadcast medium, digital channels allow direct engagement with each member of the audience.

Definition by difference

Digital offers brands new opportunities that traditional methods cannot easily match

Digital does not obey the line
Digital can be broadcast and personalised
Digital can be reactive as well as proactive
Digital should be cost efficient
Digital should always prove returns

Planning and Creating a Digital Strategy

We are excited to announce and release a new whitepaper from Red Ant addressing Planning and Creating a digital strategy. The paper covers digital strategy from putting together initial aims, targeting audiences to ideas generation and evaluation and just a smidgen on areas to be considered for build processes.

We have decided that instead of making you complete a great big long form to download the whitepaper, we would make it available for download directly. That doesn’t mean we do not want to hear from you though; we would love to hear your thoughts on the paper either through our twitter channel @red_ant or through plain old e-mail (digital@redant.co.uk). If you enjoy this first paper, there is also part two to sign-up for which covers running and evaluating digital strategies.

Enjoy reading the whitepaper and please do let us know your thoughts. You can download the paper using the following link: Planning and Creating a Digital Strategy.

Dan Mortimer

Website Membership UX

In this article, I'm looking at website membership and how user experience can be adversely affected by poor design. By way of examples, I will be referring to two fictional (at the time of writing) websites; 'Flip Flop Fitz', an online shop selling fashionable flip flop footwear to customers in the UK and 'Bobblebook', a worldwide social-networking site for fans of bobble hats, beanies and berets.

Is it necessary?

Registration can present a barrier to conversion. People don't like to identify themselves unless they have a clear understanding of how their information will be used and what they're getting in return. They are naturally sceptical of the unknown and conditioned to be mindful of privacy and security on the Web. Why do they want my information? What will they do with it? Will they be watching how I use the website? Will I get lots of spam? Am I entering in to some sort of contract? What's in it for me?

Flip Flop Fitz has identified a number of aims which justify membership. It wants to allow repeat-customers to place orders without having to enter the same billing and delivery details each time and provide them with a record of previous transactions. It also wants to build a database of people who wish to receive promotional emails. Crucially, however, it recognises the importance of allowing non-members to browse the full product catalogue and begin the order process without interruption or obligation.

Bobblebook by contrast is a far more closed experience which requires membership almost from the start. The main feature of Bobblebook is the ability for members to share personal information through their own profile pages – the privacy of which the owner must be able to control.

If we're asking for registration, there should be a clear benefit to the user.

Expose the benefits

Rather than actively trying to sell membership to users through promotion and advertising, the benefits of being a member should be discoverable by sharing the activity of existing members or by exposing features available to them through the interface. In other words, people can see the entrance to the nightclub, hear the music and watch people having a good time through the windows before deciding whether they want to join the queue and pay the price on the door.

Flip Flop Fitz allows customers to post reviews of flip flops and give a star rating out of five. Firstly, there's no reason to demand membership just to read the reviews. On the contrary, customer reviews help users to make buying decisions and are a key sales generator. Each product page displays the average rating and a link to see all the reviews posted so far. There's also a link prompting the user to contribute a review. Everyone – visitors and members – can read all the reviews in full and see the call to action on the interface.

Bobblebook allows non-members to search for friends who are already registered, helping them to decide if it is worth becoming a member too. They can't interact with their friends without joining but they can see who's there and what sort of things they can do if they choose to become a member.

By publishing member-generated content and exposing the interfaces, both websites are advertising the benefits of membership, not hidden on a page of 'member benefits' but by subtly sharing the activity of existing members and hinting at what tools and features are available through the UI. Users can see what's available without obligation and make an informed decision about whether they want to sign-up. This builds a list of people who are definitely interested in the product, rather than a bloated database of accounts created by people just trying to find out what's being offered; people who will never return and whose details are, in many cases, probably false anyway.

Ask no questions, hear no lies

People don't like to share more information than is necessary in order to complete the task in hand. A user presented with a long list of demands for personal information is likely to 'mash the keyboard' or say what they think we want to hear, just to get past the form. We're collecting a lot of information that we think may be needed in the future, but most of it is likely to be false; it's just noise, not valuable data that can be mined for anything useful.

There is little point in us collecting information at a stage where it serves no immediate purpose, particularly if it's only released under duress. We can always collect more information later, as and when we are in a position to justify the request, demonstrate the benefits and actually make use of that information in ways that are immediately visible to the user.

Flip Flop Fitz asks for two pieces of information in order to create an account: email address and password. These two pieces of information allow the member to write reviews, save their basket, save products to a wish list and send products to friends; they can also begin the checkout process, during which they are prompted to provide additional information which is relevant at that point. Demanding billing and delivery details as part of the initial registration would be unnecessary and frankly rude.

Bobblebook collects an email address and password, but it also asks for name, gender and date of birth. These additional details are collected because they are important to the main objective of the service – allowing people to find their friends or to meet new people with things in common. Members are then given immediate access to customise their profile and share extra information if they wish.

Balance security and usability

For most websites, a simple email address and password combination is perfectly adequate for authenticating members. By using their email address as a unique identifier we avoid the user having to spend time thinking of a unique username and subsequently having to remember this for future visits.

We should try to encourage users to pick strong passwords without enforcing a complex set of requirements. The average password should be eight or more characters long and contain a combination of letters and numbers. Common words and phrases shouldn't be used on their own as they are vulnerable to automated dictionary attacks. Other than that, insisting on something "exactly twelve characters long with two numbers, a mixture of uppercase and lowercase letters, no repeating characters and one symbol" is the sort of thing that results in abandoned transactions.

Don't interrupt

So exposing member functionality to non-members is an effective way to advertise the benefits of registration, but it can also introduce an annoying side-effect by luring users into a process which they cannot complete without becoming a member.

If Flip Flop Fitz was to allow a non-member to spend time typing a review into a box on a form only to say, when they press submit, "oh, by-the-way, you'll need to be a member before you can do that", the user will be understandably miffed.

Equally, demanding that a user identifies themselves too soon is a huge barrier to conversion. On Flip Flop Fitz, the process of placing an order is a member-only system because it wants to record and reuse billing and delivery details and record the order against an account. However, the first stage of the order process – the basket – is something that should be accessible to everyone. We can't insist that visitors create an account just to browse the shop and to drop items into their basket since this is a common behaviour for people comparing prices and often leads eventually to a conversion.

Avoid demanding registration after a user has provided information or completed a task; after they have spent time doing something which they cannot benefit from without then becoming a member. If registration is required in order to complete a process or perform an action (such as writing a review) prompt for that first or integrate it at the start of process. Make sure the user is returned to their previous location or the next stage in the process after completing registration, with any data provided or changes made by the user intact.

It's a balance between exposing functionality without asking for anything in return, identifying the minimum information necessary to process a task in the most efficient and usable way and choosing the right moment to ask for that information.

Take no prisoners

If they create it, members should be able to edit and delete it. This applies to individual chunks of information and to their account as a whole and is particularly relevant to profile-based applications like Bobblebook which rely heavily on user-generated content and personal information. Particularly important is the ability for a member to control who has access to what information.

