Fitting rooms are where customers make their decision whether or not to buy clothes, yet the space in which this happens often seems like an afterthought. So many are cramped cubicles made from substandard materials, with few places to hang up clothes or leave other items you might have with you. Customers want to feel confident about their purchase, and a poor fitting room experience undermines this decision.

Pay attention to the trial experience
As we know, being able to try a product or service greatly increases chances of conversion. Fitting rooms, game demos, wine tasting, movie trailers and car test drives are all ways to allow people to sample the experience of being a customer. If these previews are of a poor quality, then those prospects are unlikely to turn into customers.

One great example of a trial experience is in Paper, an iPad sketching app. This comes with one free pen tool and gives you the option to buy more. The dialog box for each optional tool invites you to ‘Try it!’, allowing you to draw using that tool within a small area. This is the digital equivalent of a small pad of paper next to the pen stand in a shop, allowing you to get a feeling for the tool before you buy it.

Tips for creating a great trial experience
For any product or service:

• Provide a trial experience – this allows prospects to understand what it’s like to be a customer
• Make the trial as good as the product – if the trial is poor quality, like a bad fitting room in a clothes shop, it reflects poorly on the brand and product, discouraging sales
• Make it easy to go from a trial to a full product – if people want to give you their money, don’t get in their way!

• 47% of smart phone users stated that they have ceased dealing with a brand completely as a direct result of its mobile service or app not being good enough.
• When asked to choose words to describe a company which designs or offers a poor mobile app or service, 38% stated ‘unprofessional’; 36% ‘poorly-managed’; and 35% ‘out of touch with their customers’.

Mobile devices are redefining how consumers organise their lives by opening up new times and spaces in their busy days. Consumers are now able to bank, shop, research and gamble on the move which, for brands, has opened-up new ways to connect with their customers.

Winners of this new space will be smart brands with a customer-centric vision for mobile, said Foolproof. However, these increased opportunities will be hard-earned:

• 81% of people stated that a mobile service or app has to make a strong first impression if they are to continue using it,

• 73% felt that an app or mobile service didn’t deserve their loyalty if it failed to meet their needs.

“Mobile devices are changing how consumers think, feel and act. From shopping and banking to gaming, media and entertainment, mobile is creating valuable opportunities to engage with consumers in new ways, at new times, and in new places.

From this research, we have seen how established brands are struggling to fill these new spaces in consumers’ lives and how the need for innovation in mobile product and service design has become a strategic issue for protecting and growing market share.

But we now know that customer engagement with a mobile platform is fragile. Retailers should be mindful that they may only have one chance to get it right with mobile users, before they default to better-performing competitors.” Caroline Ahmed, Head of Practice and Insight.
 

Further reading

• More about Going Mobile methodology
• Watch Going Mobile: ‘Understanding & winning the mobile consumer’ webinar
• Register for Part 2 in our Going Mobile webinar series: ‘Understanding the changes in mobile consumer behaviour’

We recently completed a study involving brides-to-be where timely and relevant adverts contributed to, rather than hindered, the user experience. We found that the shopping model used by brides-to-be actively seeks out glossy ad content and that excitement was generated when seeking inspiration and ideas from advertisements in magazines, at wedding fairs and importantly, online.

Brides were interested in looking at stories and adverts to collect inspiration and build a picture of their wedding.  Online adverts in this context can provide a relevant mood board of inspiration that gets users excited about using a site. In this instance, advertising played an important role in helping users to find and filter their options and make sense of chaotic and haphazard ‘cottage industry’ supplier networks. As wedding plans progressed and preparation tasks became more difficult and mundane, advertising proved effective in maintaining momentum, interest and excitement.

Advertising doesn’t always have to negatively impact on the user experience. When adverts are timely, relevant and tailored to the user, they can contribute to a great user experience.

Adverts and the user experience: top tips
If you work in weddings or a similar environment where advertising has a positive impact on the user experience, consider these pieces of design advice.

