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Notes and quotes from Ecommerce Expo: Part 5 - Product information management and site search optimisation

martin.belam@currybet.net — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:55:40 +0000

Over the last week or so I've been posting a whole series of notes and quotes from the recent Ecommerce Expo, looking at multi-variant testing, optimising shopping carts, social commerce, semantic ecommerce and ~~ticket-touting~~ brand building and online marketing. In this last part I want to look at two presentations, one about information management, and one about internal site search.

"Product information management: The next Ecommerce opportunity" - Steve Lovatt, Pinder

You simply can't argue with a presentation that has a slide called 'product information anarchy'. Steve Lovatt from Pindar was making the very valid point that 10 years ago, everyone viewed the web as 'another channel', distinct and separate from having a store or a paper catalogue business. People expected consumers to move from offline shopping to online shopping. However, in fact what has happened is that consumers use the channel that is convenient for them at the time. As I already mentioned in this series, a retailer like John Lewis finds that 51% of their store visitors have already researched a product online prior to purchase.

What interested me about Steve's talk was that it reminded me a little of the convulsion the web went through when we decided it was a good idea to separate data and presentation, and moved away from <FONT> tags and towards XHTML & CSS. He painted a picture where businesses had their product data for the web, product data for a catalogue, and product data in their store inventory software all held separately. He advocated having one central XML repository of product data, which can then have a 'presentation transformation' applied to it to turn it into the right view for a website, catalogue, flyer or in-store price tag. Obviously a paper catalogue would not be as dynamic as the website, but by pooling the data you could be sure that each physical iteration reflected the latest changes to product data as displayed on the web.

As someone who in the 90s who used to have a job getting a really shonky CSV file out of a UNIX stock management system for records & CDs, then had to transform it by hand into a mail-out catalogue and advert copy using PageMaker, I weep for the hours I wasted that a decent XML transformation could have achieved!

SLI Systems and Tiso on 'site search'

The final session I saw at the Ecommerce expo was a joint session from SLI Systems and Tiso, about optimising site search. To be honest it was pretty standard stuff, with nothing ground-breaking. Tiso, a small company which had started in a boat in Leith, had managed to increase their sales by working on their site search. Around 21% of their visitors used search, and they had focussed on continually providing a better experience. They now find that users who have passed through search during their session were 18% more likely to buy than those who didn't.

Probably the most stunning takeaway from this presentation though wasn't from the speakers, but from the floor. The audience was asked for a show of hands of who looks at what is being typed into their site search engine. Only around 10% of the audience put their hands up. Asked if they made decisions based on their search logs, only about three or four hands stayed up. As my friend Karen Loasby put it on Twitter when I tweeted about this: "Why use facts when you have got gut instinct".

Of course it was a random sample of people, and probably biased towards those who thought they had something to learn from a session on site search, but I was utterly astonished that at a conference full of people desperate to sell goods to their potential customers, the vast majority didn't appear to be listening to what their customers were telling them they were looking for or struggling to find.

And finally...

Given that we are a relatively young industry, you'd think we would escape a heritage of crass sexist behaviour, but unfortunately yet again the Ecommerce Expo featured sponsors and companies who use 'booth babes'.

Frankly there is no place for it in 2009 at a digital trade show.

It is patronising to potential customers, essentially saying you'll only be interested in our product if the brochure is handed to you by a leggy blonde in high-heels and tight shorts. I think it is patronising and degrading to any woman at the show who is appearing at a stand on merit as part of a business, rather than for what she is being made to wear.

As much as I'm tempted, I'm not going to name and shame the companies involved, as I don't want to reward their sexist behaviour with publicity. However, I have provided negative feedback to the organisers about them, and if you don't think 'booth babes' have a place in a 21st century digital trade show, then I suggest you do the same...

links for 2009-11-05

martin.belam@currybet.net — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:05:21 +0000

Changes to commenting functionality | Meg Pickard | Inside guardian.co.uk

"As you may have noticed, this week we've been changing the way commenting works on the site. The tech-literate among you may be interested to learn that the main change is that comments are now handled server-side rather than client-side". A long overdue change on guardian.co.uk - we are collecting bugs on this thread

(tags: megpickard ugc insideguardian pluck comments)
Guardian makes its comments accessible, SEO friendly and mobile friendly all in one go! » malcolm coles

Malcolm has already been delving into the source code of our comment changes to look for the search engine implications - and spots them already being indexed by Google. Those Googlebots don't hang around, do they?

(tags: seo accessibility guardian pluck comments malcolmcoles)
Temporary MY Sun | MY Sun

Good bit of customer service here - the migration to the new My SUN platform took a bit longer than expected, and so there is an apology and a temporary forum to keep users in touch whilst the process gets finished. Neat.

(tags: thesun mysun community)
Switchover put viewers out of the picture - News - Manchester Evening News

From the comments: "I got great pictures from a transmitter in France, Lyon, watched the digital TV for 90 minutes, went funny on 83 minutes, but back to normal on 90 minutes, so funny..."

(tags: manchestereveningnews championsleague liverpool ugc)
Spare us the phoney poppy apoplexy | Marina Hyde | Football | guardian.co.uk

"It was a matter of genuine surprise to me that the Mail's reaction to the pictures of Wayne and Coleen Rooney leaving hospital with their new baby wasn't a headline screaming 'But where is Kai Wayne's poppy?'"