Each Bobblebook member has a profile which displays their name, age, location, photo and favourite hat, together with a list of messages posted by them and their friends. Bobblebook members can edit or remove this information at any time and have privacy options which control what information is visible to other people. They also have the ability to delete their account completely, on their own, without jumping through hoops or contacting someone for help.

Flip Flop Fitz members can also edit their billing and delivery information at any time. There is no facility to close their own account because of the transactions recorded against it, but this is an understandable restriction considering no personal information is published for other members to see.

In summary

The first thing to consider is whether registration is even necessary. If it is necessary, be sure to communicate the benefits to the user by showing what existing members have been doing and by revealing the features available to members in the UI. If users can see what membership has to offer, the database of members will be populated by people who are genuinely interested. Don't ask for more information than is necessary to complete a task and make it clear how that information is being used. Find the right compromise between exposing features without obligation and asking for information at the most appropriate and least intrusive moment. Keep members in control of their own information.

This blog post was written by Matt.

Friday Links Round-Up Number 3

Question - where are the 900,000 high-school students missing from Facebook?! http://bit.ly/3bbtZX
Social media is just one piece of the puzzle: http://bit.ly/SGvFZ
Check out Obama's "Reality Check" Facebook quiz application - http://bit.ly/2AsPiT
300 million and counting...that's almost the entire population of the US: http://bit.ly/Z3iRe
Woo hoo! Red Ant seal the deal with Filofax: http://bit.ly/1qpoFB
Popular online? Now you can cash in your followers: http://bit.ly/viQIr
Analytics fraud for fun and profit: http://bit.ly/bRTPo
Social networks affecting your health?! http://sbne.ws/r/2MQO
Nifty new Twitter app: http://bit.ly/dLbHI
Does Bing visual search actually work? http://bit.ly/i6obL
Google Earth + augmented reality = wow: http://bit.ly/i7e6n. Can't wait for this...
Social media is not new - great article with some interesting predictions for 2010: http://bit.ly/dV5Kv
Facebook now allows you to tag friends in your status and posts: http://bit.ly/UAtVI
Twitter to begin making money by end of year: http://bit.ly/mBwzb
Facebook makes you sharper but Twitter makes you thicker? http://bit.ly/qRdLc
Interesting read - the top 5 web trends of 2009 (so far!): http://bit.ly/nXxfS
New Look launches fashion social network via YouTube: http://bit.ly/brAUt
Don't get mad, get tweeting: http://bit.ly/qTljk - Brands, don't underestimate the power of the tweet ;-)
Psychologist: Facebook Makes You Smarter, Twitter Makes You Dumber http://bit.ly/zFsG3

Friday Links Round-Up Number 2

Facebook's most popular app ever? It's probably not what you think: http://bit.ly/1LmYdE
How depressing – Sainsbury’s is replacing it’s bbq stuff with Christmas goods this week: http://bit.ly/P8R0J
A 60 second movie from a 140 character Tweet?! http://bit.ly/3bgUb
Have you ever seen an $11,000.00 Tweet?! http://bit.ly/tAEe4
A quick tour of all of your options for using Facebook Mobile: http://bit.ly/qyLhc
Sony plans to put 3D TVs in homes by end of 2010: http://bit.ly/3JjzDd
App of the Week - Tweet your mobile video: http://bit.ly/17ZIFk
Young People Are Flocking to Twitter http://bit.ly/49ZYai
Yahoo! keeps Twitter-rival launch under the radar: http://bit.ly/WknEP
Some great Marvel/Disney mash-ups: http://bit.ly/gUC3Q, Love it...
Ten things you need to know about mobile applications right now: http://bit.ly/Qszx
NFL bans tweeting from the sidelines: http://bit.ly/14QScA
Twitter overtook MySpace in the UK for the first time last week http://bit.ly/x6c2C
How to get your blog posts ignored: http://ow.ly/nxBA
Twitter won't do ads, but Time.com's twitter page does: http://bit.ly/bksOj

Friday Links Round-Up Number 1

Who’s No.1 on the viral video chart? Number 4 is awesome! http://bit.ly/DMXlV
Eight Twitter habits that may get you unfollowed or semi-followed: http://bit.ly/93EoD
The Future is Now? Augmented Reality Comes to the iPhone: http://bit.ly/cx7YN
Google launches fantastic new tool - Google Docs: http://bit.ly/Esnnd.
Do You Know Who’s on Twitter? Demographics and usage habits of the microblogging crowd: http://bit.ly/2lEH6f
Why don’t teens use Twitter? Interesting insight from the New York Times: http://bit.ly/3iurZ5
Following on from our twittering teens post yesterday: http://bit.ly/1SuYGc
Will you upgrade to Snow Leopard? Here's some info to help you decide: http://bit.ly/lgxE7
Pimp your tweets with this new Twitter app: http://bit.ly/KNTi0
John Prescott launches new climate change awareness campaign today using Twitter and Facebook: http://bit.ly/y5as
"Why should I be the one to take the kids to see the their psychologist? I don't even love them!" Twitter Wit: http://bit.ly/16kCxx
Which social media channel should your business be using? http://bit.ly/17nJM4
How to manage the info 'stream' before it manages you - useful tips from Steve Rubel at Ad Age: http://bit.ly/9NYWn
Twitter Study Part Two: Continuing the Conversation | Pear Analytics http://cli.gs/JU9E9
Computers may be good at crunching numbers, but can they crunch feelings? http://bit.ly/xxkJ2
Mobile Phone Web Sites Top Online Growth In UK: http://bit.ly/oZk4W
1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media, and some other interesting facts: http://bit.ly/muIfz
Google’s worst ads ever? http://bit.ly/TR4vS
First U.S. Rehab Center for Internet Addiction Opens Its Doors http://bit.ly/lOXTj

Tweet is in the eye of the beholder

A recent study of Twitter posts by Pear Analytics (opens in new window) and reported in the BBC today reports that just over 40% (40.55%), of all tweets are "mindless babble" or "pointless babble". Conversation accounted for 37.55% and Tweets that carried what is termed pass-along value was third at 8.7%.

Whist the study techniques themselves are interesting, what strikes me a particularly interesting is who decided what was mindless babble? The example given for mindless babble was the type of post "I am easting a sandwich now"; which I admit if I didn’t know the tweeter then certainly this would hold very little interest for me. To be frank if I did know the tweeter this post would also hold very little interest for me, but does the subjective basis that it is uninteresting to me make it pointless babble?

Taking this back a step, in Twitter like most social networks I only get updates from people I am interested in. It is my choice who I follow and do not follow, so why would anyone want to follow this supposed babble? Let's change the tweet slightly to "I'm off to bed now", this certainly would all into the life blogging approach adopted in the first tweet, but I don't feel this is now pointless babble. I now know the person that I am following, probably a friend (this is social after all), is off for a nap and there is little point in disturbing them or trying to get an answer from them. Of course if I felt (subjectively), that this was pointless and there was too much of it I could since again it is my choice stop following this person.