• Carefully position advertising to ensure it doesn’t dominate your site or fall victim to ‘banner blindness’ and go unnoticed (e.g. where possible avoid overly large banner ads).
• Make clear the difference between editorial content and advertising by visually separating them. The visual treatment of the advert should not take priority over key content on the site.
• Make advertising contextual. Associate it with the task users are doing to support the user journey and provide a richer user experience (e.g If a user is creating a seating plan for their wedding, advertise chair covers etc.).
• Make calls to action clear and engaging – make obvious what the offer/benefit is and what kind of content they will see next. Ultimately, give users confidence in what will happen when they click on an ad.
• Where possible, relate adverts to the brand to reassure users they are in the right place.
• Make advertising inspirational, suprising, informative, relevant and above all useful to the user.

Designing an event

Here are my top tips for taking advantage of the games and beyond.

1. Target the right audience
Researching into the value proposition of your products and services mapped with consumer behaviours from visiting countries could help you to effectively focus your efforts and investment.

• Not all the 900,000 visitors will be your target audience
• East Asian tourists are known for their fashion shopping
• Middle Eastern tourists like luxury brands
• Europeans see London as a big entertainment city
• Everyone communicates via mobile phone or computer

Develop a picture of the audiences, which are likely to connect with your proposition and create a marketing and design plan accordingly.
 

2. Optimise your interface designs for a multi-lingual audience
While it is not feasible for businesses to provide for all languages, a number of official languages should be the norm. At the very least, welcome your users. But how do you decide which languages to include? Associating languages with country flags is common but this practice is culturally wrong and does not provide enough leeway for users to select their desired language.

Would a German speaking Swiss citizen choose the German Flag or the Swiss flag? Recent research has also revealed that using one of the Indian languages (such as Urdu) for an everyday interface in a predominantly Punjab community or vice versa, is offensive.

Your interface designs may need to follow global or familiar standards to make them easier for users to navigate. Some countries are high context societies (such as Asian cultures), where more content on the interface inspires trust and engagement. In other cultures, busy interfaces with no structure can be seen as too noisy and not serious (Scandinavian cultures). But even this trend varies with demographics, thus the need to initially target the right audience.
 

3. Reduce your transaction friction by optimising your processes
If you do not already have quick checkout processes, clear and visible calls to action or pre-packaged and relevant deals/options, you may be asking too much from your users who only have a limited time or window of opportunity to buy your products or services.

In a number of recent research projects we have conducted, we found that many businesses have lost their customers in the labyrinth of irrelevant information presented to them. Users are often forced to dig through unnecessary content – what I call noise in the transaction – to identify what they need.

In a case study, we found a website promoting three core products that were effective in attracting the right audience but then failed to actually address their needs fully. Users were forced to go through each core product prior to identifying the right package they wanted. In such cases, users say that they would abandon the process, in favour of picking up the phone to get answers.

With the Olympics audience, not everyone will be keen to make a phone call due to language barriers or the cost of international calls. Also, if your product is not digitally delivered (physical products), how do you facilitate deliveries and returns for an international audience residing in temporary addresses (hotels, rented flats, etc.). Do they want to stay in their residence awaiting deliveries or make the most of their time by visiting London. DHL and UPS have recently introduced convenient points of collection with local shops/businesses.
 

4. Provide the X-factor to stand out from competition
This is a unique opportunity to quickly make your claim, and there is a massive audience ready to listen to what you have to offer. Your design and processes need not only communicate your value proposition, but also to add something enticing to your users’ experience. Why should they come to you? There are lots of similar products and services. So help your users choose yours.

Big businesses are already adding the X-factor:

• British Airways are currently repainting all their aircrafts for the London Olympics to make them unique. Their planes will look like real birds (doves).
• Holiday Inn are also highlighting their tailored experience for the Olympic audience.

How to effectively use your assets and design a unique experience to capitalise on this tremendous opportunity is what user experience is all about.

The London Olympics 2012 is an event. Design for it!
 

