But anyway, lets start from the beginning…

It all happened one sunny autumn day when we realised we’d been so busy working with our fantastic clients that we unintentionally let our own brand catch some rust. As you can imagine, this is definitely not good, especially when you play in the top league of digital eCRM agencies!

It most definitely needed our attention so the next day we brewed a tanker of quality coffee, locked ourselves in a conference room for half a day and started madly intensive brainstorming session.

I should probably note at this point, that our creative team may look funny and often generates weird noises, but when it comes to their field of work, they will not joke around, nor accept any solution that could jeopardise or damage quality of a project. That’s also why, when we left the room, we all looked as if we just reached K4 summit… What we did manage though was very important­—we established a solid game plan together with a branding and website draft!

What came next is most likely worth 10 separate articles but long story short, was a period of long hours trying to leverage all latest technologies like HTML5, CSS3, SASS or OOCSS together with recent findings in the world of User Experience and Information Architecture.

On top of that we decided to rewrite a number of articles and case studies, making sure that not only our website delivers rich and useful materials, but also improves the SEO status.

We couldn’t of course ignore what was happening with the mobile platforms so, in the spirit of Responsive Web Design, our website was heavily optimised for speed, size, readability and usability no matter the device, screen size or orientation.

So yes—it all sounds like a lot of work and it is indeed (as well as a very intense learning period) but what you look at now is a result of all these things composed into one beautifully functional system, which guarantees a better operation for us and our clients for as long as yet another of those autumn days arrives.

And with that, I’ll leave you to look around and discover how we recreated Services section, give our new and shiny Case Studies a read, or even, if you’re fancy a laugh, take a look at our mug shots!

Update: We were just nominated for CSS Design Awards! How great is that?!

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The project has been technically challenging as the administrative platform we’ve developed needs to be able to capture live arrival data on 16,000 Bus stops, processing hundreds of updates every second via the TfL Countdown API. The solution we’ve deployed is highly resilient — split across multiple servers, any one of which can fail without a perceptible loss in performance and, in a disaster recovery situation, the platform can fail over to another location entirely, and restore in under half an hour without any human intervention.

For more information about the Digital Signs Project please read the Transport for London case study

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EHM are a late night bar operator in the City of London, running Yager and Gilt, whilst BARRIO are a cool, urban, latin themed collection of bars in Shoreditch, Soho and Islington. Both operators will be using our eCRM platform to manage their customer data, manage enquiries/reservations and tables, deliver email marketing and to deploy ‘nudge’ tactics to drive customer engagement and sales. We’re very much looking forward to working with both of these fabulous clients.

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The Drake & Morgan deployment also marks our first integration with the MICROS till system (the eCRM platform is available on their Partner Programme), which will integrate the our table management suite with the till system and allow transactional data to be stored against customer profiles. Over time this will be merged with other behavioural data and used for customer insight and to deploy engaging, relevant marketing campaigns, personalised to individual customer’s spend and visit patterns.

For more information about our specialist eCRM platform please visit the Retail Leisure website.

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Pondering the idea of ‘retro’, I perused my bookshelves in search of inspiration. It was there that I stumbled across an original 1986 instruction manual for ‘Sidekick’ produced by Borland (who, I’m glad to report are still trading at Borland.com).

‘Sidekick’ was the first piece of Desktop software that I owned. 1987 was the year I purchased it. In retro terms, that equates to the original year for the Rubix Cube, ‘Withnail and I’, ‘Dirty Dancing’ and Acid House smileys..

Why I kept the manual I don’t know, certainly the computer and associated floppy disks were long consigned to the tip. But, as I flicked through the manual it occurred to me that it provided an interesting benchmark to show how far things have come in the space of a relatively small number of years, not in terms of the Internet per-se but how we interact with software and the notion of user experience.

Installing the software was akin to entering a darkened room and staying there, alone, for several hours. There were 14 diskettes that needed to be loaded in sequence, each taking minutes to load, the process accompanied by whirring and chirruping as the disks were read. Fraught with fear, in case the disks were loaded in the incorrect order or the final summation, once the process was complete, indicated that there was a ‘disk error’ and the whole process would need to be repeated.

The Sidekick Manual came at an interesting time, as users were trending away from being home-based programmers, to people who just wanted to write, calculate or do some other task without having to understand how to write Basic. The manual tries to bridge this gap, and offers tantalising content such as it’s description of one of the basic calculator feature ‘This is a normal, everyday business pocket calculator…However, it also offers special features for programmers’. Oh, how I wanted to unlock those special features!

Chapter 1 of the manual ‘Getting started’ has five pages of content before you reach the milestone of ‘Finally – start Sidekick’. The next Chapter is about taking your ‘Sidekick for a Ride’, detailing how to open up the Notepad, and using the shortcut keys. One of the features profiled is the F4 ‘Import Data from screen’ which is described as ‘a very exciting feature; it allows you to take text from the screen and put it into the NotePad! When you ht F4, the Notepad disappears, but don’t be afraid, it will come back’. Sadly the re-assuring tone failed to reduce my anxiety levels when using the feature, although the notion of ‘copy and paste’ is perhaps one of the most common utilities we now take for granted.

The friendly, personable tone extends throughout the manual. Including the Calendar description which offers the perhaps overly optimistic text, that once you’ve opened the application ‘You may now move through time’. 

From a UX perspective, one of the interesting facets of Sidekick was the use of function keys, which were deployed for every conceivable function. The reason being that the Mouse still wasn’t the prevalent form of Computer Human Interaction at that point (that didn’t really happen until the late 80′s) so there was no easy way to control the on-screen navigation, so instead the user had to jump up and down the screen and call different utilities by a mind-boggling array of function and CTRL keys, often requiring three or more keys to be depressed simultaneously, in a Twister-style approach to keyboard interaction.

