IN THE NEWS: BBC report names UK as leading E-commerce nation
BBC News are reporting today that the value of the web economy in G20 countries is set to double in the next four years with UK E-commerce providers leading the charge.
The article also includes predictions on the growth of smart phone usage and interesting stats on the projected growth of internet usage in China which could well be a key web marketplace in the years ahead.
Click here to view the article
Sitefinity 4: Module Builder
It’s fair to say that since the release of Sitefinity 4 building bespoke modules has become much more difficult. What once took a few hours to knock together in version 3 now consumes days of development time. Yes, these new modules now hook into the workflow and multilingual framework of version 4 but the steep learning curve can definitely be infuriating.
Therefore it is with a sense of excitement (and relief) that we greet the release of the Module Builder. Introduced in version 4.4 it allows modules to be designed and registered directly within the Sitefinity admin system. Not only does it create the associated tables and taxonomy, it also provides code examples for accessing the module data directly in code.
Sound like the answer to all your woes? Well, yes and no. Although the Module Builder is technically a full release within 4.4, it does feel more like a beta as a number of features are currently missing or not fully functioning:
- No multilingual support
- Modules cannot be deleted
- Fields cannot be edited
- Custom widgets only via a hack
These features are all scheduled in the roadmap, but not all in the next version so it could be a while before some are available. Therefore whether or not the Module Builder will work for you at this stage in its life will depend on your requirements. If you just need a simple holder for general object types then it will save you precious time. However, if you need to incorporate it into a multilingual site then you’re better off doing it the long winded way (for now).
Comparing the comparisons: should you compare the meercat?
In a new age of savvy customers and tight budgets the growth of comparison sites has been outstanding in the past few years. As part of a series of Blogs on usability this week I’ll be exploring whether the major players in this huge market could be doing more to keep their customers happy.
Life looks pretty good in the marketplace of comparisons. With so many jingles, a few dozen meercats, and millions of bargain hunters thrown in you would have thought all was rosy. But according to recent research published by Which? over half of all comparison customers are not happy.
Which?’s research also states that comparison sites have a fantastic take-up rate with consumers. A staggering 55% of their readers use price comparison sites when purchasing financial services.
Four players dominate what is a very completive marketplace; Moneysupermarket, Gocompare, Confused and Comparethemarket. I thought it would be interesting to look at how well each company performs from a user experience standpoint. In this article I have focused on the effectiveness of each homepage to serve the needs of a cost aware public.
Making the assumption the each company has optimised Pay Per Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) effectively then the primary goal of the homepage is to direct the customer as quickly as possible to their desired product or service. This may sound an easy task but with such an array of services on offer and the everlasting need to cater for repeat visits, this is no small challenge.
So how well does each company do in the usability stakes?
Money Supermarket
Starting with the market leader; launched in 1999 Money Supermarket was the first of the four to launch and has enjoyed a significant share of the market ever since. Being the original does not necessary mean the best and in the case of the web user experience this is certainly the case.
Money Supermarket’s homepage is structured into a main “mega” menu which is colour coded by product and service. This creates the first usability problem, with the legibility of text in some of the mega menu’s being difficult to read. This is due to the primary coloured backgrounds and the point size of the menu text.
Moving further down the page things don’t get much better. A third of the main banner space is taken up with a brand building advertisement. Amazingly this does nothing. This results in a restricted banner space, which is split into insurance services and money services with the less important services listed below. The remainder of the home page is taken up with banner advertising for financial products which dominate the page.
Overall the Moneysupermarket homepage could be improved. Tidying up the navigation issues, focusing more on their core product offerings, reducing the prominence of advertising and allowing the customer to retrieve quotes at this level would all help the user experience.
Gocompare
Go compare offer a different approach which to my mind is more focused. They retain the mega menu of product and service areas but this is easier to read due to the absence of the colour coding on seen on Money Supermarket. Gocompares’ main banner is split in to two features; Car insurance and Home insurance.