Relevant links

• Whitepaper: 2012 ticketing – the good, the bad and the ugly
• Blog: International research and working with interpreters

In this presentation he looked at what quality of life is and the role that user experience can play in improving it; the role that online and mobile services and media can play in enhancing quality of life and how creativity and innovation can be used to optimise the design of these.

Here are my sketch notes summing up the lecture (opens as PDF)

My reflection on Patrick’s presentation is that when we understand people thoroughly we can make the correct judgments about what they want from a product, service or brand, both in practical terms and in terms of the emotional qualities that are required.

The lecture reiterated to me the importance of applying a user-centred design approach to all phases of a project. This highlighted the fact that the impact is not only immediate for users and businesses but proves vital for the longevity of ideas and their success in the market place.
 

Relevant links

• Luck:What it means in sport, life…and UX – Ed Smith talking at the London School of Economics
• Interaction 12, creating a shared vision – The changing conteext for UX professionals

The title of the talk – one of a series of public events at LSE – was ‘Luck: what it means and why it matters – in sport and life’. Admittedly, I attended this lecture primarily as a cricket lover, yet I found myself musing on the lessons for user experience (UX) researchers to be found in Ed’s stories about the evermore strenuous – and ultimately futile – attempts of sports coaches to eliminate chance from sport.

His argument is that people engaged in the reduction of risk eventually find themselves on the boundary of what we know to be controllable. At this point, despite all available evidence, human beings will continue to try and take control of events that are effectively random.

Whilst he made the case for increasing acceptance of the influence of randomness in our lives, I was struck by how his examples of attempts to achieve control over sporting situations drew parallels with mistakes I have often seen researchers make in drawing their inferences from customer data.

Randomness and UX research
Confirmation bias – a tendency to favour information that confirms things we already believe to be true.

• In sports, pundits and coaches often single out examples of behaviour that they already ‘know’ to be the strengths or weaknesses of a player – to the exclusion of all other information.
• In user research, observers who have strong opinions about the audience or the design will often latch on to isolated incidents in one research interview, or consistently rate the opinions of one person above others in a group research format.

Fundamental Attribution Error – describes the tendency to over-rate the influence of personal agency and personality to explain the behaviour of others while under-valuing situational explanations.

• Sports analysts often assign too much significance after the fact to events such as the manager’s half-time talk to explain a turnaround in the team’s performance in the second half, when – as a superior side to their opponents – regression toward the mean suggests it is more than likely they would have won eventually regardless.
• When designing for a certain audience, inexperienced project teams tend to overestimate their ability to produce certain behaviours by changing the location of buttons and other superficial actions – without considering more fundamental influences on a person’s likelihood to use a product. For example, if I am on a train, a mobile app presenting the most useful tasks for this context is preferable to a full desktop version of the same tool, however attractively presented.

Looking for patterns that don’t exist – trying to get your analytical data to address a question which it is not suited to answer, or simply asking the wrong question.

• In professional sports, video analysis is used to break down every aspect of a players’ performance. Yet analysis commonly focuses on the wrong parts of performance. A batsman in cricket who ‘plays-and-misses’ at a delivery is still in, yet if the edge of their bat ‘nicks’ the ball – and it is caught by a fielder – they are out. Batsmen will spend hours reviewing video footage of their dismissals, observing their technique as they nicked the ball. Paradoxically, as the point of cricket is to hit the ball with their bats, these ‘nicks’ are actually somewhat better shots than the ‘play-and-misses’ which are often completely ignored in analysis.

• In user experience design, many powerful tools exist to help analyse user behaviour and identify problems. Examples of these include remote testing tools, eyetracking and web analytics. Business stakeholders often prefer the quantitative output of these tools to qualitative user research as they offer a superficial veneer of statistical validity. Yet their output is only as good as their operator. You cannot simply turn on an eyetracker during research and automatically expect to get insights into user behaviour – it is simply too sensitive to tiny fluctuations in the research environment. The whole research session, and the objectives, must be designed exclusively to optimise the use of eyetracking technology, otherwise the data produced is at best useless, and at worst misleading.