There are lies, damned lies and statistics and some statistics especially in new media seem to have more subjective reasoning than objective. The subjective stats go beyond what is termed as mindless babble. In the same paper Gizmondo is quoted from their report launched 4th August "If only 100 people were on Twitter", this puts 50 people as being lazy (although it does qualify what lazy means on the chart). So, if I were only to use Twitter as a focused industry news service (which I find it brilliant for), fired up TweetDeck every day and reviewed what people had posted I would be "lazy", even though I am using the tool and the tool is working for my needs.

Web 2.0 statistics are for me at least quite interesting (it is my job to stay on top of these), but next time you hear a quote that sounds interesting it might be worth digging a little deeper to see how objective those statistics are.

This blog post was written by Gemma.

If you care to take a look at some of our statistics you may be interested in these Facebook user statistics.

New iGoogle gadgets - a potential social strategy tool?

iGoogle is a personalised Google page for your account where you can add 'gadgets' for news, weather, rss feeds and more, helping you to create your own web experience and easily view your regular haunts. This week Google have announced that the OpenSocial API is now available to US and Australian users, with more countries to follow.

The OpenSocial API allows a gadget to be created for any purpose, and potentially shared with your iGoogle contacts. This means that you will be able to interact with your friends directly through the gadgets on your iGoogle page. For example, you can currently install gadgets to get help with (or solve together!) the NY Times crossword or challenge a contact to a game of scrabble (sharing is done through contact lists so there is no stranger interaction).

There are a small number of social gadgets that have already been created , and we have started thinking of ideas for new ones that we can work on when the API is released to the UK. Essentially, the success of the Social Gadgets is going to depend upon the quality of the gadgets and how useful they become to iGoogle users and their contacts when staying in touch online.

At the moment the iGoogle Developer is still in formative stages, and so is part of Google Code labs.

This blog has been written by Sarah.

Facebook hits 261 million profiles and other stats

This week, we've been updating our knowledge base specifically in regards to Facebook. This threw up a few interesting facts and figures that we thought that we would share. Sources for the facts and figures are the Facebook advertising tool and Wikipedia. Although the research was only carried out yesterday (12 August 2009), given the speed of the web, this will be out of date very quickly!

First is the big number; there are just shy of 262 million profiles on Facebook. Ranked against population in the countries Facebook states it has a presence in, that is 4.5%. Iceland is top of the population-to-profiles ratio at 48.4%, Norway 2nd at 41.2% and Canada 3rd with 37.1%. The UK is in 7th place with 32.6% and the USA is 12th at 25.9%. Obviously profiles do not automatically match to people (since some people have more than one), but it gives a good indication of uptake. So, assuming no one has more than one profile, that's 1 in 2 people in Iceland, and 3 people and one leg (probably a bad photo!) out of 10 in the UK on Facebook.

The USA is top in pure numeracy of profiles with 79.5 million users. The UK comes second with just over 20 million, and third, which may surprise some people, is Turkey with 13 million profiles (17.5% of Turkey's population). The future powerhouses of the world, the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) nations, are not big fans of Facebook, with India having less than 4 million users and Brazil having 0.7% population to profiles. The reasons for this are twofold, the obvious being the relatively small number of Internet enabled within these countries when factored against their population, the second being that in these markets, Facebook plays second fiddle to localised social networks (e.g. QQ in China). Similarly, the success of Mixi in Japan means that there are only around 640,000 Facebook profiles country-wide.

English and Spanish speaking countries seem to be the core Facebook profile base – a quick tally shows over 120 million profiles from countries that have English as a primary language and over 35 million from Spanish speaking countries.

There are too many numbers to run through all of the stats, but hopefully the above provides a little insight. The top 10 listings are below:

Top ten countries by number of Facebook profiles

Position	Country	Profiles (millions)	Profiles to Population
1	United States of America	79.55	25.9%
2	United Kingdom	20.07	32.6%
3	Turkey	13.12	17.5%
4	Canada	12.51	37.1%
5	France	11.46	17.6%
6	Italy	10.4	17.3%
7	Indonesia	7.87	3.4%
8	Australia	6.47	29.6%
9	Spain	6.46	13.8%
10	Colombia	6.29	25.9%

Top ten countries by percentage of population with Facebook profiles

Position	Country	Profiles (millions)	Profiles to Population
1	Iceland	0.15	48.4%
2	Norway	1.99	41.2%
3	Canada	12.51	37.1%
4	Denmark	2.02	36.7%
5	Cyprus	0.29	36.3%
6	Singapore	1.58	32.7%
7	United Kingdom	20.07	32.6%
8	Hong Kong	2.27	32.4%
9	Chile	5.13	30.2%
10	Australia	6.47	29.6%

This blog post was written by Richard Conyard.

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Where now for the web? HTML5?

At Red Ant we pride ourselves on standards adoption, I also do so personally – if a job is worth doing then it is worth doing right. To that end there are a number of proponents at Red Ant that look at web standards and best practice including accessibility, usability and user experience.

Web Standards

Over the past few weeks standards adoption has taken a bit of a battering, with W3C and luminaries in the field having to re-evaluate where the web is going. First up is the announcement from W3C on the 2nd July that the XHTML 2 working group will not being having its remit extended beyond 2009 so they can increase efforts on HTML 5 (more on this in a bit). Now I must admit to not being much of a fan of XHTML 2; a lot of the work seemed to be focused towards print and seemed (sorry W3C), somewhat ivory towered. For some one that at time of last review worked daily with XHTML 1, some of the sections seemed plain wrong, but it was still a work in progress.

XHTML 2

One of the areas that was good about XHTML 2 was the X part, XML. For those of you that just want your websites to look right, the whole XHTML / HTML debate can seem very trivial. Throw out comments such as "tag soup", "well formedness", "mime-types", etc. mean very little when you're either seeing the page without any difference or looking at an XML error if strict processing is employed. For developers and a smooth push into a slightly more intelligent web, things are different however and these throw out comments become important. Their importance derives not from people viewing web pages, but from machines viewing web pages; if a web page follows the set of rules laid out in XML, programmers like me can quickly pull relevant information from the page to build advanced behaviour in applications. Also XML supports extension (namespaces), that allow further information and meaning to be embedded in the document without changing how it looks.

HTML5

I don't believe XHTML 2 will have many serious mourners, but some of the principles that it engendered will hopefully remain and the baby will not be thrown out with the bathwater. And some of them do remain in the shape of HTML5. From my understanding HTML5 can be (but does not have to be), well formed. So the king is dead, long live the king? Not quite, not all is happy over in HTML5 land either. Various web standards luminaries have written on the subject (external links open in new windows):

The posts above go into the details far better than I can. From my experiences of the HTML5 specification process (I'm on one of the W3C HTML working group e-mail lists and used to follow WHAT-WG), it has been potentially one of the most open of processes. This is good because it encourages participation and is also bad since a lot of contributors enter with a singular agenda in mind. It seems to have proven fraught, regular squabbles on the lists are more reminiscent of playground fights than a technical process (I am surprised that Hixies cat has any hair left, let alone Hixie).