This is very clear with the call to action being either get a quote or retrieve a quote. The menu is excellent with a really well structured mega menu that is easy to scan.
Below the main banner sits a series of feature boxes listing other products. This is well designed with a cut-out image representing each product and with just the right amount of text and white space to avoid the page looking cluttered. Below this sits a completion banner and customer promise. At the foot of the page sits the ubiquitous SEO copy and news. Pretty standard stuff.
Overall Gocompare’s approach works very well giving customers looking for car and home insurance a quick route into these products and also those customers retrieving a quote (assuming they have not come by email link). The absence of advertising also removes the clutter focusing more attentions on their core products.
Confused
In contrast to the competitors Confused adopt a narrower screen resolution (918 pixels) and as a consequence the design feels restricted. Similarly to Gocompare the main banners are subdivided into car insurance and home insurance but the main navigation uses a ribbon style rollover which is displaying a sub-navigation that is barely legible. This presents a significant usability / accessibility barrier.
Moving down the page the content is split into product sectors and a series of advertising banners. This is less effective than Gocompare who dedicate the whole area to product sectors.
Overall the design of the confused.com website is less successful than that of Gocompare’s. The proposition is less single minded and let down by a poor main navigation.
Note – Since writing this review confused have redesigned their homepage. The navigation has been improved although still lags behind Gocompare in terms of clarity.
Comparethemarket
Famous for the iconic Meerkat advertising campaign Comparethemarket were not the first comparison website but took a significant market share in no small part due to the success of the Meerkat campaign.
Comparethemarket fairs better than some of its competitors, with it’s clear navigation well structured feature boxes and minimal advertising which is relevant to the to the brand.
Comparethemarket splits the main navigation into car insurance and credit cards, with the facility to get a quote or retrieve a quote. It’s simple well structured feature boxes supported with relevant imagery makes for a homepage that is easy to scan and navigate.
Whilst not quite as effective as Gocompare, Comparethemarket does a good job in navigating customers through an array of products.
Conclusion
With each company investing significant sums on TV, press and paid search advertising it really surprises me that they are not looking more closely at the user experience of their websites. For me top marks for their homepage design goes to Gocompare for a homepage
which is very clear and offers a great user experience. Comparethemarket is the runner up with a reasonable homepage, but Confused and Moneysupermarket really need to look more closely at the usability of their homepages.
Search Gets Social: Introducing Google ‘Search Plus Your World’
Google is taking personalised search to a whole new level with the launch of the rather cumbersomely-named Search Plus Your World. Launching initially on Google.com, the new service (let’s call it SPYW) will offer signed-in searchers a blend of conventional organic listings and social content.
This means that when you perform a web search you’ll see organic results combined with content that you and your friends may have shared. For example, if I searched for ‘fluffy bunny’, and a friend on Google+ had recently shared a picture entitled ‘fluffy bunny’, then it’s highly likely that this picture would appear in my search results above any other images or sites about fluffy bunnies.
The really off-putting thing about this is that it will look like the content personalised to you is available to the whole wide world in that familiar and unthreatening white-and-blue colour scheme. Luckily, this isn’t actually the case.
What Will Be Included?
Basically, SPYW takes a functionality that already exists in Google search – the ability to perform a social search – and blends it with the conventional Google search that millions of people use every day. Although this change has been in progress for a while, the immediate difference is that SPYW will be a heady combination of web search, personalised search and social search. All of these have been available before now, but only as separate entities.
So, SPYW will draw a variety of elements from Google’s channels into your search. These will include ‘pure’ organic listings as well as listings that are personalised by your previous activities – for instance, sites you’ve already visited which will be boosted in your personalised results. So far, so conventional. But now Google will be taking personalised search a stage further by including listings that have been boosted up the rankings by the activities of people in your social circles.
The really significant change, however, is that material that you have publicly or privately shared on Google+ will also become available in search results. Fortunately the private stuff will only appear in the results of you and the person you shared with, whereas the public material will be visible to anyone in your circles.