• (Harry Brignull produced a memorable presentation a couple of years back, comparing poor analysis of eyetracking data with identifying animal shapes in cloud formations! That is, trying to impose meaningful patterns on essentially random data).
  Ed Smith was promoting his recently published book ‘Luck: What It Means And Why It Matters’. There’s no UX in there, but it’s provocative, well researched and intelligently written. I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in the subject of risk, complexity and human beings’ often misguided attempts to control it (plus it contains several good anecdotes for the cricket fan).

Further reading

In January I wrote a blog post – ‘EU cookie directive could make the web less accessible for all’ – in which I highlighted some challenges and concerns around the guidance issued by the ICO.

I stated that it contradicted itself and that the interpretation of the law was inflexible and unworkable for businesses. At the heart of the law is the need for “informed consent” for the storage and retrieval of information on an end user’s device.

The guidance explained that the need for information to qualify as “informed” recognised the varying intrusiveness of cookies and allowed for a proportional approach, but that the action required to create “consent” didn’t have a similar flexibility. However, the examples presented contradicted this by illustrating inferred consent solutions and suggesting collecting consent after placing cookies without explaining when this might be appropriate or how it could be deemed compliant.

This has driven a lot of debate within organisations and amongst digital professionals, as well as a lot of very different solutions ranging from fully compliant, prior explicit consent in the form of light boxes or avoiding placing cookies until consent is given; through to opt out statements in barely visible banners.

Reading between the lines of the ICO guidance it is clear they will focus enforcement energies on cases where no appropriate effort has been made to make users aware, and even then they will be reasonable in encouraging and allowing time for upscaling the response.

Our advice to clients is to understand the spirit of the law and then interpret it in a way which maps to the level of risk the organisation is prepared to take and the context of the business. Here are three examples:

• For a highly risk averse company in a domain in which building customer trust is paramount, such as financial services, this means a more explicit consent route, e.g. interupt the user’s experience to inform them using a light box or overlay, and offer a clear choice, making accepting cookies the path of least resistance.
• For a less constrained company dealing with non-intrusive cookies, such as the Foolproof site, it means focusing on informing and using an inferred consent route.
• For any company using cookies to track behaviour and target promotions, it means accepting that this is the area the law is aimed at, and taking extreme care to demonstrate that you are being open and transparent – and that your users are therefore informed. We believe that clearly stating the benefits that cookies provide to users, indicating where content is affected and offering clear instructions on opting out is enough in most cases. The ICO’s response to the Digital Advertising Alliance’s self regulatory framework, most likely recognised as the Adchoices scheme, illustrates that this is a compromise they accept is more commercially viable than seeking explicit consent for tracking cookies.

  To summarise, we recommend focusing on taking reasonable steps to avoid enforcement rather than full compliance – at least in the short term until it’s clear how companies and the ICO will respond.

  We’re continuing to work with our clients to find the right solutions for their business. Contact us to see how we can help you.

  ]]> http://www.foolproof.co.uk/cookies-update/feed/ 3 http://www.foolproof.co.uk/breaking-organisational-silos-at-uxhk2012/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=breaking-organisational-silos-at-uxhk2012 http://www.foolproof.co.uk/breaking-organisational-silos-at-uxhk2012/#comments Fri, 20 Apr 2012 08:21:24 +0000 Ray McCune http://www.foolproof.co.uk/?p=9663 Co-authored with former Foolproofer Patrick Goffin

  Top-of-mind for UX professionals at last month’s UX Hong Kong 2012 (UXHK2012) was ‘breaking down organisational silos’, which in fact related heavily to a round-table session we were running during the event.

  The fact that so many speakers were focused on organisational silos and how they could be broken down to drive effective change, suggests that UX professionals from all types of organisations around the world have arrived at a shared view, that UX has matured as a discipline and earned the right to play a leading role in supporting business strategy and change. This common view point shows how far the UX industry has come in the last 10 years.

