online and in-store

Over the past 5-8 years the trend has been for companies to move services online in order to reduce costs streamline business processes and attract wider audiences. Is it time that online and in-store met in the middle of the road?

Moneysupermarket.com may have started this movement with their interactive shop window on Oxford Street at Christmas time. The window allowed shoppers to quickly and easily compare prices between stores whilst shopping.

With a little bit of creative thinking there could be bundles of opportunities for online services to appear on the high street:

• Design, save, share and compare your own bathroom/kitchen/living room within the furniture department of a department store
• Use mash-up technology to find products and stock counts when in-store
• Save gondola space in entertainment stores by using the online catalogue to browse music before buying the physical products
• Make more of the valuable space taken up by fitting rooms and reduce the annoying fitting room queues by using photo sharing sites to try on clothes and makeup

Both Tesco and Argos do a good job of blending their online experience with in-store due to their ‘order online and pick up in-store’ offering… but there is still the opportunity to take retail to the next ‘interactive’ level.

customer experience is everywhere

When at a shin-dig just the other week about 7 people, other than myself, were talking the talk about the importance of designing good customer experiences.

Admittedly, approximately 99% of the people at the party were in the creative industry in one way or another but I was still quite surprised to hear these golden words on so many lips.  I have been an advocate of designing customer experiences for over 8 years and I have not encountered a similar scenario - is customer experience becoming the buzz word?

I take some heart in this as it makes my quest easier if customer experience design becomes main stream - take The Yard Creative for instance, a young and fun commercial interior design agency - their USP is all about designing with customers in mind. A great way to make your business stand out from the rest.

Blending desktop and online

Loving the way that some interactions and widgets are coming into the mainstream making the everyday use of the web much more similar to the desktop experience.

Take a look at www.macwarehouse.co.uk this site manages to provide a good experience whilst making a play upon quite a lot of features that you would expect to find on a Mac computer.

Widgets are widely available but I quite like the Yahoo library.

Every tiny detail counts

"The devil is in the detail" is one rule that I always abide by - dark? Perhaps....

I think it is incredibly important to make sure that every tiny detail is considered when designing a solution, else you could end up with a solution that looks lovely but when you get down to using has silly idiosyncrasies that have just been overlooked.

Now put your user hat on: you are a busy business person and you have lots of important tasks that need your attention.  One of your many tasks for the next hour is to enter you company details in to a service directory.  There are 25 people in your company.  See how long and hard you have to think before you can choose the correct company size from the drop down (see image below)?

Nice 'New' feature

LOVEfilm really let me down the first time I attempted to register, however persevering reigned and the result - quite a nice site that makes it easy to manage your personal film preferences. 

I think the 'New' feature works well and is in a great location.  I also feel that the priority list is simple and effective.

Well done LOVEfilm, next thing to sort out is the page refresh when adding a film to your personal list and also the search / browse facilities.

Registration by stealth

Where it suits the business model and objectives of the site, I will often encourage clients to opt for registration by stealth.

The main idea behind registration by stealth is that, simply put, registration can often become a blocker to users using a site.  Registration by stealth looks to remove the formal 'registration' call to action and instead focuses on gathering the important bits of information (that the business requires) as the customer is using the parts of the site that they feel are important.

The result is a site that allows the user to move quite freely around the site and then provides them with a very quick and simple form that effectively registers them.  An example is www.justgiving.com where you can sponsor without registering then right at the end of the payment process the user is presented with a cleverly designed box that ask 'Save this card  for future use?', if the user then chooses to enter their password and verify their password - voila! the user is registered without any fuss.

what is Contagious?

what is Contagious?

...a website that is definitely worth a visit if you are interested in ideas, trends and innovations in marketing.

Contagious is a multi-channel publication that focuses on how technology can revolutionise brands.