(tags: remembrance marinahyde dailymail guardian football)
Hellfire preacher takes on Lewes Bonfire Night 'debauchery' | Times Archive Blog

Same as it ever was.

(tags: timesarchiveblog guyfawkesnight lewes)
How should Neal's yard Remedies have responded to the Guardian's bloggers? | PR Week

"Our digital essay writers offer Neal's Yard Remedies some advice on how it might have handled the explosion of communications that appeared on the Guardian's website in May."

(tags: guardian prweek nealsyard ugc community)
Beatle Ringo Starr's face seen in water droplet on lotus leaf - Telegraph

I like this line in the report: "Strange apparitions have been making the news a lot lately". Isn't that only because we all think they are good Diggbait?

(tags: Linkbait telegraph beatles humour)

Notes and quotes from Ecommerce Expo: Part 4 - Marketing at Seatwave, and semantic ecommerce with Smart Information Systems

martin.belam@currybet.net — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:25:22 +0000

Last week I started posting a series of notes and quotes from the London Ecommerce Expo in Earls Court which I attended in October. I've written up Mike Tomlinson talking about multi-variant testing from British Airways, Trenton Moss of Webcredible discussing optimising the purchase process, and Andy Leaver from Bazaarvoice talking about 'social commerce'. Today I wanted to look at two other talks that I attended.

"Building a new business in a brand new category"- James Hamlin, Seatwave

I suspected the word "ethical" was going to be missing from the talk about Seatwave, and I was right. James Hamlin made the point that wherever demand outstrips supply a secondary market forms, but I still struggle to see how they are able to build a business that partners with the very people who are printing 'not for resale' on the back of the tickets Seatwave re-distribute.

Leaving aside my qualms about the nature of the trade, James gave a very interesting presentation. Two key things stood out for me.

Firstly, he was one of very few people to praise the tech team at his firm. Many case studies at this kind of conference seem to experience IT and technology departments as roadblocks to sales and innovation, but James stressed that Seatwave's tech guys and girls were the enablers of the feeds and APIs that power a lot of their sales.

Secondly, he was a big fan of Google products. In a building full of people trying to sell expensive tools and products to help you make money, Hamlin said that Google Analytics was free and good enough, and that Google Trends and the Google AdWords suite of tools were all they needed from external suppliers to make their campaigns work. All the other tracking they wanted had been wired into their systems as they built them.

Other key takeaways were that James felt it was important if possible to have an in-house online marketing team rather than going down the agency route. As a 'buzz' based product, their in-house team were able to leap onto emerging trends within seconds. Although they "do social media stuff", it is still 'the big three' search, email marketing and affiliate deals that power their business. In the Q&A at the end of the session, someone asked him if he thought their marketing mix would have changed in two years time to include more social aspects, and James unequivocally said no.

Finally, some numbers. Seatwave launched with just 200 tickets available, but now generally has over 1 million tickets in the marketplace. They had 1.5 million unique users in July 2009, and James says, most importantly "the prices are coming down all the time". Whether those prices get anywhere near face value, or whether Seatwave is just a semi-legal mechanism to allow an armchair army of touts to cream profits from legitimate fans, remains a debate for another day.

"How semantic web technologies are creating new opportunities for Ecommerce" - Markus Linder, Smart Information Systems GmbH

Markus Linder had a tough time at the Ecommerce Expo, as it wasn't really the right audience to be showing slides that featured RDF data, or mentioning things like OWL or SPARQL. In trying to ground his talk in a real world example he suggested that current search technologies struggle if you put in long terms like "family holiday in Austria 4 star hotel 22-28.8.09 yoga courses and classical concerts" whereas as humans we can see the intent behind the query.

Markus showed us a screenshot of a prototype search engine Smart Information Systems have in progress, but sadly he said he couldn't actually show us the results page - the big tease!

Where I think Markus' talk was useful to the audience was in flagging up that some Ecommerce sites are already embedding rich semantic product data into their online presence. This is a trend that is likely to continue, and which will lead to more sophisticated price comparison sites and customer recommendation engines.

He showed an interesting approach to buying a television. Instead of starting with a range of models and narrowing it down by technical criteria the user may not fully understand, it started with a questionnaire about TV usage. It asked what type of programmes you usually watch e.g films or sport, whether you get your TV via cable or satellite, how far you usually sit away from the screen and whether you use games consoles or not. The system was able to suggest a range of models that matched user requirements they may not have even consciously had, for example to do with the connectors or the refresh rate.

If you wanted to find out more about semantic data in Ecommerce, Markus recommended a presentation on SlideShare by Martin Hepp - "Semantic Web-based E-Commerce: The GoodRelations Ontology"

Next...

In the final part of this series, I'll have a write-up of presentations by Steve Lovatt of Pindar about the 'product information cloud', and a joint talk by SLI Systems and Tiso on site search.

"UFO hits wind turbine": World-class journalism from News International

martin.belam@currybet.net — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:55:53 +0000

I've got no qualms with the News International corporate site claiming that each of their newspapers is a leader in their field - the audience figures speak for themselves, especially in print.