What Will Be Excluded?
Google doesn’t yet own the whole internet, so some of the big social media streams such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr still have terms of service that prevent them from sharing private information with Google. You can also choose to opt out of SPYW and just receive regular search results, and there will even be a handy button to let you switch between SPYW and the standard listings.
What’s the Big Deal?
I’ve already pondered the SEO industry’s obsession with rankings and whether increasingly personalised searches are making for increasingly irrelevant ranking results. Clearly what you and I see as search results can be completely different, but what other impact is this likely to have?
In terms of linkbuilding, this should be a massive boost to content-driven activity. We’ve known for a while that cheap links from spam sites are becoming ever more obsolete, but the renewed importance of social sharing is going to force companies into producing interesting, shareable content in order to put themselves at the top of personalised searches.
We’re also likely to see an increased focus on brand ambassadors. If you can’t rely on appearing at the top of the organic rankings, then it might be worth attaching your brand to someone highly influential in your niche. If they have thousands of followers on Google+ and you can persuade them to share your product or service, then you’re laughing.
Whenever Google makes a significant change it causes a re-think and a repositioning of the whole SEO industry, and a shift towards better content can’t be all bad. If your digital marketing strategy could do with a refresh, drop me an email at erjohnson@quba.co.uk or call a Quban on 0114 279 7779.
Delivering Better Responses to Online Enquiries
I was recently left very disappointed by an online experience which started really well…
Having spent a few hours looking for a suitable restaurant for an anniversary meal with my partner I elected for a well-known Michelin starred establishment.
Their website had fantastic images of great looking food, the content stressed the freshness of ingredients and their commitment to local seasonal produce. There was a fantastic set of reviews to back all this up and they had a recommendation from one of our friends. With all this in mind, and having convinced myself that the significant financial outlay would be suitably compensated by Kat’s appreciation of a romantic gesture I decided to proceed… what happened next cost this restaurant a large part of my January salary.
I filled out a long enquiry form specifying a date, time, dietary requirements, provisionally picked a set menu and gave my details including a contact phone number. I felt I’d put in a fair amount of effort to get to this point- so I was hoping for a reply confirming if the restaurant had availability to confirm my booking. Instead I got..
The least helpful email of all time
—————————————–
From: XXXXX XXXXX
Sent: 11 December 2011 10:16
To: Jonathan Eaton
Subject: RE: Enquiry
Dear Mr Eaton,
Thank you for your enquiry. Please call me to discuss this further.
Kind Regards,
XXXXXX
(0111) 1234567 / uselessrepresentative@anonymousrestaurant.com
—————————————–
All that time and effort put into the marketing of this restaurant, the money spent on design and photography, the investment in advertising and PR to put the name of the restaurant on my radar…. Ruined.
You may think I’m being harsh here but I don’t think so. I’d made my choice, defined my preferences, braced myself for extraordinarily high expenditure and all I got was a lousy email asking me to call up. What was the point in me filling in the form or going on the website at all- if I’d known I should call up I would have called up!
From filling the form in the very least I expected was a call from the restaurant if anything was unclear. The person sending the email reply had not even bothered to include the phone number for me to call in the body of the message.
Whether the member of staff who I interacted with at the restaurant was uniquely bad I’ll never know (I won’t be enquiring again!) but I think this episode did raise an important point. Online customer service needs to be constant, consistent and responsive.
My top tips for a successful online enquiry communication strategy for 2012:
- If someone has qualified their request in a website form this needs to be reflected in the response sent back to them (definitely do not email back asking them to repeat their request over the phone).
- If your product or service costs a large amount of money make sure that extra care is taken in customer service to keep the customer journey special. Going that little bit further can make all the difference.
- Make sure your staff know the journey(s) which customers make prior to submitting an online enquiry.
- Ensure your website messaging is consistent with your standard sales process. If taking bookings or handling enquiries is not possible without a sales person’s input make submitting requests simple so potential customers do not get the impression that they are self-serving.