  Breaking down organisational silos
  When Foolproof started out back in 2002, we were working mainly on tactical briefs, improving the design of sites or processes but rarely gaining the opportunity to influence strategy or the broader perspective on customer experience. Today, Foolproof, and some of our peers, are getting the opportunity to work on high value, strategic engagements higher up the organisational chain. So, this in itself is surely a win for the UX industry. UX professionals have finally been given a seat at the strategy table and we’re winning briefs and projects that in the past would have gone to some of our creative design agency cousins without UX agencies warranting any consideration.

  So where do we go from here? Well, as I mentioned at the beginning, a lot of the emphasis at UXHK was on breaking down organisational silos, and for good reason. It’s these silos that are now the main barrier for organisations that wish to become more customer-centric and to take a strategic approach to customer experience management.

  Big organisations tend to be extremely departmentalised, with business functions split into areas such as Product, Sales, Marketing, Operations and IT. These departments act as almost independent silos, sitting alongside one another and very often poorly integrated or not incentivised for co-operation. In recent years Digital has been bolted-on as an additional silo, more recently Social has also been added and even split further between acquisition, onsite experience and mobile. These structures lead to an isolated view, focused purely on each silo’s own short-term goals such as channel optimisation, revenue, cost reduction and profit to name a few. The result of this is a fragmented and disjointed experience for customers as they come into contact with businesses in different ways.

  This silo mentality gets in the way of creating coherent and joined up customer experiences and hence jeopardise lifetime customer value. If the silos don’t act in concert with a shared vision of the customer experience they’re aiming at delivering then it’s unlikely they will create a perception of good service and live up to their brand promises.

  In many organisations that I have worked with, this is very much the case. No-one seems to be wholly responsible for the entire end-to-end customer experience (well apart from the CEO). It’s this problem that is creating the circumstances for UX practitioners to come in and begin to effect change. We’re being asked to come in and unpick what the patchwork of interactions that makes up the typical customer experience and to create a strategy for joining them up in a meaningful and valuable way.

  Agents of change
  I believe that the future of UX lies with us acting as ‘change leaders’ in organisations – be it client-side or standing firm with a strong voice, opinion and evidence from agency-side. Make no mistake, this is no easy task. Organisational silos are deeply entrenched in most companies, but that doesn’t mean customer experience cannot be managed strategically and effectively if it’s prioritised at the top of the organisation and managed downwards consistently. Think about companies like Apple and Amazon that have had a mantra in their DNA of obsessing about the customer experience. These are the organisations that are succeeding today, in a market where the consumer has more power and where poor customer experiences are easy to share and uncover.

  There were four takeaways from the event which we would like to share, which I believe UX champions can take forward to effect change:

  1. Create strong leadership and sponsorship. This can often come about in the form of finding and supporting someone in the organisation that champions UX and helping them on their career path through delivering exceptional UX led work and supporting their voice within the organisation.

  2. Make a connection between customer experience and drivers for brand value. Really understand and be aware, of all of an organisation’s customer experience touch points (the experience drivers), work hard to get these right and find a way of measuring how this can impact on hard measures of value. Have a measurement framework in place. Net Promoter Scores are not necessarily the right answer but are one such metric that organisations are using.

  3. Create a vision that can inspire and create organisational alignment. Create a shared vision within the organisation so that everyone is bought into it and ensure it drives passion and inspiration and functions to bring the organisation together. Working as one towards a shared end goal of delivering a better customer experience.

  4. Create a roadmap and business case to bring everything together. Develop a UX strategy framework which is a long-term plan to align every customer touch-point with the organisation’s vision for user experience. It should be noted that focus should also be on achieving a measurable increase in commercial yield.

  ]]> http://www.foolproof.co.uk/breaking-organisational-silos-at-uxhk2012/feed/ 1 http://www.foolproof.co.uk/data-is-not-a-dirty-word-in-design/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=data-is-not-a-dirty-word-in-design http://www.foolproof.co.uk/data-is-not-a-dirty-word-in-design/#comments Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:38:57 +0000 Steve Abbis http://www.foolproof.co.uk/?p=9600 Does data have a place in the design process? There is a very strong constituency in the design community that thinks not. ‘Design is magic’ the story goes. Analytical thinking stifles creativity, and constrains thinking. Data closes things down rather opening them up.