I just wonder, if I'd been putting the banner graphic together, whether I'd have picked The Sun's thoroughly debunked "UFO hits wind turbine" front page as the image to set against the claim of 'world-class journalism'...

Notes and quotes from Ecommerce Expo: Part 3 - "Social commerce prioritisation: Where should we start?"

martin.belam@currybet.net — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:55:32 +0000

I've been posting a series of the notes and quotes I made at the London Ecommerce Expo in Earls Court. So far I've featured a case study in multi-variant testing from British Airways, and a presentation by Trenton Moss of Webcredible about optimising the purchase process. Today I wanted to turn my attention to 'social commerce'.

"Social commerce prioritisation: Where should we start?" - Andy Leaver, Bazaarvoice

Andy Leaver of Bazaarvoice opened by making a point that Google may turn out to be a generational thing. For many years most of us have worked on the premise that the centre of the people's Internet universe is a search engine - and that usually that search engine is Google.

He suggested that increasingly younger people start their Internet journey not on Google (or Bing or Ask or Yahoo!), but on a social site like Facebook, which has become 'the hub' in the centre of their Internet experience. People are now looking for real-time confirmation of information and trends, rather than the static Internet search we have been used to.

Bazaarvoice work with a wide range of companies, integrating and curating user-generated content into their marketing process - indeed, as Andy observed "social networks seem like a marketer's dream". He had some great examples of companies integrating their digital social content into the real world. Best Buy in the States, for example, use their highest rated products online as the basis for what goes into their newspaper advertising inserts.

Another company - whose name escaped my notes, I think it was Urban Outfitters - really worked with the people making up their online 'community'. They figured that as 80% of the reviews and content on the site was coming from 20% of users, if they really got to know those users they'd have better customer insight. In the end they got in touch with the most active community members and profiled them, using those profiles in marketing material. This helped promote the idea that the reviews are coming from 'people like me', which seems one of the keys to success in social commerce. With film reviews, for example, it is no good to me if a load of 15 year olds rate a film as really good or totally boring, what I need to know is whether people my age, with my taste and interests recommend it.

Andy also touched on what people are calling 'omni-channel' marketing. Instead of shopping in one way or another, customers utilise lots of different ways to shop. He quoted John Lewis as saying that 51% of people who make a purchase in-store have already researched the product they want to buy online. He thinks the days where people will habitually scan barcodes themselves in shops on devices like the iPhone is not far off. He has sometimes experienced a negative reaction from sakes staff when using his Blackberry to research products in store, but his argument is that all he is doing is finding information 'from your customers'.

Some other interesting numbers he mentioned including a prediction that 70% of content generated on the web will have been made by individuals rather than enterprises, and the fact that Argos get 30,000 online reviews left on their site every week, sometimes peaking to as much as 70,000 reviews in one day.

Language and labels are key

A common theme that emerged from the three sessions I attended on day one of the Ecommerce Expo was the use of language. In his talk, Mike Tomlinson from BA had identified small text changes as one of their key ways of optimising their site. He said that the air industry used lots of specialist jargon, and converting that complex language into something customers understood more easily drove sales.

Trenton from Webcredible also talked about how crucial it was to get labels right. He used the John Lewis checkout process as an example of where language is used to allay user fears. He also stressed the precision needed in giving users instructions - he'd seen someone in a usability lab type "yes" as their response to the input field: 'Confirm email address'.

For Bazaarvoice, the value of using the customer's own voice to describe was also a question related to language. A retailer might describe a product using brand and model number, but it is user reviews where it might be referred to as a phone, telephone, mobile and handset. This gave SEO long-tail benefits, and helped to reinforce that a site was serving a customer base of 'people like me'.

Next...

Over the next few days I'll have some shorter round-ups of some of the other sessions that I attended across the course of the two Ecommerce Expo days.

links for 2009-11-03

martin.belam@currybet.net — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:04:59 +0000

Fables for the internet generation | Distilled blog

"One day many years ago, I was wandering around alt.forest.urban when I saw a mysterious thread. I followed the thread down a long, winding, very dark path...". Worth reading just for the illustration of the hart with the wifi antlers.

(tags: internet fables)
Winterval – the truth « Mabblog

Mike Chubb: "After a great deal of thought i shall be undertaking a winterval uk project in the uk in 2009. any interested parties/sponsors should contact me. Let us create another urban myth festival to which all are accommodated and let us see the press/media turn in their ire whilst normal folks get great value for money".

(tags: winterval christmas wintervaldoesnotequalbanningchristmas)
Judy Garland behind the scenes of The Wizard of Oz | Times Archive Blog

The film is rubbish, this colour fad will never last, the budget is overblown and detracts from the story-telling, what was wrong with silent movies anyway etc etc. The Chris Tookey school of blockbuster film reviews was alive and well 70 years ago it seems.

(tags: timearchiveblog wizardofoz)
11 ways to miss the point on the Internet: kimthomas

I think the opening sentence makes the best point: "I spend quite a lot of time arguing with people on the Internet. You could say that this is a waste of time, though whether it’s more or less of a waste of time than playing 30 consecutive games of Freecell (which was how I used to avoid working before the Internet came along) is debatable."