- Make sure the ‘action’ for customers to take is obvious at each stage. If you want them to clarify preferences say so, if you want to confirm a booking, sale or meeting make this really clear.
- Be aware of what your main competitors are doing in relation to online enquiries. Submit enquiries on their websites and look at the responses you get. Is the response better than yours? Could it be improved?
Fancy A Chat?
If you follow the above advice you shouldn’t go far wrong. If you have anything else about online communication you would like my advice on please drop me an email (jeaton@quba.co.uk) or give me a call on 0114 279 2750.
Christmas competition a great success
Thanks to everyone who took part in our Christmas competition! We had hundreds of entries and some really impressive scores so a big congratulations to everyone for persevering.
As it is the start of a new year we will be posting useful insights in the coming weeks to help make 2012 hugely successful for all our clients and contacts. Keep an eye on our Blog and email me (jeaton@quba.co.uk) if you have any new web projects you would like to discuss.
Happy New Year
Jon
Quba Christmas Game- Just Two days to help Santa save Christmas and win great gifts!
It’s day three and there is still no sign of Rudolf! Please continue helping Santa by firing presents down the chimney.
Click here to play the game.
Our second winner was contacted this morning after another prize draw. Thanks again for everyone who has taken part so far and a special well done to Andrew Scaife of Irwin Mitchell solicitors in Sheffield.
Scoring so far today is a little lower than days 1 and 2 so don’t stop trying! Remember there’s lots of fun to be had in beating your friends so please continue spreading the word!
Good luck, Merry Christmas and keep on throwing!
Quba Game: Competition Day Two!
It’s competition day two at Quba HQ and we’re reet chuffed that so many of you have enjoyed playing so far.
Click here to play the game.
Remember we’re giving away prizes every day this week so keep on trying. We’ve had loads of fun challenging our friends and family too so please continue spreading the word!
As there were a few people who top scored yesterday we had to do a prize draw. Congratulations go to Stephen Ball from CASL in Chesterfield! A massive thanks to everyone for their submissions and keep on throwing!
Play our amazing Christmas game
It’s the early hours of December 25th and Santa needs your help!
Rudolf and co have done a runner leaving Santa at the last house on his run with a sleigh full of presents. It is your job to pull back the festive slingshot firing as many presents as presents down the chimney as possible.
To add a little extra incentive the top helpers each day will receive a fantastic £75 to spend online with our sportswear and fragrance retailers SKINS Compression Clothing and The London Perfume Company.
Good luck and Merry Christmas!
The Quba Team
The BBC Homepage Re-design: Good, Bad or Indifferent?
Nobody likes change. Especially if that change affects something we are familiar with and come into contact with on a regular basis. So when the BBC changed their homepage it was bound to initiate a public debate – perhaps because we all pay for the BBC and feel like it’s part of our heritage.
I decided to canvass the opinions of the Quba team on this sensitive issue.
It’s All About the Banner
Benn Raistrick, Senior Designer
Some elements of the redesign are great but this only applies from the banner upwards. I think from a design point they’ve taken a step backwards – the BBC have always been about accessibility and this is where they have failed in my opinion. It is neither fluid nor responsive and in a 2011/2012 app-driven culture the next evolution should cater for the masses more effectively.
I’m left feeling like its 1999 again. I can see where they were trying to go but it’s just not quite there.
Content Confusion
Jon Eaton, New Business Exec
Firstly, news and sport are listed together – why oh why? It looks like they’ve used the same approach for each section at the bottom of the banner when your needs as a user will vary according to the content you’re looking for. And why haven’t they got the ‘What’s On’ stuff in here? Surely as a broadcasting company this should rank fairly highly!
Following the same logic, you should really be able to play videos in the banner area to showcase content.
Finally, collapsible sections at the bottom of the screen will be difficult to use on a mobile and I would have expected more social integration as some competitors are very good at this. On the plus side, the clock is very nice!
