Ascendant are a boutique corporate finance firm that help their clients raise money, buy out or sell their business. 

Ascendant approached Know to refresh and update their corporate identity and website to ensure that the materials matched the core values and professionalism of the firm.

The result was a modern, fresh and professional looking identity and responsive website that works across all devices that their clients are using to view the web.

View the live site here > http://ascendant.co.uk/

Gucci were celebrating the 60th Anniversary of their iconic ‘horsebit’ loafer.
Know helped them celebrate by creating a dedicated Facebook page featuring video, imagery of iconic celebrities wearing the loafer and a quiz that helped visitors choose the right colour and style for them.

The page was created in English, Italian, Japanese and Korean using the latest HTML5 technology to create an engaging story for the visitor.

Blue Prism are a software company that create and implement innovative ‘software robots’ that help automate routine tasks allowing employees to concentrate on value add services.

The Blue Prism website is a crucial tool in the sales cycle, it helps educate potential blue chip customers about the advantages of using software robots and gives them the information they need to overcome internal barriers and processes during the procurement cycle as well as allowing Blue Prism to gather useful data about visitors to the site and what they are interested in.

The new site needed to feel modern, simplify complex material, reflect the nature of the business and yet not be too ‘corporate’ and stiff in the way it looks and feels. To ensure that potential customers can view the content whenever and wherever they are Know ensured the site works across all devices from small smartphone screens to huge desktop displays.

The live site can be viewed here > www.blueprism.com

Know have been helping Neilson Holidays (a specialist activity holiday company that was until recently part of Thomas Cook) optimise and improve their email and online advertising campaigns.

We’ve created new banner templates, retargeting campaigns and affiliate banners. Our new email templates and user testing process have improved click throughs by 40%.

Brother asked Know to help promote it’s wireless ‘cloud’ printing feature across Europe, North America and Asia/Pacific.

We created a simple, fun animated video that explained the advantages and benefits of these new types of printer without using too many words (important as any copy would have to be translated into 28 languages)

We’ve been struck recently by how little prototyping and user testing happens in agencies, we believe passionately that it makes the work better. By testing digital products on users throughout the development process you can make sure their needs and requirements are always incorporated into the product.

We dislike guesswork and prefer to rely on rigorous and frequent testing and iterations.

By understanding how users will interact with your digital product in the real world you can iterate and optimise your structure and creative to ensure it meets its goals. By allowing stakeholders to get a better understanding of what is being built, they feed back earlier in the process when it is cheaper, quicker and easier to make changes.

We use several different types of prototype during the creative and production process to test our hypotheses, making our work better and better able to achieve the products goals:

- We paper prototype very early on. This is as the name suggests, sketches of the structure and content of the site that allow users to interact with a low fidelity version of the site. Early and frequent feedback in invaluable. Ideas and iterations can be tested very quickly and cheaply and flaws are uncovered speedily, new directions are identified as real world feedback is incorporated at a very early stage.

- We create clickable wireframes (black and white blueprints) that allow clients and users to interact with the structure and proposed content of the site in a web browser before the creative has started. Giving clients the ability to click about and get a feel for the site and content is invaluable for getting buy in and watching users attempt to complete key tasks is vital for ensuring the site works hard to achieve the goals set for it. Iterations, feedback and amends are easy to incorporate at this stage of the process.

- Clickable designs with key interactions – During the creative stage designs and proposed interactions are stitched together to create a more realistic looking site. Design routes and interactivity can be tested to see how users navigate the task they’ve been set (we don’t usually ask their opinion, always ask them to complete a task and watch what they do). At this stage we can be confident our design, layout and interactivity is working as hard as it can.

It needn’t take days or cost thousands and it undoubtedly create a better product when you build prototyping and testing into your process.

Taking on the beauty industry big boys and winning.

Problem

In 2010 Boots established a joint initiative with a female beauty manufacturer – iPulse. They make the leading salon hair-removal products in the UK and had managed to reduce the size of these devices to make them suitable for home use.
The problem they faced in launching the product was a lack of budget. Their main competitors – Remington and Philips – were spending a significant amount on marketing their own products. The advantage we had, however, was that ours regularly came out top in head to head reviews.