(tags: internet community guardian commentisfree)
PCC defends Dacre's position on code committee in face of online petition :: Journalism.co.uk

So, when Stephen Abell says "The PCC provides help for thousands of people every year, free of charge. People who actually use the service tend to find that it works", I'm looking at the word *actually*. Does that mean that the 21,000 people who complained about the Moir article and who have been fobbed off by the PCC haven't *actually* used it as far as he is concerned?

(tags: pcc journalismcouk janmoir dailymail stephengately pauldacre)

Notes and quotes from Ecommerce Expo: Part 2 - "Persuading users to buy & eliminating checkout drop-offs"

martin.belam@currybet.net — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:55:53 +0000

Last week I started blogging about my visit to the Ecommerce Expo in Earls Court, where I attended some of the free seminar sessions that were on offer. If you can pick your way through the more obvious sales pitches, then there are usually a few worth visiting. I first posted about a case study from British Airways on multi-variant testing. Today I wanted to write about Trenton Moss from Webcredible, and his presentation on optimising the checkout process.

"Persuading users to buy & eliminating checkout drop-offs" - Trenton Moss, Webcredible

Trenton was on solid ground at the Ecommerce Expo, as the entire event was geared around persuading people to buy. He was looking at user experience and design factors in persuading people to shop, rather than technological solutions. He started off by demolishing some common Ecommerce myths, including the idea that you should just copy Amazon. They do 'crazy things' on their product pages, he said, like having them really too long, allowing you to wander off and buy the same products from competitors for a lower-price, and featuring Google Ads.

He stressed the need to optimise both the browse and search paths to products - and suggested that sites would usually see a 50/50 per cent split of users preferring one or the other. He praised ELC for their navigation - they had clearly identified two distinct user groups. You could find products using a standard kind of inventory navigation, which would be useful for parents who are accustomed to shopping for their children. Or you could just plug into the 'shop assistant' feature the age and gender of the little one you were buying for, and how much you were prepared to spend. This would then list a range of suitable products.

I've never been terribly impressed with the HMV online presence myself - they've struggled with digital - but Trenton saw some good things happening on their product pages. Their 'Add to basket' button was bright and in the centre of the page, and eschewed the Americanism of 'Add to cart'. It also didn't say 'Buy now', which is an inaccurate description of what it does, and can make people think they are committing to a purchase.

Trenton looked at ways in which an interface can 'allay fears'. He cited the John Lewis checkout process as a page which has several elements in the interface which encourage trust, from the simple use of the word 'secure' in the form heading, to explanations of why John Lewis need information to fulfill your order.

Interestingly, Trenton did not at all mention any security technology to provide reassurance - unlike the Verisign presentation I saw the following day that seemed to imply that 97% of people in the world would not buy from your site unless you had a green browser bar and a 'verified by Verisign' logo plastered on every page of your site. Funny that!

He had some great examples of poor usability. One was a boots.com registration page that tells you your password is weak and has to be between 6-12 characters after allowing you to choose a password, and having provided no prior guidance. He also showed a ~~Norwich Union~~ Aviva form that was saying a phone number was invalid, even though it appeared to be perfectly correct. Trenton made the important point that as a savvy web user, he was able to guess that it was the presence of the space that was causing the form to choke. However, the error message didn't say that, and he reckoned that many web users would not know how to validate the input. His key learning from this was to 'design errors out'. If you can anticipate user error on your web form, then you should be able to mitigate against it.

You can download his slides from http://www.webcredible.co.uk/expo.ppt and you can also download Webcredible's annual web usability report. And come on, you have to trust a man whose company makes everyone walk around with "User experience specialist" written on the back of their t-shirt, no?

Next...

Next I'll have a write-up of a presentation I went to by Andy Leaver of Bazaarvoice entitled: "Social commerce prioritisation: Where should we start?"

links for 2009-11-02

martin.belam@currybet.net — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:04:44 +0000

Stephen Fry quip blogger from Birmingham runs adult website | Birmingham Mail

"A BIRMINGHAM blogger who briefly caused Stephen Fry to quit Twitter by calling him 'boring' runs an adults-only website, it was revealed today. He says he received more than 1,800 insulting emails and a We Hate Richard group was growing on Twitter". There is a 'groups' function on Twitter now? Bloody hell, we only just got lists...

(tags: twitter stephenfry internetmobrule birminghammail)
A.N. WILSON: Halloween is a frightful U.S. import. So how has it come to conquer Britain? | Mail Online

"I doubt whether one child in 1,000 on Saturday night took part in traditional All Hallows games, such as trying to grab apples with their teeth from a floating tub". You know my standard response to people saying things like this don't you - I ask them did you make your children do it? Or did you organise a party where children could play traditional All Hallows games? Well, did you?

(tags: halloween peoplemoaningabouttraditionsdyingoutwhilstnotmakingtheefforttokeepthemgoing anwilson)
Editor defends front page photos of apparent suicide - Press Gazette

"A PCC spokesman said this morning it had contacted the local police so they could pass the family of the man information on its services". Nice move. As well as coping with the death of a family member and its public exploitation for commercial gain by a newspaper, they've got the PCC saying "We won't act to do anything about this unless you fill in some forms to complain"...