Taking Inspiration from iPlayer
Ed Russell-Johnson, Search Engine Marketing Exec
Personally, I think it’s too busy. There are at least four ways of getting to any one resource, which is clearly an attempt to make the user’s journey easier but which ends up being over-complicated and confusing.
I like the iPlayer-inspired ‘Most Popular’ panel, as this is a handy feature, but it needs some more personalisation and social integration to reach its full potential: ‘I wonder what people in my Google+ circles are watching right now?’ It’s also partially hidden below the fold, and the main banner is trying for a similar interactivity, so despite its potential the ‘Most Popular’ panel seems almost redundant.
Less Overwhelming Than It Used To Be
Anna John, Office Manager
I think the only improvement is that the content is less overwhelming and it’s easier to find want you want. On the downside, I think the lack of colour is boring and the deep pages haven’t yet been updated to match the new look.
Overkill on the Whitespace
Naz Haque, Digital Marketing Executive
The moving banner can be overwhelming sometimes. I think the idea was to present a larger selection of content at a glance but personally it dilutes my attention and I feel a classic case of information overload.
Finally, because the change has been so drastic, it’s likely that many people will dislike it. Fundamentally humans don’t like change, but I’m sure the BBC’s quality will eventually win over the users.
Clean, Simplistic and Easy to Navigate
Becky Grover, Account Manager
I really like the new design as it has a bit of a retro feel with the clock, date and weather symbols but with a modern design layout of the top banner.
The homepage is a landing page to get a user to their desired area of the site as quickly as possible, and I think this homepage has good signposts and achieves this well.
The top navigation is clear and I like the main banner layout. My improvement to this section would be to animate through the sub-headings after a period of time if a person doesn’t interact with the main banner as it’s not immediately obvious that these update the banner content.
A Wire Framing Exercise That Went Live By Mistake?
Rob Gregory, Technical Project Manager
There are some nice ideas like the main banner carousel and the personalised weather options, but the design lacks depth and contrast for me. For example, the navigation is lost against the background and there are no visual cues to indicate the priority or hierarchy of the content.
Search the BBC: Why would you move away from a longstanding and commonly accepted web convention and remove borders from an input control? Come on BBC, you know it’s not cool unless Apple does it first!
The BBC has so much content I think it’s near impossible to accurately and fairly represent all of their offerings on one page. Maybe a brand wall listing all would be as good as anything?
The new BBC Weather pages are on the other hand rather natty in my opinion – 9/10.
What Were the Main Drivers for the Redesign?
Matt Jones, Director
Here’s what the team at the BBC wanted to achieve with the redesign:
- The homepage was too narrow in focus – 79% of referred traffic went to BBC News and BBC Sport during July this year. They wanted to highlight all of the content available from BBC Online.
- Research showed that the BBC Homepage is often confused with the BBC News front page, and there was a need to differentiate these two separate offerings
- Detailed customisation of content was used by under 10% of the old homepage audience and many users preferred simple filtering rather than wholesale customisation.
Obviously the page is a gateway to the BBC’s content and visitors aren’t expected to linger here – so in terms of better representing what the BBC offers I think it achieves the objective.
I personally like the channel approach on the banner. Finally I am not surprised that less than 10% of visitors were customising their content. There’s already evidence to suggest a move away from customisation and towards better tools that let users find content quickly.
Overall I think they have been successful in addressing the brief but ultimately only time will tell how successful. Possibly in six months time when we see numerous clones of the BBC homepage?
As for me – I like it!
Matthew Williams, MD
When I first looked at the Beta version I liked it and I still do. I think it’s made browsing top level content easier and more enjoyable. It feels more informal – like a magazine which is generally a ‘sit back and relax’ pastime.
I also like the roll-over features on the banner which make for easier interaction and the general mix of content from across the various channels: TV, radio, iPlayer.
To find out more about the redesign and the response to criticism from the public click here. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2011/12/bbc_homepage_your_feedback_2.html
