Our thinking

As we swing into June summer is most definitely here in London. For me, summer arrives when the air con starts going on every day in the office and we no longer rely on opening windows, and this has most definitely been happening recently. The customary differences in opinion (usually between the men and women) as to the air con temperature have also begun surfacing in earnest.

Summer this year brings a great deal of uncertainty into the UK, with our new government promising massive cuts especially with public sector spending. At Webcredible we’ve been extremely busy this year working on some large and very interesting projects, with no apparent sign of this waning. We’ve still got decent briefs coming in from both the public and private sector so it will be interesting to see how this pans out.

So, other than the General Election and the iPad launching in the UK in May, it was an eventful month for us. We’ve finally hired our new Head of User Experience, Pete Broadbent, after a lengthy selection process. Pete has a huge amount of experience within the UX and digital space and we’re really excited to have him in the company. He’s worked for a very large consultancy for the past few years so has built up varied experiences over the past 10 years or so.

Talking of new hires, we’ll also be hiring a new office manager this month as our current one is sadly leaving us. I’ve got a number of interviews lined up for what is actually a hugely important role within the company – the Office Manager is probably the person that interacts the most with everyone internally and ensures people’s day-to-day happiness.

We noticed quite a bit of activity over on Twitter too, with people tweeting about the results from our latest poll. Our poll asked why you’d abandon an order when shopping online, with the most commonly cited answers (accounting for 2/3 of the votes) being:

• Hidden charges at the checkout
• Having to register before buying

We weren’t too surprised that these came out on top as we see consumers complaining about these all the time in research. We were however surprised at the number of people that chose these 2 options. Ecommerce managers, you have been warned!

We’ve got a couple of reports coming out this summer too, namely our annual flight booking and council usability reports. I really like our reports – they always rank 20 of the leading providers against 20 key usability guidelines that we’ve developed through our own research (we run a lot of projects in the travel and local government sectors). The reports always make for an interesting read as they:

• Have a full league table showing who are the best and worst
• Explain the guidelines in detail meaning everyone can learn best practices

So do look out for our reports! We’ll of course blog and Tweet about them when they come out. Do also keep an eye out for our new training courses. We’ve got 5 new courses launching this week (taking the total number up to 15), and are splitting them up into 5 separate training streams. Our training courses our great (although I’m a bit biased)… small class sizes, highly interactive and taught by experts – what more could you want!

Until next month…