  The reality is that good design stems from the right reason for creativity. Being clear on the questions that need to be resolved, and the pain points the customer experiences, helps to define the problem-space and build a platform for truly creative thinking.

  User experience researchers know the power of a well worded question when it comes to unlocking vital insight from an end user. Analytics data present another place to ask intelligent questions. Identifying and extracting useful data from an analytics platform can be every bit as powerful as writing an astute discussion guide.

  Design decisions present themselves in different places, shapes and sizes, from big decisions about product and service propositions through to small decisions about type and layout. The very best designers make evidence-based calls wherever they can because it increases the likelihood that users will try and treasure the experiences they create. Which means, in our experience, that the very best designers are comfortable using data to help them make design decisions: it is all part of the craft.

  ]]> http://www.foolproof.co.uk/data-is-not-a-dirty-word-in-design/feed/ 0 http://www.foolproof.co.uk/qa-understanding-winning-the-mobile-consumer/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=qa-understanding-winning-the-mobile-consumer http://www.foolproof.co.uk/qa-understanding-winning-the-mobile-consumer/#comments Fri, 13 Apr 2012 10:18:07 +0000 Ray McCune http://www.foolproof.co.uk/?p=9546 Thanks to everyone who attended the webinar ‘Understanding & Winning the Mobile consumer’. As promised I’ve answered the questions we didn’t manage to get to within the session here. If you missed the webinar you can view the recording in our new Insight section.
   

  Q: Historically, designing for mobile is often focussed on transitional, quick, task-based goals, but we’ve been hearing a lot recently that this is no longer the case. How can we determine the context of each different scenario to satisfy all?
  

  A: There’s certainly an opportunity to go beyond tackling quick, task-based goals with mobile. There is a strong element of both time filling and distraction with mobile consumers, and session lengths often exceed 30 minutes. For certain customer types this time is used to improve efficiency or to make their time productive. Others are looking for a degree of escapism and want to be entertained.

  There’s an opportunity here for brands to engage consumers for prolonged periods of time, either through experiences that add utility, or that are immersive and enjoyable. When it comes to deciding on which contexts and scenarios you are trying to design for, you need to bring customers into the process to really get under the skin of their needs, expectations and preferences.
   

  Q: Device wise, Caroline said iPad is more for home use, but would it continue to be like this, or something bigger than mobile but smaller than iPad in demand?
  

  A: New mobile devices are frequently being released and they vary in screen size, platform and capabilities. New devices such as the Galaxy Note blur the edges between a tablet and smart phone. These new hybrid devices have implications for context of use and expectations for the types of products and services that can be used on the move and at home. 66% of those who don’t already own a tablet expect to purchase one within the next 12 months which underlines the fact that a large number of consumers will be using both phones and tablets, and devices in between, at different times for different purposes. If brands want to deliver a joined up experience they need to design products and services for a wide range of devices and contexts.
   

  Q: …and gambling when on the toilet?
  

  A: The short answer is yes they do, and not just on the toilet. Going Mobile showed that mobile was spurring a significantly greater volume of betting activity with existing players and introducing new customers into the market as well.

  Mobile enables bets to be placed at work for the first time for many and allows for spontaneity, placing a bet with friends during a sporting event in the pub or at home, all of which are new social contexts.
  Importantly, these are incremental bets over and above what would have been placed if it wasn’t for the convenience of a mobile service.

  Apps are perfect for servicing this type of business but bookmakers beware; a poorly designed mobile experience may not only lose you the bet, but also the customer. We saw this theme emerging from our diary study and the survey confirmed this showing that 38% of consumers had turned away from a brand because of a poor mobile experience.
   

  Q: What do you think makes that emotional connection to a brand?

  A: Relevancy, value and intimacy are obviously key drivers for overall emotional connection with brands. In the mobile context this translates into understanding the context of the consumer and delivering something relevant and of value in the right way.