(tags: pcc suicide northernireland pressgazette sundayworld)
POPPY POWER! | Birmingham City | News

Yesterday my initial reaction to Birmingham City's shirts featuring a poppy was that it was a bit tacky. However, now I find out that after the game the special kits were signed by the players, and will be "auctioned off on the club's official website to raise money for the British Legion", so I feel more than a bit churlish.

(tags: birminghamcity football poppyappeal remembrance)
Open door: The readers' editor on... new media ethics: police spotter cards | Comment is free | The Guardian

"The digital era brings new ethical dilemmas for journalists. Chief among them is the question of if and when articles should be removed from a news organisation's website. The issue came up last week in connection with the Guardian's three-day series about police monitoring of people who attend political meetings and protests."

(tags: onlinejournalism guardian ethics readerseditor)
JAN MOIR: The net has no monopoly on predators | Mail Online

Jan attempts to placate the the gods of the Internet by writing a piece saying "bad stuff happens offline too". The Internet mostly replies by saying things like "Are you still here? - So there's no justice, then - you can peddle your tat eternally and never get sacked...", "Blimey, you still have a job?" and my favourite "But are you going to write another column next week explaining how none of this really means what it seems to mean?"

(tags: janmoir dailymail ugc)
Sir Alex Ferguson unhappy about England friendly in Qatar | Football | guardian.co.uk

"You have all these fixtures and you have the intrusion of a friendly international game in some unknown country, so that is a definite thorn in everyone's flesh". Surely this can't be the same Alex Ferguson who took his Manchester United team who last year staged two friendly fixtures 3,000 miles apart within 24 hours in Africa, and jetted off to Saudi Arabia in mid-season January to play in a testimonial?

(tags: manchesterunited hypocrisy football england brazil qatar)

Carbon, clippings and checking out Wave - more cool stuff on guardian.co.uk

martin.belam@currybet.net — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:55:43 +0000

Last week, when I was writing about the Jane Bown interactive gallery on The Guardian site, I mentioned that there were several other things done recently that had really impressed me. In no particular order, and stressing again that these have been nothing to do with me, here are another three things that stood out over the last few weeks.

Quick carbon calculator

I remember a conversation I had a while back with Simon Willison where he was explaining the difficulty of calibrating the scale on carbon calculators, to avoid people concluding that all their efforts to reduce their carbon footprint were futile compared to the impact of flying and the output of the national grid. The Guardian's new personal carbon counter tries to mitigate this by including within the figures a chunk representing how our individual share of the nation's infrastructure factors into the calculation.

It was produced by the Guardian Professional digital agency. My colleague Mairead O'Conner was product manager on it, and has blogged about the carbon calculator. She says:

"For indirect emissions, we considered making this a range based upon whether you used a lot of public services a lot, but ultimately we decided to make everyone use the average UK figure. This is because it's very hard to know how you compare to the average and there's not much you can do to change it."

The message seems to be getting across, as some of the user comments on this piece point out:

"Very, very, telling. I have just gone through the calculator and set everything to 'pauper' mode basically, and I'm still over the average Chinese citizens emissions. I'm talking, no heating or lighting, no running water (plainly impossible) buying clothes every couple of years, never flying, never owning a car, somehow moving closer to my workplace, really carefully monitoring my diet to make it seasonal and mainly vegetarian and never buying anything that could even be remotely construed as a luxury (no books, magazines, no internet, tv, phone etc) All that and we're still higher on average than China. The message here is clear, CHANGE NEEDS TO BE MADE AT AN INSTITUTIONAL LEVEL!"

With the recent revelation that none of the top ten Conservative bloggers believe in man-made climate change, the chances of an incoming Conservative Government making those institutional changes looks pretty slim at the moment.

Facebook Connect for 'Clippings'

If you have a Guardian user account, then you can 'clip' articles and save them in collections on guardian.co.uk. We've recently added the ability to cross-post (or should that be cross-clip?) them to Facebook. Using 'Facebook Connect' with the clippings functionality was initially done as an experiment by Chris Thorpe. It is the kind of agile prototyping that is allowing us to get some applications deployed really quickly - the MPs Expenses crowd-sourcing tool was another example.

With the Facebook Connect implementation, Chris also published some code snippets and a screencast of how he put the system together on the Open Platform blog.

My only problem with it is that 'seamless integration with social platforms like Facebook' is one of the standard bullet points on my 'in the future there will be robots' slides about potential directions for The Guardian website. And Chris and a couple of other developers got 'the future' up and running on the site in the space of a few days. Now I have to find a new shiny future to promise... ;-)

Google Wave dev lab

There are a few things built into The Guardian's development process which I think give us a real advantage over every other technical department I've worked in before. I've avoided blogging about them to help keep it that way! However, Lisa van Gelder and Martyn Inglis have broken cover about the Developer Dev Labs we have, with a couple of posts on guardian.co.uk about their recent exploration of Google Wave. Martyn described the Dev Lab process as similar to a Hack Day, but:

"Whereas on a Hack Day there are twenty four hours to attack the problem and the goal is a working demo, even if it is hanging together with duct tape, a DevLab is a more considered beast. The concept is similar, to examine something outside of the normal working scope, but the time-scales and outcomes are different.

The DevLab process is basically a simple one. A proposal is made to the departmental management team, in this case what is a Google Wave and how, if at all, is it relevant for us as a company. Once approved the developers are taken completely out of the standard development process for five days.