Insight

We discovered that competitors’ activity was doing a great job of raising general awareness of the category but wasn’t following through when prospects were brought into the category.

The first thing women who were interested in the products did before purchase was to go online and investigate them further – reading reviews, blogs and so on. Competitors hadn’t targeted this behavior at all.
This behavior and lack of competition gave us our opportunity to take on the big players and win.

Solution

We created the brand website for iPulse that featured functionality which pulled in reviews and comments of all the product reviews from across the web into the site.  We heavily optimised the site for the key search terms being used by prospective customers searching for iPulse and competitor reviews.

Once users visited our site they wouldn’t need to go anywhere else as all the reviews were conveniently in one place. So our chances of a conversion to purchase were vastly increased.

Results

Results have exceeded expectations with the site increasing visibility, visitors and purchases. In one month the new site surpassed the visitor numbers of its previous version.

Client: iPulse

Digital offers brands the chance to forge real emotional connections with their customers. However, all too often this is lost as agencies produce work that has no relevance or use in people’s lives.

Everything that Know Digital creates has the customer in mind. Rather than just appeal to a brand’s vanity, our work is designed to do something for real people.

We believe that a simple and effective solution to one of life’s little problems is far more powerful than something that promises everything yet delivers nothing. By identifying everyday moments when digital can provide something useful, educational or even just fun, our clients can connect with people as living breathing individuals rather than a target audience.

This delivers communications that reach the hearts and minds of people. Our work doesn’t patronise or preach; it puts your brand at the centre of a positive experience

The end result is brands that are viewed as more than just advertisers. By actually giving something to consumers, our clients are perceived all the more positively, driving value to their bottom line.

About 5 years ago I wrote a blog post for my previous agency predicting that QR codes were going to become increasingly visible in the UK over the next few years.

Now that they have, I’ve changed my mind about them.

I was prompted to talk about them by a trip to Japan, where they have been ubiquitous for the last 8 or so years. It made sense in Japan at the time (pre iPhone) as it was the quickest way to access a mobile website – do you remember trying to type out a long url on standard phone keypad, it was too much of a hassle only to find the site didn’t work on a phone. QR codes solved this problem.

Fast forward to the UK in 2012. I’m seeing them plastered everywhere. Do they still make sense? well, sometimes…One of the benefits a QR code offers is that you can use a different URL for each location, so you know which locations are driving traffic to your mobile website or you can direct traffic to a specific, highly relevant page – e.g. at a bus stop you can direct users to a page that tells them when the next bus is due.

However, the majority of QR codes being used by ad agencies aren’t doing anything quite so clever, they are just replacements for the url, which is where I have a problem with them. When QR codes were first being used in Japan they solved a problem – URLs were a pain to type in and created a barrier to viewing mobile websites – however that problem has been solved by smartphones and URL shorteners.

Compare the 2 user journeys:

1. Assume you have a QR reader in the first place, which is a big assumption to start with. The user has to open the application, wait for the camera to start up, move close enough to the poster to fill the frame with the code, hold still while the picture is taken, wait a second or so for it to be processed and then click the link to open the browser and go to the page.

2. Open the browser, type the URL into the address bar using a QWERTY keyboard, page opens.

Which is simpler and easier? My problem with QR codes is that they are attempting to solve a problem that since the iPhone launched doesn’t exist anymore.

It seems a classic case of agencies and brands using a technology that they’ve picked up on for the sake of it without thinking about the user experience.

Agencies need to remember that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

So my advice, next time someone tells you to put a QR code on your ad, think about the user experience, does the QR code make something simpler and easier to access or are you expecting someone to walk across a train track, to photograph a code, to access a site, that can’t be loaded underground?

Even in the use cases above where a QR code can be used to track location response or deep link to a relevant page I’d argue that this could be done more effectively and quickly with a URL shortener.

Congratulations to our client Hutch on the release of their highly acclaimed new game ‘Smash Cops’. It’s already top of the new games list in the app store with 17 ’5 star’ reviews.

We’re biased, but we think it’s a fantastically beautiful and fun game, download from the app store here