HTML4

So the future isn't clear at present, so we stay where we are? On SitePoint today James Edwards, posts "HTML4 considered harmful". HTML4 is the last agreed recommendation of HTML, it's over 10 years old and according to James it's now past its sell by date.

Confused?

Who would try to follow web standards! Red Ant will continue to work with XHTML 1, with our mishmash of tag soup to maintain Internet Explorer compatibility for the time being until things become a little clearer. The one thing that is clear is that the chief winners in this debate at present are proprietary standards such as Flash and Silverlight who's cases grow stronger the longer the debate continues.

Red Ant are leaders in building accessible compliant websites and will always advise our clients of the best practice techniques even when there is so much hype on new technologies.

This blog post was written by Richard Conyard.

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Yahoo goes with a Bing!

Firstly, sorry for my terrible pun, secondly; what a turn up for the books? Or maybe Yahoo & Bing setting a 10 year search deal is just a surprise that wasn't really. I’ll be keeping a very close eye on the news on this one, but for now, a few of my thoughts.

With Yahoo and Bing now joining forces to tackle the presence of Google in search, we should be able to assume that marketers can expect some great offerings with their combined knowledge and offerings. The search market could remain at a steady-ish 80% for Google in the UK or in the US 70% to Google and 30% to everyone else, but this could also be a good dent in Google’s share.

Maybe this has been a long time coming? With Yahoo shutting down the european content match in the spring, and Microsoft launching the new search engine, Bing, is yesterday’s announcement the culmination of a master plan constructed in initial talks all those months ago?

For marketers at least, there will be one less platform to worry about as adCentre from Microsoft will serve the paid search marketing across both networks. With a desktop editor and easier to use platform than Yahoo Panama, I think that I am not alone in giving a little Schumey jump knowing that I will no longer have to deal with the slightly clunky Panama platform, but I am still intrigued as to how the networks will work with marketers to get over the hurdle of campaign combining?

One thing is for sure, we probably will be seeing a number of new products released into the market for search over the next twelve months that may switch marketers over, but what about search consumers? The Bing launch had more of a fizzle than a roar after the first week and Yahoo have been limping along for some time now - can they combine their powers to overtake Google's popularity? Or even take a share of their devoted market? Will the scriptwriters stop using phrases such as “Google it” and replace it with, “see what Yahoo has”?

This blog post was hand crafted by Sarah.

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Website design and build

Quite often we web designers tend to jump straight to the technicalities of website design when talking about the nuts and bolts our industry. The rest of this rather long post (taken from our upcoming digital strategy white paper) will hopefully explain some of the areas we talk about from a slightly higher level.

Creative Design

The creative design process usually starts with a brief from the client. If there is a brand established already, that provides both inspiration and a certain level of constraint on ideas. A website is a representative of its company and the design needs to communicate the personality and values with continuity to its other marketing material.

By combining colour, shape, typography, photography, graphics, sound and video, a designer creates an atmosphere and a consistent identity, providing a framework to support the functionality and content that will eventually complete the experience.

Functional Design

One of the key techniques in functional design is 'chunking' – breaking a system into smaller modules and features. Not only does this make complex systems and processes easier to comprehend and memorise, it makes it possible to zoom in to particular components and spend time identifying low-level problems that might otherwise be missed. This object-orientated approach also allows individual components to be combined or integrated into larger processes, without duplication or unnecessary redundancy.

A functional specification is neither a creative brief nor a technical specification. It shouldn't dictate design or worry about how the functionality is implemented by the developer. The purpose of a functional specification is to describe – primarily from a user's point of view – the individual modules, features, inputs and outputs of the system, together with the logic that constrains them and the relationships that link them.

User Experience Design

User experience design is a subset of experience design with a focus on digital interactive products, including software applications and websites. By combining the outputs of creative and functional design activity – adding the disciplines of accessibility, usability, information architecture, interaction design, user interface design and contingency design – a positive, valuable and consistent experience can emerge.

It is important to recognise that user experience is a key part of branding. Good user experience increases conversion rates by generating trust and encourages both loyalty from existing users and new traffic from viral referrals.

Accessibility

Web accessibility is about designing content and functionality that is accessible to people with disabilities, including sight, hearing and speech; physical, cognitive and neurological disorders.

The Web provides a gateway to all kinds of content and services, and crucially, has the power to enable people with disabilities to access these resources with a level of freedom and independence that would otherwise be impossible.

In the UK alone there are an estimated 8.5 million disabled people with a combined spending power of up to £50 billion. The number of users with some form of disability is constantly growing due to the increasing older population with a desire to venture online for the first time or to continue doing so.

Essential in designing accessible Web applications is understanding what disabilities people have and what technologies (screen readers, refreshable braille displays, magnification, voice-recognition, etc.) they use to facilitate access to digital content. By recognising the needs of these users and predicting problems that they may face, designers can remove barriers and develop solutions that make their interaction an easier, more enjoyable – and most importantly, inclusive – experience.

Usability

A usable product is one that is practical and efficient. Contrary to popular belief, usability and user experience are not one and the same. Usability is just one part of the overall experience a user has when interacting with a website. Usability has a narrow focus on utility and efficiency and must work in harmony with the other aspects of UX in order to generate the positive feelings, emotions and attitudes that are so crucial in attracting users and keeping them satisfied.

Information Architecture

The Web is an incredibly diverse resource of information but unless it is organised in a way that is both logical and efficient, any value it may hold is lost. This is the job of the information architect – to recognise patterns in information, group related items according to a taxonomy that users can understand and provide sensible routes through that information.

Users and other stake holders can be involved in the IA process through a range of activities, including card sorting. By asking a number of users to arrange and categorise a series of cards, each representing a subject or an individual piece of content, it is possible to identify trends in the way people expect information to be structured.

Interaction Design

Commonly referred to as IxD, the interaction design process answers questions about how users (and other systems) enter information and receive output from an application. Ignoring the functional interfaces that control the interaction, IxD specifies the logical actions and exchanges that happen during a process.

For example, in order to process an order, a website will firstly need to interact with a customer. The customer requests details of a product and the website displays the relevant information. The customer requests that the product be added to their basket and the website records that request. During the checkout process, the website must interact with a payment gateway to request authorisation and understand what to do with the response. Once payment is made, the website needs to inform the customer and also exchange information with another stock management system. Each of these interactions, and all possible permutations and outcomes, must be designed.

User Interface Design

Not to be confused with interaction design, UI design is concerned with the layer that sits on top of and facilitates the abstract inputs and outputs between user and system; it's about levers, switches, dials and flashing lights. With a solid understanding of the conceptual interaction model and processes, it is possible to design interfaces that empower users to discover and perform those interactions and to receive the output in ways that are both efficient and enjoyable.

The interaction between a user and a vending machine is designed such that the machine releases a particular product in response to a corresponding number inputted by the user. However, the method by which that interaction takes place – how the user actually makes their selection and inputs the number – is a question for the UI designer.

On the Web, UI designers must consider everything from the position of the main navigation menu to which types of controls are most appropriate to collect information on a form. They must balance their decisions between facilitating the required interactions and providing an accessible, usable and enjoyable experience.