This period is to be spent on investigation. There is no requirement for a working product that can be released or even demoed. Rather the outcome is understanding, and for this understanding to be spread throughout the team. "

If you are one of those people who still cling to the notion that the news industry isn't now part of the technology business, and that the IT department are just there as code monkeys not thinking about the journalistic implications of their programming, then you should definitely read Martyn's blog post. He makes some really thoughtful observations about how The Guardian might approach using wave-like technology, looking at how this distributed type of real-time content might scale for a publisher, and how potential legal problems might scarily scale up with them.

Incidently, I'm on Google Wave myself, so if you fancy inviting me into any interesting Waves around user experience, information architecture or online journalism then please ping me about them - martin.belam@googlewave.com

Notes and quotes from Ecommerce Expo: Part 1 - "How little changes made a big difference at BA.com"

martin.belam@currybet.net — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 08:14:21 +0000

Last week I made my annual trip to the Ecommerce Expo in London. Although in my current role at The Guardian I don't generally deal with Ecommerce day-to-day, I've done plenty in the past for people like Sony. The exhibition had a four-track two day programme of free seminars running alongside it, and if you can pick your way through the more blatant software and service sales pitches, you can find some really interesting case studies from some big (and not so big) companies. Today I wanted to start posting some notes and quotes from the event.

"How little changes made a big difference at BA.com" - Mike Tomlinson, British Airways

Mike Tomlinson gave a brilliant case study of how British Airways had used multi-variant testing on their website. The changes brought about by testing were not always huge. Mike showed two slides of the first real changes they'd made to the site as a result of their own in-house A/B testing system. From my fuzzy picture below you can't really see the detail, but it was a splash promotion offering upgrades on previously booked flights.

Basically the first version had two buttons - a continue through the upsell process and a 'no thanks, get me out of here' button. By changing the 'no thanks' option to a smaller text link and placing it on the left away from the 'continue' button, they increased clickthroughs to carry on the sales process. Another change was using more appealing imagery, and a small line of red text underneath the main image disappeared. It was a link to a currency calculator to work out the price in money other than sterling. They found that even though people didn't click on it, the very presence of the text dampened conversion rates.

Having proved that testing worked with their own in-house system, they moved to using Autonomy's Optimost, which meant less involvement for their tech team, and that a wider range of people within the business had the opportunity to suggest and measure changes to the site.

There was one area of the talk I did find a little strange - I didn't recognise his description of a 'user experience architect' as being a person who "likes to say no to new ideas". Tomlinson felt that introducing a regular programme of testing had begun to change the organisation. No longer were project managers stuck in lengthy meetings where people argued the toss over two slightly different link colours, instead they could say "Let's do both and measure!".

He also claimed it has made the organisation less risk averse, and they have even used control samples of their homepage in bright oranges rather than their red, white and blue brand palette to measure the effect on conversion. He also talked about the possibility of launching 'vanilla' applications on the site, with just the bare bones of the interaction design in place, and then gradually adding the visual design elements through testing their effectiveness.

At times the testing regime sounds like a hard grind. After 7 waves of testing on the BA payment page they produced a 0.23% percentage uplift in the completion rate. That number might make you say 'meh!', but it does means that for every 435 page views, they sell an extra flight. With a high ticket item like that, it is worth it - I'm not sure all businesses could afford that luxury.

As ever, when you try and apply some of these lessons to the news industry, it gets a bit more fuzzy. British Airways have some clear goals and KPIs. On a news site, you can set varying desired outcomes, like the user clicking on an advert, leaving a comment, viewing another article, or coming back the next day, but none of them currently carry the value of a plane ticket!

Overall BA's findings were not revolutionary. Small text changes often yielded more dramatic results than big layout changes. And they found that if you make your buttons bright red and write "Click here >>" on them in big letters, more people click on them. What was key though, was that these were firm design decisions based on evidence, that you could actually put a price on.

One of the best points Tomlinson made was that nobody being tested in a usability lab with the 'talk-aloud protocol' ever says "you know, that small line of red text under the image just threw me off there for a second. That has lessoned my chance of buying this item in the long run". The trends discovered via multi-variant testing show British Airways how even the smallest change in web design impacts their bottom line, and seem to be factors that no other method would uncover.

Next...

In the next post in this series, I'll have a write up of a talk given by Trenton Moss of Webcredible called "Persuading users to buy & eliminating checkout drop-offs".

Windows 7 overtakes Linux usage on guardian.co.uk in just 4 days

martin.belam@currybet.net — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:54:17 +0000

On Sunday 25th October, just 4 days after release, for the first time The Guardian saw more computers using Windows 7 than computers using Linux to access guardian.co.uk.

Now, weekends do see a different pattern of usage on the site. We usually expect to see weekday visits roughly break down as XP 55%, Vista 23.4%, Mac 14% and Linux 1.8%. With less people in an office environment on a Saturday and Sunday, XP share drops to around 43%. Vista (31%), Macs (17.3%) and Linux (2.3%) are the main beneficiaries of more varied OS use in the home. On Sunday 25th, Windows 7 usage stood at 2.5%, and Linux usage 2.2%.

