By Alexander Baxevanis on 30 April 2009
We often get asked how companies can best use their online presence to minimise the effects of the downturn. While there’s no silver bullet that works in any kind of business, some helpful ideas for the travel sector come from a recent (29 April 2009) presentation by the Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA) & accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC).
Their “guide for surviving the downturn” was mostly presented from a financial management perspective, but it’s easy to see how much of their advice is actually related to the user experience of online travel booking:
- PwC advised businesses to “take a closer look at changing booking patterns” and understand not just what customers do but also why. Conducting user research is one way to uncover such insights, especially given that what customers say they do is not always what they actually do.
- Customers choosing to book later than usual is having a considerable impact on travel agents, who traditionally count on receiving payments well in advance of delivering a holiday. Last time we looked into how people research & book holidays online, we found that many websites didn’t do as much as they could to convince customers to book early rather than postpone their decision.
- Businesses were also urged to manage their cost base and evaluate the impact of their distribution methods i.e. their call centres or websites. Can travel agents still afford to have consumers getting confused on their wesbite and having to ring a call centre to complete a transaction or resolve an issue?
One of the questions that inevitably came up at the end of the presentation was whether there’s still room for innovation in the current economic climate. The answer was quite straightforward: “Don’t stop innovating, don’t forget your brand, and have an eye for the future”. According to PwC, there are winners and losers in each recession, and those who can continue to invest & innovate to create a better user experience are usually among the winners.
Photo credit: specialkrb (via Flickr/Creative Commons)
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By Alistair Gray on 27 April 2009
A survey released by the Gadget Helpline today claims that too much jargon is used when referring to gadgets and technology, with the top 10 terms consumers find most confusing identified.
This is hardly a surprise. Whilst in development most gadgets are known under a codename and these are hard to drop after the grand unveiling. Even when they are changed many of the new names are led by marketing or simply kept short (and as a consequence vague) to save time. Why say ’save the programme for later’ when ‘timeshift’ is so much shorter?
Jargon develops naturally, it grows in groups of people using and working on the same equipment. At Webcredible we give different types of meetings various names - ‘kick-offs’, ‘debriefs’, ‘workshops’, etc. This means we know exactly what the meeting content will be. Internally it makes perfect sense, no need to explain what we’ll be covering, it’s all clear in the name. But our clients always ask the same questions – “What will we cover in [meeting X]?”.
While you use jargon internally, you must not use it for external communications (try to cut it out internally as well, you never notice jargon creeping into your external communications until someone asks “what’s that?”). You should not assume knowledge, but rather ensure that your website or any other consumer-facing device or communication can be understood by anyone!
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By Trenton Moss on 23 April 2009
Microsoft has recently announced that they’ll be pushing Internet Explorer 8 on to users of earlier IE versions through an automatic rollout. As IE8 launched, much of the talk was about increased security and new features for users. Though the new features are welcome and will maybe help IE8 stay up there in an increasingly competitive browser market place, has Microsoft thought enough about usability?
Features are all well and good, but usability of the browser is also crucial. The IE7 interface doesn’t score particularly high in the usability stakes and IE8 uses a very similar interface. In fact Microsoft seems to have made the usability of the interface worse by placing the compatibility view button (which makes the website render as it would in IE7) right next to the refresh button, making it easy to press this by accident and unwittingly causing the website layout to break.
Hardly anyone outside of the web development world is going to understand what this compatibility button actually means or does.
When other online markets have reached a stalemate on price or functionality, then usability can become a key differentiator (if it wasn’t already) and Microsoft really needs to consider this in the browser market. The growing strength of Firefox and the entry of Google Chrome have seen the browser market really hotting up, so maybe Microsoft should look at what will really make consumers want a browser, rather than trying to push it on them automatically!
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By Jon White on 21 April 2009
After months in the making I finally find myself saying welcome to Webcredible’s blog. Aside from the development time it took, this blog has been a long time coming given that we are over 5 years old now. But hey, better late than never!
This blog, like many others, is a mouthpiece for the people behind the company to give their opinions on industry issues, technical thoughts and even what’s happening at Webcredible. So if you’re interested in the thoughts of our directors, developers, consultants and a few slightly less technical musings from me (the PR & marketing manager), then this blog’s for you.
We hope you find our posts interesting and helpful and look forward to your thoughts and reactions in the months to come.
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