Contingency Design

There will always be situations where a user makes a request that the system is unable to answer or performs an action that goes against how the system was designed to work. Leaving form fields blank, requesting a page that doesn't exist, making a spelling mistake when performing a search or trying to buy a product that is out of stock are all examples of how users could challenge a system.

By predicting these challenges and proposing solutions to either prevent or deal with the problem – by answering the 'what if...?' questions – it is possible to find solutions that add value to failure and maintain a positive user experience.

Quality Assurance

It is crucial that a product and the thinking that shapes its design are tested, not only just before launch, but throughout the development process. Effective QA is about asking the right questions, understanding what the correct answers should be and identifying where faults exist or where things could be improved.

When testing a complex interactive product such as a Web application, the first questions should reveal whether the system is even ready for further testing. Does it actually work? If the product isn't usable on even the most basic level, real functional testing cannot begin.

The next stage is to test the implementation against the specification; to compare what has been built against what was envisaged in heads and described on paper. If things are different, are they better than had been designed? Most importantly, have the requirements been satisfied and the business objectives met?

Finally, test the boundaries and try to break it. Using a similar technique to that employed during contingency design, and based on the failures designed during that process, it's possible to predict both 'reasonable' and 'unreasonable' challenges that the product might face and evaluate how it responds to those challenges. What happens if a user enters a date in the wrong format, or they use words instead of numbers? What if they try to input JavaScript or SQL queries? Test performance with a reasonable 1,000 and an unreasonable 10,000 concurrent users (or whatever numbers are appropriate for each project) and discover what it takes to cause the system to become noticeably slow, or to fail completely.

This blog entry was written by Matt.

Transposing Maslow's Needs Hierarchy to Digital

The following is from the forthcoming digital strategy white paper, please check out this site in the coming weeks to download a copy.

From his work as a clinical psychologist, Abraham Maslow devised a model for explaining the essential needs for healthy psychological development. Maslow's hierarchy of needs are used in building motivational routes by a number of different disciplines.

Maslow's needs hierarchy can be used to rate the engagement of each idea from the brainstorming session. Each particular idea may only reach certain level within the hierarchy of needs when based against the audience requirement.

Deficiency Needs

Deficiency needs are those that must be satisfied to ensure the ideas (or individuals), existence and security. Unless the idea comprises of a very small part of a channel the deficiency needs must be met for the idea to be even moderately successful.

Physiological / Functional Needs

Physiological needs are elements such as food, water and air, the most basic of all needs for a human to survive. These have their corresponding needs when evaluating ideas, do they meet the aims or part of the aims of the digital strategy. If these functional needs are unsatisfied an individual's actions will be dominated by attempts to fulfil them opening up a second set of needs or more often than not causing the individual to move on.

Safety Needs

In Maslow these needs relate to obtaining a secure environment in which an individual is free from threats. Transposing these into digital ideas there is a direct parallel in security, but also the factor of the barriers to entry to consider. Does the idea make the audience jump through a number of hoops and assumptions to be of any value?

These digital safety needs are most often unmet when the idea is closely aligned to internal brand perception and not audience aligned.

Social / User Experience Needs

Social needs are the needs for friendship and interaction within the physical world. In the digital world these are mirrored initially over user experience, not the more obvious parallel of social media networks. This is due to the role of digital and the expectation of the audience, otherwise to hit these criteria every idea would have to be through a social media network. The interaction in this place is between the audience and the idea.

Growth Needs

For Maslow growth needs are concerned with personal development and realisation of an individual's potential. Within the digital strategy sphere the individual is replaced with the aims of the digital strategy and audience progression and / or evolution to these aims.

Esteem Needs

Esteem needs include within Maslow the desire for achievement, prestige, recognition as well as the appreciation and attention from others. Ideas can be rated against these (consider the games and quizzes on Facebook), to see what return a member of the audience receives from the effort they will be expected to put in.

Self-Actualisation / Engagement Needs

This is the ultimate goal, the achievement of complete satisfaction by an individual successfully fulfilling their potential. In rating these ideas these are essentially ideas without barriers that allow the audience to move from being inactive participants to being influencers and advocates and physiologically partners in pushing the digital strategies aims.

This blog entry was written by Richard Conyard.

If you liked this blog you may be interested in the following posts:

Colour, its importance and influence on your brand identity.

Colour can say a lot about your business and it is important to recognize the impact it has upon your brand.

Whether you realise it or not, colour has a big part to play in our day-to-day lives and this is an important factor to consider when taking on any branding project. For instance, when you travel in a car, colour gives us all references for the information we need to get where we need to be and also to navigate the roads in a safe manor. A red light will signal you to stop and green to go, a blue sign on the motorway or will give you information on where you are and what is ahead, signs with red trim will signal a precaution, such as a gradient, or regulatory details on the road, such as the speed limit in that area. Details of engineering work are signalled in yellow, public attractions are signalled by white text reversed out of light brown signs, a green sign indicates a primary route (such as 'A' roads) and all signs in our towns and cities that are not part of a motorway or primary routes are in the traditional black on white.

Colour Theory

You may muse that over time, we have conditioned ourselves to what these colours mean, but to the contrary, the colours, symbols and even the fonts were meticulously considered to convey the information that was adorned upon them. Indeed the major factor in the production of road signage was the use of colour to indicate directional, regulatory or warning signals.

The basis for these considerations into how to colour code our signage system dates as far back as 1810, when a German Poet and Government Minister, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, documented the purely psychological effects of colour in his book, The Theory of Colours. This was followed some 20 years later by The Law of Simultaneous Colour Contrast, written by French Industrial Chemist, Michel Eugène Chevreul. Both books would form the basis of what is considered to be modern colour theory.

As the theory of colour further developed, the meanings and associations of which we relate to today were defined and articulated. For the most part, colour symbolism and psychology does vary with time, place and culture. For instance, in Western Culture, red can symbolise danger or a warning, yet we also associate it with love and Valentines day is awash with red, entirely opposite ends of the scale to each other, whereas in the East, red ranges from the colour of luck, purity, integrity, to mourning and indeed communism, again, at completely different ends of the scale entirely. It is, however, these observations of colour and its effect on our psyche, which we must consider carefully when choosing colours to represent ourselves as businesses and organisations.

Getting it right

More often than not, getting it right should be a matter of common sense for the most part. For instance, if you look at the way restaurants use colour, you will notice that the colours used will generally speak to the audience that frequent such establishments. If you look a restaurant aimed at the children's or family market, these are usually use bright and non-confrontational colours to express their brand, as they want to a) associate themselves with their market/audience and b) create an environment in which appeals to children. Similarly, if you go to the other end of this sector and look at À la carte restaurants, they tend to use a much more subdued palette, the bright reds of the children's restaurants become regal looking burgundies, and vibrant yellows become an understated ecru, and so on.

So as well as choosing the right colour, tone is also an important factor, as this can ultimately determine character and can stand to reinforce the language or the messages of your business. For instance, if you were to brand a business that deals mainly in an environmental capacity, such as renewable energy or recycling, you would naturally (pun intended) want to use what we call ‘earth' tones, which are colours and tones that are synonymous with the outdoors and occur naturally in abundance, whereas a manufacturing firm would choose a palette that relates to their product, such as bright and colourful colours to represent plastics.