At the moment, on a regular weekday, a week after the Microsoft launch, we are seeing Linux and Windows 7 computers visit The Guardian in roughly equal proportions. It will be interesting to see how this develops, and whether the mainstream media coverage that the new Ubuntu release is attracting will help give desktop Linux a boost.

The usual caveats to these sort of figures apply.

They are not officially audited figures from Guardian News & Media. You can find coverage of our official ABCe stats on the Media Guardian site.
Web analytics packages can only report what they are told. If you are one of those Linux advocates who believes true usage figures are much higher, and that n% of the world's desktops are Linux machines masquerading as Windows in order to access those increasingly rare websites that don't function in Firefox, this article is not for you.
I'm not a fanboy of any particular OS. In my house we happily run computers using Windows and Linux, and I usually work on a MacBook. Computers are tools. Use the right tool for the task in hand.

links for 2009-10-28

martin.belam@currybet.net — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:05:04 +0000

BPI | 2009 Is Record Year For UK Singles Sales

"2009 has already become the biggest ever year for UK singles with more than 117m sold to date", so what we'd like now is the Government to remove Internet access from the evil people who have utterly decimated our busine....oh, hang on...

(tags: bpi music piracy ourfiguresdontseemtobackupourargument)
Being Agile and open for a stronger business | Nik Silver | Inside guardian.co.uk blog

"Our huge rebuild and redesign of guardian.co.uk was a successful project. Once it was done we could have slumped back, exhausted. But instead we used it as a springboard to start additional exciting (and arguably controversial) work."

(tags: guardian technology niksilver insideguardian)
Gordon Brown Biscuitgate: at last, a crumb of truth | News & Politics | News & Comment | The First Post

"Except, er, no one asked him [about his favourite biscuit]. As Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts has now clarified in a posting on the website, the biscuit question proposed by various messageboard users was never put to Gordon Brown in the hour that he devoted to the interview". Ah that old thing, fact-checking before writing a story about the internet...

(tags: firstpost gordonbrown factchecking journalism)
Online Protests – why do they make me uneasy? | Joanna Geary

"While the internet offers the chance for everyone to speak, it generally favours the voices of a particular socio-economic, digitally literate group of people who communicate on some specific platforms that those in power seem to listen to."

(tags: joannageary internet protest janmoir)
Help! Can anyone find a Tory blogger who believes that climate change is a real threat? | Next Left

"Indeed, Next Left can now declare that the unlikely winner of 'greenest top Tory blogger' is John Redwood MP. Redwood's combines his own scepticism with the argument that it would be prudent to take some steps to adapt to possible negative consequences".

(tags: climatechange conservatives politics sentencesyouneverthoughtyouwouldread)
Atlas of risk shows health risks & death rates by age, sex & region | NHS TOOL

Fantastic little flash application. As a young(-ish) bloke in London, it appears my biggest worries are suicide and smoking - I don't plan on doing either in the near future. [via @VicThompson]

(tags: nhs health nhschoices data)
Things We Hate About Content Management « Irina Guseva: Random Thoughts on CMS, WCM, ECM and Other Acronyms

Ah, I remember the lengthy arguments I once had at Sony about whether it was acceptable to de-scope writing and applying the CSS to the vanilla HTML bare-bones of a CMS [via the-now-defected Paul Carvill]

(tags: cms ux userexperience)
Journalists are human beings too « Thoroughly Good Blog

"So as I approach the end of our two weeks away from the London CoJo office, I’m reminded of the blinkered and unforgiving view I have of journalists and the kind of people they are. They aren’t all one kind of person and they’re not necessarily anything like me. No surprises there. If only I could remember that the next time I sense that frustration rising up like bile inside of me."

(tags: bbccojo thoroughlygood journalism)

New interactive Flash photo gallery on guardian.co.uk

martin.belam@currybet.net — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:55:03 +0000

When I recently did a reader survey, writing about the work that I do at The Guardian proved to be one of the more popular topics for blog posts. However, it can be quite tricky. The things that I have spent most of my time on have tended to be strategic longer term projects that are still under wraps. On other things, very often my contribution consists of chipping in to a couple of meetings very early on in the process, and so it then seems a bit churlish to subsequently blog "Look! I did this!" once they launch.

There is good stuff and new functionality being developed all over the Guardian site, and over the last couple of weeks a few things in particular have struck me as worth blogging about, and here is one of them. To be absolutely clear, I had nothing to do with this, I just think it is really cool.

Jane Bown 'Exposures' photo gallery

At the moment I get to walk past the an exhibition of Jane Bown's photographs called 'Exposures', which is housed in the entrance to The Guardian's office in Kings Place. There is also an online photo gallery to go with it.

There is always a tension when designing an online photo gallery between commercial and artistic interests. In terms of user experience, providing a seamless set of photos with no obvious reload is ideal, although having a unique URL for each photo is valuable. However, photo galleries can also be a source of multiple page impressions and the ad impressions that go with them, so it is no surprise that newspaper photo galleries, ours included, veer in that direction.

For the Jane Bown gallery last week however, The Guardian used a new flash interactive rather than our usual template, developed by Alastair Dant.

This provides a full screen option, which really shows off Bown's photography. I think it seems to work particularly well on screen because the images are such a crisp monochrome.