Hardware notwithstanding, the manual is interesting in its use of a ‘human’ tone to try and reassure users that the software was their friend and not something to be fearful of. Supporting this, the manual provides ‘Scenes from our lives‘ where Borland programmers write about typical behaviours and how Sidekick can help, generally by being by being faster and more efficient. This notion of putting the customer at the heart of the experience is central to the delivery of a good UX today, as is the approach of delivering applications that are intuitive for people to understand and apply.

The Sidekick Manual came with a pre-paid card slip for users to send their details back to Borland for marketing purposes. The form is styled to make it almost impossible to read due to minuscule text, and requiring programmer level knowledge of your hardware, asking for details such as your PC’s CPU and whether you had EMS/EEMS Memory or a Math coprocessor. But you can see where Borland were going, identifying their customers and segmenting them based upon their attributes, presumably with a plan to send them targeted marketing material or to identify trends in their customer base to guide future product development.

It’s been 27 years since I purchased Sidekick, but it’s possible to see a direct correlation between that software manual and today’s web applications, perhaps not in terms of the technology per-se but in the sense of communicating a friendly, helpful experience, that’s intuitive and built by people who want to make your life easier. The sidekick manual, to me, evokes that sense of bushy programmers, sitting in a sunny Californian business park, akin to an early Steve Jobs, exuding hope. Wanting to make a difference to society and recognising that they could do it via coding, and by communicating to their users in human terms that were both relevant and contextual.

Why ‘Ready Player One’ as the title to this blog?  Well, for reference, this is the title of a thumping retro Sci-Fi novel, based on early arcade games (especially the 80′s) that have this title as the ‘Call to action’.

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The award for Harwin.com follows the recent announcement of Silver at the W3 awards for Best Manufacturing Website.

About Harwin

Harwin design and manufacture electrical connectors, used by big global customers like BAE and Smiths Aerospace when they’re building a wide variety of hi-technology products including satellites, defence, ships and aerospace. With a global distribution network and manufacturing capability on three continents the company is the leader in its sector. Aardvark Media are Harwin’s digital agency and provide a full service to their Global and Asia Pacific websites.

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When they first notified me (by email) that they were shutting down, my wife and I muttered about it being a ‘sign of the times’ and other such doom laden prophecies. So, it was with some surprise when I got a later email from them saying that they real reason they were shutting down was because of Google’s Penguin update.

Being top of Google’s search results for selected key terms can make (or break) a business, so it’s tempting to try to get to those positions by nefarious means, perhaps by employing inappropriate SEO link building for example. This is exactly the behaviour that the CFC deployed. They had wanted to get to the top of the rankings and so had employed a SEO agency to help deliver that. The SEO agency had generated a ton of external links to the CFC website, which Google initially applied a positive ranking to. Then came the Penguin update (May 2012) and Google re-categorised those links as spam and demoted the CFC to oblivion of the sub-pages of its results pages.

What Penguin meant for the CFC was that they no longer generated the level of sales that they did previously, and as a small business they did not have the funds or time to re-do their website or fix the links. They decided, therefore to call it a day and shut up shop. They were not alone, the Penguin update affected many thousands of businesses.

What this cautionary tale goes to show is that natural SEO is always best and that you should proceed with caution when selecting an SEO specialist. It also shows how difficult it is for small business to react to major changes in their marketplace. As Neils Bohr (the Danish physicist) said ‘Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.’

The good news, for customers of the Children’s Furniture Company, is that it appears the business was purchased and a new owner has re-launched the website and is offering pretty much the same range of furniture. Hopefully, they’ll be more cautious when considering how to get to the top of Google’s search results.

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They demonstrate the benefits of applying a holistic customer experience strategy to enquiries and data management, and the advantages of a centralised eCRM platform.

Each year we’ve worked with Novus, since kicking off back in 2006, has seen a refinement of the digital strategy over the Christmas period. Last year our approach delivered a staggering 50% increase in enquiries over the prior year. This year we hoping to equal or better that.

We believe that planning a Christmas Party should be simple, friendly and fast. To enable this, we spent a long time consider the user experience prior to starting development. The micro-sites for LatenightLondon and TigerTiger allow customers who know what they want to choose their ideal venue, select menus (with clear airline style pricing) and to add various add-on options to their party enquiry prior to submittal. Alongside the enquiry process there are clear information panels detailing how the enquiry will be managed along with a summary panel, reassuring the customer that their details have been logged correctly. Of course, there is always a telephone number displayed if the customer needs to speak to someone directly. Once submitted the customer’s enquiry is added to the Novus eCRM platform, through which the venue sales staff will manage the conversion process and message the customer.

Because all enquiry types are managed centrally by the Novus eCRM, sales staff can see the entire customers booking history across the business, meaning a more personalised service is offered.

Of course, not everyone knows what they want for their Christmas party so the micro-sites also help to effectively showcase the venues, food options and add-ons in a friendly, helpful manner; whilst guiding the customer using a persuasion architecture model. This is supported by a general ‘quick enquiry’ form, encouraging customers to kick-start the process, by submitting only the bare minimum of details for the event planners at Novus to give them a call to talk through the options.

The micro-sites are live now and can be viewed at:

www.tigertigerchristmas.co.uk
www.latenightchristmas.co.uk

For more details about our work with Novus please read the case study or for details about our Retail Leisure eCRM platform please view the dedicated micro-site

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