Understanding your audience

Essentially, getting it right has a lot to do with the public perception of the industry you operate in, and it is important to grasp this. There are of course exceptions to this as there are a number of industries that you could consider neutral in terms of colour, such as insurance or law, which have very little to go on in terms of defined colours that represent the industries as a whole, but none the less, both of these sectors must consider colour carefully. In the case of insurance, it is important that trust and friendliness is conveyed throughout the brand, and similarly for law firms, trust is a key factor, but also both power and stature need to be expressed to reinforce this trust in a legal sense. So where colour isn't a key or predetermined factor, tone usually is.

Getting it wrong

As well as an understanding of your audience, you must also try to not let personal preference or any feelings of your own towards certain colours, positive or negative, sway your decision on the process of determining a colour scheme to represent your brand. You may feel this is quite a common sense approach, but I think you would be amazed at just how many brands I have dealt with during my career that were completely misrepresenting themselves colour-wise, simply because it was the MD's favourite colour, or the boss' daughter thought it was fetching. I wish I was joking. Probably the best example of this that I have encountered, was when my career was in its infancy, I was given a job to do advertisements for a firm that, without giving too much away, manufactured heavy duty building material to the housing industry. Given that their target audience was a very male-dominated environment, and the nature of their product, I probably could have been forgiven for the look on my face when I was handed their corporate brochure, 90% of which was covered in what was the brightest magenta I've even seen, in complete seriousness, it would not have looked out of place in a Barbie display. I later discovered that the wife of the MD at the company in question had insisted on it, and I was not surprised by that at all.

Points of reference

So, just how do you determine which colour and tone is right for your brand?

A good place to start is taking a look at your competitors or other businesses within your industry, gather enough material together and you should see a common theme in the colours and tones of these brands. This information should give you a good point of reference to start from, but from there, you may want to dig a little deeper and research colour theory, as there are few other factors to take into consideration, like the use of complementary and contrasting colours, both of which can add an extra dimension to any brand. An excellent reference point for colour theory in relation to design principles is Josef Albers 1963 publication, Interaction of Colour, a book that is still widely used in teaching design and a reference to artists & designers alike to this very day. The book contains many theories on how colours are governed by an internal & deceptive logic, despite how complicated that sounds, it is very well articulated on in the book and it is easy enough to grasp the concepts therein.

Conclusion

I hope the above gives you some wider understanding of colour in relation to branding and the importance of the effects that colours have on the human psyche, but to conclude, do remember the steps you need to take to determine what colour is right for your brand. Take a look around you, observe your industry as a whole and use this as a point of reference to start from. Then, dig a little deeper, find sound reasoning and form a conclusion from that. But, most importantly of all, try not to let personal preferences creep into the equation and approach the subject of colour impartially.

This blog entry was written by Tim.

Tim's first brand alignment series article

Digital marketing and conversion - Test it and see

As digital experiences and technologies become a larger part of our everyday lives, consumer expectations are gradually becoming bigger, faster, richer and more and more personalised. Within this morphing landscape no digital technique is ever set in stone and in order to keep up with these expectations, companies and brands need to adapt.

This is one reason why I love working in digital; it's never the same strategy, the same approach. Every brand/company is individual with different products, different target markets, in the same way every consumer is individual and has different wants and needs. Add to this unstable environment the fact that the majority of the big players have only truly been actively marketing in the digital space for around 10 years, and you have a marketing discipline which is in its infancy, as well as in constant flux.

These factors contribute towards the fact that there is no equation you can create to help you see which digital strategy/approach will work best for your brand. The only way to truly know if a planned approach is right is to test it and see.

The big brother of digital marketing

Web analytics, or as I like to call it the 'big brother' of digital marketing, provides the insight you need to help you test and refine your activities and therefore make the right decisions. The implementation and testing of different tactics or tools and the measurement of consumer response using analytics helps you see how effective the marketing tools are in driving the consumer to your final end goal, whether that be to purchase, to capture data or to engage with your brand. With this insight into customer behaviour, you can test and refine to ensure that every decision made is inline with what customers actually want and not just what you think they want.

Test, analyse, refine

To get the best use of out analytics, you need to test, test, test. Every decision made should be tested, analysed and refined. Here are a few step by step examples of how you can test and refine in all aspects of digital marketing (there are many more):

On page creative/landing page testing

Google Optimiser can be used to test how users respond to changes in the overall look of a page.
1. Choose which web page to test - use analytics to pick out the under performing areas of the site (e.g. high exit rates or low conversion).
2. Create different versions of sections of your landing page to test.
3. Install optimiser code.
4. Preview and review test combinations.
5. Use Google website optimiser to run A/B testing variations on the page design against the original.
6. Multivariate testing can be carried out in the same way. It allows you to test many variations in the content of a page simultaneously. This should be used to test multiple content changes in different parts of the page.
7. Analyse results – which test has the highest click through/conversion.
8. Implement the most successful design/content.
9. This method can also be used to test landing pages for advertising such as pay per click or banner advertising.
PPC landing page and creative testing
1. Use your paid search platform to split test ad creative.
2. Test the response by looking at click through and conversion rate of various different PPC ads with different copy e.g. 'free P&P' message versus '10% discount'.
3. You can also use PPC to test the response to different keywords in the view to spending time optimising them for SEO.
Email marketing creative and subject line testing
1. The 80, 10, 10, test strategy is a great, quick way to test and refine your email communication strategy.
2. Split your total database into three segments (a number of email service providers offer easy segmentation); send the first two segments emails with the same content, but different subject lines.
3. For a quick test, leave for a few hours and check back on the open rates. Time can be increased dependent on how defined you need the results to be. You can test punctuation, length, capitalisation and call to action this way. E.g. 'Mid season sale now on!' Versus 'Don't miss final clearance'.
4. This is also an excellent way to test email design by sending different creative to the segments with the same subject line, content and links but different look and feel/design. Measure click through rates on each and send the successful one out to the remaining database.
5. Even unnoticeably small increases in open rates and click rates using these methods e.g. 0.2% a week can gradually equal a 2-3% increase in one year; this will also have a direct impact on transactions.

Digital marketing is all about tactics. Being so close to a company/brand/product it's easy to just assume that you know what your customer's wants and needs are. You may be following a hunch or an idea you believe will work. However without actually stopping to look at what they actually respond to, you could be venturing down a long road to poor conversion and low engagement.

Be proven wrong

Testing should be an integral part of your digital strategy it not only provides you with the insight to make the right decisions, but essentially puts the decision in the customers hands, the page/email/advert can be optimised to how they want it to look and work and isn’t that what everyone online strives for – keeping the customer happy?

I have chosen to end this post with a recent Tweet from the analytics guru, Avinash Kaushik. I think this sums it up nicely...

"The greatest gift you get from the Internet is the ability to be proven wrong fast. Be grateful. Use it."

