User experience blog

BA holds its no.1 position

By Claire Savage on 8 June 2010

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BA continues to hold 1st place in terms of online usability for users according to our latest online travel report, Flights Online: Ensuring Your Site Takes Off.

Just as well as 2010 could be said to be its Annus horribilis to date.

First the snow, then volcanic ash followed by a number of strikes, at least BA are making it easy for the user to purchase flights online if not following through with the service by actually having it’s airlines fly.

In a competitive market which is more and more feeling the influence of uncontrollable outside effects, making it easy for someone to find and purchase travel has never been so important. Now, when users are sitting at home booking a flight or holiday many other considerations are going to come into play, so keeping a potential customer is crucial.

So why do the average scores in our annual travel report still leave plenty of room for improvement? Although the average usability score has increased from 56.7% to 64.4% since last year, basic guidelines that still need improvement include the following:

  • Supporting comparison shoppers
  • Making pages ‘share-friendly’
  • Providing airport information
  • Displaying clear progress bars
  • Providing contact numbers during the booking process

So perhaps for those companies with lower scores this is their time to capitalise at BA’s expense and improve their user experience.

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Successful social media podcast available

By Claire Savage on 3 June 2010

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Social media continues its domination in marketing news and buzz. Marketers with years of experience outside of the digital sector and SMEs are often reluctant to adopt it or simply don’t know where to start.

Our Successful Social Media podcast (the link to the podcast is at the bottom of the page) outlines the basics to social media, what to think about and how it can help generate traffic, new business leads and carry out market research.

Many will remain resistant and pessimistic about just how effective social media can be for business and to put it quite simply this is normally because they:

  • Don’t understand what it is
  • See it as a fad

Let’s get things straight. Social media is really quite simple. It’s just another channel to audiences that you need to communicate with. However, it can be 2-way, it’s constant and control can be minimal.

Social media is not a fad. It’s here to stay whether in the form we see today or a new form. Convergence with TV is fuelling it’s evolution and it’s growth is rapid. It’s here to stay so you might as well get used to it before it’s too late.

Photo credit: matthamm via Flickr

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What’s happening at Webcredible

By Trenton Moss on 1 June 2010

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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…

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Poll results: Online retailers need to be transparent and upfront

By Claire Savage on 26 May 2010

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A lack of transparency and the request for upfront details when purchasing on line is the biggest cause of drop offs according to our recent ecommerce poll.

The research polled over 1,200 online users, asking why they would abandon an order when shopping online. The results were:

  • Having to register before buying – 29%
  • Hidden charges at the checkout – 41%
  • Lengthy checkout process – 10%
  • Not clear delivery details – 11%
  • Phone number not provided on website – 8%

Is that really that surprising? Taking the traditional experience of shopping, consumers do not expect a list of additional charges at the checkout and would, I expect get very upset at the prospect. Nor, would the shopper in the traditional retail environment expect to register their details before paying for the goods in their basket.

As one respondent commented ‘If the checkout process is too much of a hassle, or becomes too involved, I am apt to go somewhere else”.

As with all online experiences, the web is meant to make things easier and quicker not more time consuming and taxing in transactions.

Retailers need to focus on the consumer needs online just like they do in the traditional environment and by implementing basic usability guidelines the poll results would be radically different.

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Guest blog - Speech recognition: dealing with the problems

By Rhodri Buttrick on 21 May 2010

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The main problem with speech recognition is that although many charities are advising dyslexics to use the software, it does not specifically cater for a dyslexic market. As far as I can tell, the program is aimed at the office worker market.

When you first install your speech recognition software you need to complete the training process. This involves reading extracts form books into the machine. I was nine at the time and, being severely dyslexic, I could barely read. The training text is displayed on a very small panel and you are unable to increase the size of the font. My reading was so poor that the only way I could struggle through the training process was to have my mother or father whisper a sentence into my ear for me to repeat back into my microphone. As you can imagine this took hours.

There is also the issue that speech recognition is actually quite a bizarre skill and is very different from dictating to a human being. Speech Recognition can only write down what it hears, so if you slur your words or leave some out altogether, then you are going to have accuracy problems. However this doesn’t mean you have to speak like the Queen, as long as your pronunciation and diction is consistent, the software will grow used to the way you speak.

Another problem is that many people give up on speech recognition because they don’t get into good habits. This is perfectly understandable that if no one had explained to me what these habits involved, I would not be able to follow them. A vital good habit is using the “correct that” feature. If you find a word is consistently appearing wrong you can use the “correct” function to type in what the word is meant to be. This way the software continuously learns thus making the recognition even better.

One final note. With speech recognition being advised as a key way to increase accessibility in schools and universities, it is important to remember that it is not a fix all solution. It may have been the right approach for me but you must consider very carefully after trying it whether it is really the right method for you.

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