Foolproof blog

Thanks to everyone who tuned in for my webinar ‘The Brand Experience Gap’. I’ve had great feedback from and discussions with those who attended.

I wasn’t able to answer all the questions during the webinar so here’s my answers to those questions I didn’t get to.

 

As a user experience practitioner, I obviously value the role iteration cycles play in the design process. In a previous post, Roger Smithers described a Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation (RITE) process, ‘Development in days, not months’.

Building on his post, these are the primary reasons why this approach has become popular with many of our clients.

Download this Whitepaper – Mobile and Africa: Are smartphones really smart? Reflections on opportunities in the African mobile market.

Commentators have remarked on the opportunity for mobile handset manufacturers, operators and mobile apps in sub-Saharan Africa for years. But, with the exception of M-PESA, a popular money transfer service, the pace of product, service and commercial development seems slow.

In this whitepaper I explore the context and potential of the African mobile market. This research is part of my ongoing monitoring of technology adoption and use in Africa. Further studies are currently underway with the biggest mobile phone market in Africa (Nigeria) and in two East-African countries (Kenya and Tanzania).

In the long-term Facebook can’t be where brands ‘live’ online. Making Facebook the centre of gravity for FMCG brands opens up a number of risks for brand owners. We need to put our thinking caps on and consider a new future for brand websites in the marketing mix.

Brands which are too reliant on social media for digital marketing are giving away data and relationships in a way they may later regret.  But social platforms do offer a new set of tools which allow consumer brands to revisit the old problem of how to create value out of digital. FMCG brands need to consider that the real value of digital is as an ‘ask’ rather than ‘tell’ medium. Success rests on the two disciplines of research and marketing learning from each other, and evolving their practices.

Read the full post published on the econsultancy website: What should FMCG brands do with their websites?

As the Christmas shopping season rolls around again, the media is busy re-running the fast-becoming-seasonal stories of it being the year of the “online Christmas”. This year I notice there is a new twist, 2011 is apparently a “mobile Christmas”.

In December, I’ll be hosting a webinar on the experience gap between brand promise and brand reality and how UX strategy will enable global, multi-channel organisations to survive and thrive in a connected world.

I’ll be presenting some of our learnings and thoughts plus our vision for how the future winners in brand will be the ones who master customer experience through strategic experience planning.

This month I attended ‘Adventures in mobile’ when the Brand Perfect Tour landed in London.

Our mates over at Flow have appointed a new Director of Design – Rob Varney (pic right) – to head up the re-energised brand.

Rob has been hired to re-establish Flow at the leading edge of interaction design. The refreshed proposition fills an emerging market gap for an agency with a deep understanding of customers to solve the most complex design challenges brands now face in the digital space.

Two stories caught my eye this week which were about large retailers looking at consumer applications of new technology.

The pace of technological innovation shows no sign of slowing, but I’m always interested in the ‘last yard’ where companies look for meaningful and mainstream applications of these technologies into the everyday lives of their customers.

This month, we opened the doors of our London office to students from UCL and City University for World Usability Day.

The event was designed to give students a good idea of how we work here at Foolproof and how the skills that they’re developing during their courses can be applied to commercial projects.