This blog post was written by Gemma

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Improving Online Sales through Social Engagement

As we all know the online world is a fast paced technology and in order to succeed and continue growth, it is essential to keep up with latest technologies and marketing tools. These tools will enable the increase in brand awareness that is needed to improve online sale and business opportunities, especially in the current climate.

I hope to give you an insight into how this can be achieved and the steps you must take to ensure your campaign is successful.

More for their money

Right now, customers are looking for more than just the cheapest products – they are looking for the best value. Do they get after sales support? Do they receive rewards for loyalty? Do they feel like they are an integral part of the business?

It is a well known fact in the marketing world that it is at least 5 times as expensive to continually attract new customers as it is to retain you current ones. This means we all need to be stepping up to the challenge to ensure our customers feel needed and respected, we can now do this by talking to them. Before you engage with your customers you must know the following:

Who you are – A brand identity must be used clearly, consistently and effectively. It must be a true representation of your brand and it must be reflected throughout all campaigns to ensure there is no brand confusion. It also depends upon the next point...
Who you are talking to – Without knowing who you are targeting you will not know their 'language' or which channels of communication are going to be best.
What you want to achieve – know your KPIs so that you can measure the success of a campaign during and after.
Where your brand exists – Ring fencing your brand is hugely important and there are tools such as KNOWEM which will essentially search 120 social media sites for your brand and tell you where it is being used. It is important you register you user name in these places so that nobody else can, even if you do not plan on using that particular social site.
Where your audience are – there are so many social media sites out there that you need to spend time finding out how much of your target audience are on which social media sites and how effective your campaign is going to be.
How to engage genuinely – "It's hard to shake somebody's hand while reaching for their wallet" Griner, 2009. Be patient and get to know your customers and the sales will follow, do not pretend to be interested and then bombard with generic offers and new products.

More for your time

With social media you cannot set it up and expect it to work alone. You will need to update content and reply to people if you want this to work.

Some feedback may not be positive, but prove how pro-active you are as a company and let people know how you will resolve the issue. Remember you must also acknowledge the people that are positive about your brand so that they remain loyal to you.

If you spend the time you will create the buzz you're looking for around your brand and begin to increase the loyalty to your brand from your customers. If you’re interested in finding out how you may be able to work out the resource time you may need, then read Paul's blog on planning time for social engagement.

Loyalty is a psychological state which triggers an emotional attachment to a brand, product or service. This often means that they will be willing to pay a little extra as they believe they are valued and respected by the brand itself and that they are getting something extra out of the relationship compared to another brand. Once loyalty is established it is potentially very difficult for competitors to break that relationship.

It is also possible to cross sell on social networks, but you must not be pushy – remember that quote I mentioned above at all times! We developed an application for Scalextric on Facebook, which enables people to buy from the Scalextric website quickly and with ease.

More than just social networking sites

Other ways of engaging with your audience include:

Blogs
Competitions
Email marketing (personalised)
Games
Videos
Downloads
Membership/loyalty schemes

These elements still require a lot of time and strategy to ensure that they are relevant to your brand and your target audience.

These elements can encourage people to spend more time on the website and then they are far more likely to investigate into the website further.

And there you go...

Once you have established the wants and needs of your target audience and spend the time with them and keeping them interested they are far more likely to spend online and go on to repeat purchase. You must invest your time and really do your research to ensure that your brand awareness increases and you have a loyalty base to get those online sales increasing.

This blog entry was written by Emma.

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Print brand alignment and the art of keeping it simple.

Keep it simple. It sounds so easy, yet in an age where the face of business shows over many mediums, it is much easier said than done.

Your brand is the face of your business and, ultimately, it is important that whenever your brand is seen, a connection is made between the style and the name. This is essentially the theory, but how do you put this into practice?

Well, the first thing to do is take a look at your brand as a whole, find a piece of advertising (print, web banners and, for some, television), copies of your stationery, a screen-grab from your website, a company brochure or leaflet, email signatures, physical banners such as exhibition or large format print and any other branded media you have (like pens, mouse mats, etc.), basically, anything with your logo on, grab a copy and collate it all together. Now, when this material is in front of you and in one place, the important thing is to think objectively, perhaps even involve a third-party not connected to your business or unfamiliar with it altogether. Look at all of these things in the one place and ask yourself whether any of it looks disjointed. Does any of it look out of place? Does it all sit together comfortably? Are there common elements the tie it all together? The answers to these questions will tell you if your brand is properly aligned or not, the reason I mention involving a third party is that sometimes these things may not be obvious to you, especially as you will inevitably spend most of your working days around this material.

Certainly from my experience, I have found that it is not that uncommon to find that the web and digital side of your brand to appear very different to the offline/print material, I feel this is simply down to the speed in which technology has progressed and what is achievable that was not 5-10 years ago. A lot of time and resource has been put into keeping up with technology and digital trends, that it stands to reason that the areas of branding offline have been left behind to an extent, but none the less, aligning these elements is just as important to the overall brand. So, if you do find that there is a definite divide in you online and offline brand, don't be disheartened at all, it is easily rectified and can be done over time, rather than in one fell swoop and indeed at great expense. The thing to remember when doing this is be clear on what you are following, is your online presence the blueprint for your brand? Or does your offline material reflect your brand style more effectively? Pick something and follow it through, it's as simple as that.

If you are unsure of how this is done, or you need an idea what an aligned brand looks like, then look no further than the big brands and in particular, the brands of the large supermarkets. I use this as an example as these brands must align themselves so meticulously, as there are so many elements to their businesses, the brands are conveyed over their literature, television and web & print adverts, over their websites, through their stores and on their vehicle livery etc. There really are a myriad of elements to these brands, yet if I pick up a leaflet and hold it up to a point of sale stand in-store, a delivery lorry, their website, a piece of external signage or perhaps even a carrier bag, there is a correlation between them all, there are common elements that make these appear part of a family and this is what you must strive to achieve when aligning a brand.

As well as knowing what to do, it is also important to understand why this is crucial for any business, no matter how big or small, and the reasons are simple matters of human nature and psychology. In a nutshell, it is all down to how we recognise each other as people, you will pretty much always associate a face with a name and a voice, people may change appearance, but the common elements remain unchanged and this familiarity and association is a big part of our lives. To put this into perspective, imagine how strange things would be if people swapped names and voices, not only would it be massively confusing, but you'd barely recognise anyone, as recognition is a complete package, you see the face, hear the voice and the name springs to mind. Essentially, this recognition is what all of the major brands strive to achieve and indeed why brand alignment and continuity is of paramount importance to any company or brand.

So, in conclusion, remember the steps, scrutinise, be objective and seek a third-party opinion. Use an element or your most consistent style as a foundation and use this as your guide, think of the material you produce as a family when undertaking the process and, most importantly, don’t lose sight of the importance of brand alignment.

This blog entry was written by Tim.

Desire paths

Desire paths in the real world

From Wikipedia:

A desire path (or desire line) is a path developed by erosion caused by animal or human footfall. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination.

Desire paths show how people think and interact with an environment or a product in a real world situation. They highlight differences between what a designer expected to happen and what people really want. People won't follow a path if they can find a better way.