The new format won't be replacing our regular galleries. However, it has been designed so that the production overhead for re-use is low, so I am sure we will see the format again.

It has given me one small information architecture problem though - because it is an embedded piece of Flash, it gets classified as an 'interactive', not a picture gallery, and so doesn't appear on our 'In pictures' aggregation page.

links for 2009-10-27

martin.belam@currybet.net — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:04:57 +0000

This misjudged 'Emma' is a pedant's dream - Charles Moore - Telegraph

Love it: "May I say at this point that part of the fun of being a pedant is to bring out the pedantry in others, so if you think that I am wrong in any of the above assertions, please write a letter to the Editor setting out your case in minute detail". He can expect 1,057 letters.

(tags: telegraph bbc pedantry humour charlesmoore)
8 Best Ways to Share ‘Mix Tapes’ | Epicenter | Wired.com

"These online mix-sharing sites are clearly something of a moving target, because they tend to operate under the radar or pay unmanageable licensing fees. But we’ve turned up a fresh batch you can use to share virtual mix tapes with friends and strangers around the world, without paying a cent". I still do it by hand using Audacity and Acid, and posting a CD, but then I'm old school like that ;-)

(tags: music online mp3 mixtape wired)
Guardian in hot water over activist face flash • The Register

"The photographs of a number of persons of interest are displayed prominently in today’s newspaper, as well as online, accompanied by the friendly request: 'Are you featured on the card? How do you feel about it? Let us know.' According to sources within the activist community, many of them are hopping mad. Some of those who are still active feel that this is every bit as intrusive as the police action: others, who have not been active politically for many years, point out that displaying their pictures prominently in the national press, alongside copy that highlights the police description of such activists as 'domestic extremists', could have serious implications for their jobs and livelihoods."

(tags: guardian register police privacy)
Petition to: to make the Press Complaints Commission a Public Body. | Number10.gov.uk

"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to to make the Press Complaints Commission a Public Body"

(tags: pcc petitions number10)
Police making criminals of the over-40s | Mail Online

...or as I read the story "Police make criminals of people they have caught breaking the law". One of the things the Mail is complaining about is that police are criminalising the middle class for "not paying court fines". If you don't want your blood pressure to rise, I recommend you don't search the Mail site for "unpaid fines" to see how furious the paper is if yobs, thugs and foreigners don't pay fines..."Half of yobs fined for anti-social behaviour never pay", "Thousands of vandals and thieves refuse to pay £80 on-the-spot fines", "£486m still owed in court fines" and "The foreign supercars which have racked-up more than £4.5m in unpaid parking fines".

(tags: dailymail hypocrisy)
I have volunteered to leave the Birmingham Post after 21 years - Birmingham Post - Lifestyle Blog

"I have a hunch that whatever form the media of the future is going to take, whether it will be niche and hyperlocal or multi-tasking in multi-media conglomerates, the people who are going to be really useful are those who combine traditional story-telling skills with both a social and technical understanding of the web. I want to be one of those people."

(tags: birminghampost journalism onlinejournalism)

Paid search and politics - still some learning for the parties to do

martin.belam@currybet.net — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:55:52 +0000

A couple of days ago Peter Moore wrote an interesting post about politics and paid search, pointing out how Channel 4 had used Google AdWords to catch some of the search traffic generated by the BNP appearance on BBC's Question Time.

He pointed out that:

"Paid search has the potential to make an enormous difference [in an election]...It’s possible to carefully study and collect keywords, to manage and monitor huge campaigns that include short and long tail terms as well as other misspellings and oddities. With such campaigns set up, the parties could increase the number of visitors that come to their websites (the centre of any digital hub) and they could also reinforce their message on the search results – over and over and over again. The question is this: do any of the major parties have the ability to do this in time?"

The Conservative party did experiment with AdWords during this year's budget. It was the most dynamic use I've seen of the medium by a British political party. It didn't entirely work for me, however. If you were running an ecommerce pay-per-click campaign, you'd make sure the traffic ended up on a carefully crafted landing page tailored to the exact phrase.

The Conservatives were not able to do this.

Although in real-time they were booking ads that targeted the phrases used by the Chancellor, the ads only linked through to a generic statement written before Alistair Darling stood up.

If I've searched for 'pension tax relief' and clicked an advert from the Conservatives that says 'pension tax relief', I really expect a response to what Labour have announced, not just a passing reference to the topic in a news piece that could have, frankly, been written weeks before.

Of course, during the Budget, the only people able to approve an opposition statement about tax are forced to sit in the House literally opposite the Chancellor, virtually incommunicado. That won't be the case during an election campaign, and so I'd expect to see a more sophisticated approach.

The risk is also there for political AdWords campaigns to backfire.

On the day that The Sun newspaper renounced the Labour party, a supporter booked an ill-advised advert mentioning Hillsborough. There was nothing on the Google page to indicate that this wasn't an official advert from the party, and there was widespread disquiet about the choice of subject matter. The potential for using AdWords for mischief during an election campaign is obvious to see.

Who knows, maybe this next election campaign will wake the parties up to how reputations can be damaged online via AdWords, and we'll end up with the new Government exerting pressure on the ECJ to change their minds over Google ads appearing for trademark searches.