  If a brand can achieve balance across all the design principles developed through Going Mobile they are in a great place to win consumer attention and advocacy and earn the right to a place on the home screen of consumer’s mobiles.
   

  Q: What about mobile version vs. responsive design?

  A: Responsive design optimises the experience for a broad range of devices with varying screen sizes ensuring you’re catering for a broad range of customers. It doesn’t however enable mobile to be catered for in specific design terms as a specialised mobile site does.

  The real weakness in responsive design is that it doesn’t enable you to take advantage of the functionality offered by mobile devices such as the camera, accelerometer and compass. Our colleagues over at FLow have answered this in more detail in their blog ‘One size doesn’t fit all’
   

  Q: Thanks a lot for sharing this. Have you considered differences between native and web apps, and if the very useful design principles you shared change between the two?

  A: The second part of this question is the simplest to answer. The design principles stay the same as they are intended to act as overarching principles for mobile experience design and management. These should be used to inform, guide and measure all aspects of the mobile experience being served up to customers and to ensure consistency across the full range of mobile products and services including sites and apps.

  In terms of native vs web app, there is no simple answer. There are a range of alternatives including generic and dedicated web apps, native apps and hybrids. Each has its own benefits and drawbacks, which organisations need to consider when making a decision on the approach that’s right for them.

  One very strong benefit of native apps is that they give brands the opportunity to become one of the body organs of the consumer’s device. They can become the heart for a specific domain of activity such as banking, gaming or media consumption.
  Think of the design principle ‘Your brand in my pocket’.
   

  Q: The gambling mobile app story was interesting, clearly mobile opens up ways for people to bypass company internet policy. There are stories in the USA of people being asked for Facebook passwords at job interviews. Do you think we could see a ban on certain mobile apps being used by employees?
   

  A: It’s a matter for individual corporate policy but the main thing to keep in mind is that there are a multitude of opportunities for engagement. Any corporate policies regarding mobile use in the work place won’t affect those other important moments in time and contexts such as lunch time or the daily commute when consumers are performing tasks, making purchases or seeking entertainment and distraction.
   

  Q: What advice do you have for organisations developing B2B apps?
  

  A: ontext really is king and it comes down to an understanding of what processes can be made available and which make sense to deliver in the mobile context. Our design principle ‘Grow and learn’ is very relevant in a B2B environment. Businesses need a deliberate strategy for evolving mobile strategy and services over time. Businesses need to connect with their customers to understand how this evolution will take place and what the objectives of the B2B customer are today and how they will be shaped in the future.
   

  Q: 1) Are the successful brands seeing the same user engagement across a variety of mobile devices or is one particular device or brand of devices (e.g. Apple) experiencing better take up? 2) Do brands tend to develop say “the perfect iPhone app” or do they tend to roll out multiple versions of their app across a number of devices?
  

  A: This is a difficult question to answer but an interesting theme for a study should someone wish to explore it! It varies depending on the organisation and we haven’t seen a consistent approach outside of a general bias towards the Apple suite of products from a lot of major brands. There are stats available which highlight differences between the amount of data consumed by Android versus iOS users for instance, but nothing that we know of in the public domain which gives meaningful comparisons of actual consumer engagement or satisfaction.
   

  Q: How have QR codes failed to take the context of the mobile user into consideration in the UK?
  

  A: Poor placement in situations that don’t lend themselves well to consumer interaction. They are also a bit clunky when it comes to use – the need for people to focus manually and the fact that it’s often difficult to trigger action.
  We think QR codes came as a bit of a surprise for most UK consumers. They just appeared out of nowhere without a great deal of explanation on what they were or how consumers should engage with them. There’s an interesting article in The Guardian, ‘WTF, QR codes?’, which underpins this lack of understanding. We expect to see QR codes being overtaken by new technologies such as Near Field Communication (NFC) which offer simpler less demanding forms of consumer interaction.

  Further reading
  More about Going Mobile
  Webinar: UX Strategy ‘The Brand Experience Gap’

  ]]> http://www.foolproof.co.uk/qa-understanding-winning-the-mobile-consumer/feed/ 0