There are a number of anecdotal examples, often featuring university campuses, where architects and developers allow people to wander freely, creating their own paths across the landscape, before adopting the most popular routes and adding lighting and a walking surface.

Desire paths on the Web

Just as on university campuses, people want to do the things they want to do and get to where they're going as quickly and as easily as possible. But how do we spot the desire paths in the absence of actual wear and tear? In a controlled usability testing environment we can use eye tracking to see where users are looking and record video and audio of their behaviour. Outside the lab, we can record clicks to produce a heat map and analyse traffic statistics to understand movement throughout the website.

If we have an understanding of how users behave in the wild, we can adapt our design to match this behaviour. On a very basic level, we could remove items that are rarely used or change the order of menu items based on the frequency with which they are clicked, putting the most popular items first. This could be done based on a trend demonstrated by all users or for individual users, personalising each user's experience to match their own behaviour.

E-commerce

So how can we apply these principles to, for example, e-commerce? We want to provide an easy route to the products that our customers want to buy. As well as observing how users move through a website, we have the benefit of being able to analyse their purchases. This means that in addition to listing products in order of most viewed, we could also present the most popular based on number of sales. For each product, we could also show which other products were viewed or purchased by other users. On a very basic level, we are making dynamic, short term changes to the website based on users' desire paths — albeit very abstract paths.

Folksonomy

It's not just about traditional navigation. The concept of desire paths can be extended to other forms of collective intelligence. One prominent example to emerge from Web 2.0 is tagging — attaching keywords to chunks of information to build a social taxonomy. By exposing the tags chosen previously, emphasising those used most frequently, we can encourage others to follow the same pattern and allow a set of conventions and a controlled vocabulary to develop naturally.

When creating a new bookmark at Delicious, the user is presented with a list of relevant tags from their own collection, together with a list of popular tags used by other members with the same bookmark. They can see what they've done before and they can see what other people are doing, but crucially they still have the freedom to go their own way and create new tags – to create their own paths to the information.

Learning from users

In the early days of Twitter, there was no way to send a reply. Without instruction, users found a solution. They started prefixing their tweets with @username if they wanted to direct a message to a particular person. The pattern became a convention and was ultimately adopted as an official feature which has now evolved to be one of the most fundamental parts of the service. Can you imagine Twitter without conversations today?

The point being, our users are a great source of intelligent design ideas. There is no better usability test than releasing a product into the wild, observing the problems that real users discover and the ingenious solutions they devise – particularly when people work together as a team.

In the short term we can design interfaces that adapt dynamically in response to the behaviour of our users. In the long term, we can analyse their behaviour and draw conclusions which can then influence our designs for the better at a more fundamental level.

This blog entry was writen by Matt.

The evolution from website design onto social engagement and digital strategy

The industry has moved, the key ideologies that this current stage of digital strategy and website design will impart are that:

it is no longer acceptable for a brand to wait for the audience to visit
brands must communicate to prosper
positive engagement snowballs, arrogance creates stagnancy

The evolution of audience expectation is increasing at a rate of knots and the whole website design, digital strategy game needs to keep up.

Is Website Design Dead?

From leading consultancies and agencies that deal in digital marketing, there has been over the past 6 months a downturn in the importance that is afforded to website design. Far from hailing the death of website design; a centralised company / brand / campaign presence on the Internet is still as important for digital marketing as it was 10 years ago.

The shift in focus is because audiences have now evolved to a degree where digital strategies can be put in place that expand beyond a single presence, channel or technology. Whilst audiences use the web; websites will be an important component in any digital strategy, but as with most things in life it is about selecting the right tools for the job.

What are the right tools for the job?

Before selecting tools the job needs to be ascertained. The job in most instances that Red Ant deals with is the communication of a campaign or brand to their audience. There are a number of tools available the mixture and use would change for every digital strategy, some of these are:

Targeted Microsites
Facebook fan pages (groups at present to not afford the same level of function or analysis)
Twitter channels
MySpace and Bebo pages
Mobile applications along with standard mobile routes (SMS, geo-targeted SMS, Bluetooth, etc.)
Crowdsourcing
Search term creation and seeding

And there are so many more (anyone for persona aligned Spotify playlists?).

It's called the web for a reason

As well as being one of his cheesiest lines, Paul hit the nail on the head when discussing multi-channel digital marketing approaches at Internet World recently with this cliché. None of the previous tools should operate in isolation and they certainly shouldn't operate in seclusion from offline brand strategies.

Each tool in the armoury of a digital strategy should be intertwined, connected to provide a seamless audience journey from initial touch points through to conversion. These of course should already be defined in your KPI index.

Building a Social Engagement Platform

Using an idea from a recent brainstorming session as an example; the client has a number of different audiences for their product line which falls across function and fashion. This idea focused on one of their audiences female, 16 to 28, interested in fashion and empowered lifestyle.

The core proposition of the idea was to drive awareness and through awareness produce purchase and / or brand advocacy by focusing on the role of the product within the audiences lives.

The chosen seeding advocate for this was to be a campaign persona initially called Jenny (first name that popped into my head). Jenny is mid-twenties, successful in her career and is either aligned or inspirationally aligned to the target audience. Using Jenny as a seed the following channels were targeted to point to a central converting microsite.

Bebo

The approach on Bebo was to use Jenny as an inspirational hook for the younger part of the audience. There would be a mild drive towards the microsite to gain further brand converts the chief hook would be for the audience in these areas to want to become like Jenny.
Tagging

Using the microsite as a central syndicating source we would look to create and seed tags tied to the product that would then be relayed through the microsite for audience generated content. This enables the brand to engage directly with the audience as well as the audience to communicate about product use. The chosen channels for these were Twitter (for quick posts), Flickr for pictures, YouTube for any videos and Google through general search.
Facebook fan pages

The campaign content would be relayed to Facebook, and in turn would allow Facebook generated content to be relayed back to the website. In short we are pushing the message to where we felt a larger part of our audience was residing rather than waiting for them to find us.
Twitter

Jenny would maintain a twitter channel for the core weeks of the campaign to both push the message, but also to highlight elements of the audience that were also pushing the campaign. This would allow real time engagement with the audience.
Microsite competition

Since the core proposition was on the role of the product Jenny would be used in a 12 week competition of how and where she was using the product. Those members of the audience that correctly identified the locations / scenarios would then win a suitable prize. Each step of the 12 questions would use imagery that would reaffirm the inspirational message.
Offline Marketing

The existing offline marketing efforts that were concentrating on this segment of the audience would be used to help create initial buzz and campaign awareness.

This is only one small idea in a digital strategy brainstorm; hopefully it highlights how each of the different channels available can work in unison to deliver a campaign. Should this go ahead however this would be the first step down the line for this particular audience as Jenny and the brand in question would have to re-evaluate message and re-engage through subsequent campaigns.

Next Steps

How our audiences use the web is changing; as brands and those helping brands we need to address these changes to give the most we can to our clients. What I hope I have made clear though is that this current evolution is about more than just having a website and waiting.

This blog post was written by Richard Conyard.

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