Posts tagged with 'User experience'

Shaking up the online property market

By Mru Kodali on 16 March 2010

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Recent news that Tesco and Google may be gearing up to launch property websites could be a wakeup call for letting and estate agents across the UK and can only be good news for the user experience in this sector.

Sites like Rightmove.co.uk are already pretty well established in this space so building market share won’t be a breeze. However, both Tesco and Google are trusted names in the UK and Google already offers property search in the US and Australia, so it should be reasonably easy to port this offering across. Tesco has tried to do this in the past, but had to pull out due to legal challenges from estate agents, but now the Office of Fair Trading has recommended reforms to this industry which will allow the entry of players like Google and Tesco.

Tesco seems to be taking advantage of this by launching a website called iSold which lets people sell their home for a flat £999 fee. Moves like this have the potential to revolutionise the way property is sold in the UK and estate agent take-up may not be a crucial factor, as it could pave the way for increasing numbers of private sales.

Concerns about hidden problems and the plain unfamiliarity with the process tend to be the barriers to private sales at the moment. But the credibility and trust that may come with big names of Tesco and Google, along with detailed guidance for sellers, could alleviate these issues. Either way, user experience will be key and Google will likely focus on this. As a result, others may eventually have to focus on this as well to continue to compete.

If these developments take place, house buyers/sellers and renters could benefit from not only greater choice at lower costs but hopefully a higher bar set for user experience.  Making selling and buying homes easier is not just a great thing for consumers but may well act as an instrument for a quicker economic recovery.

Photo credit: I See Modern Britain via Flickr / Creative commons

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Monthly user experience finds

By Mru Kodali on 26 February 2010

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We, the User Experience team at Webcredible, are always stumbling upon interesting sites - UX best practice, bloopers or just plain amusing finds that we share internally. We’ve now decided to share a couple of these on our blog every month. Without further ado, here’s our first installment:

  1. Tag cloud gone wrong - The risks of automatically updating tag clouds with little or no moderation are apparent in this screenshot, where the EggExpert site’s most popular keywords revolve around their poor service
  2. Web 2.0 video - An entertaining explanation of web 2.0 on YouTube

We’ll post some more gems in a month’s time. Future posts will go up on the last Friday of each month.

Photo credit: faith goble via Flickr/Creative Commons

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SeeSaw launches new online TV service

By Abid Warsi on 17 February 2010

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SeeSaw has just launched its TV service bringing together recent and archive TV programmes from the BBC, Channel 4 and Five. It bought its technology from Project Kangaroo, which was joint venture by the same broadcasters that the Competition Commission blocked. Now that this service has finally arrived will it succeed?

3 channels in 1 place

Bringing programmes from different broadcasters into a single place has been popular elsewhere. Hulu did this in the USA where it offers programmes from NBC, Fox and ABC, amongst others, and has been very successful. For users it’s convenient to have all the programmes they want to watch all in one place and it encourages them to browse around and find various programmes, just as they do on their living room TVs. However, UK broadcasters already have their own successful catch up servies so SeeSaw will need promote itself heavily and attract users to its website.

SeeSaw will contain thousands of hours of archive programmes and this may help it to attract users. However, it’s not clear from its homepage that it contains a large amount of archive footage. It should make its proposition clear in its marketing material and on its homepage.

Living room

Most users will still prefer to watch programmes on their living room TVs rather than on their PC monitors. Living rooms are used for socialising and large TVs work much better PCs in this environment. If SeeSaw found a way to integrate its service into TV sets, set-top boxes or gaming consoles then it could get head of the competition. Netflix has does this quite successfully with its own streaming service in the USA and SeeSaw could benefit from doing something similar.

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Retrospective BA miles claims hinder online experience

By Jon White on 15 December 2009

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British Airways might have enough problems at the moment what with making big financial losses and reports that its cabin crew have voted nine to one in favour of striking over the Christmas period. Nevertheless, I’d like to talk about a shortcoming I encountered deep within its website, specifically in the Executive Club section.British Airways plane

Firstly I feel I must insert a caveat here that I’m not knocking BA’s website as a whole, as it provides a very good user experience and actually topped Webcredible’s 2009 Flights Online Report. However, the problem I encountered came when looking to attribute BA miles to a previous flight.

When it comes to joining BA’s Executive Club and collecting miles, I’m guessing many people do it in the way I did – booked a flight, realised you could claim the miles, and signed up to collect them retrospectively – and it’s the retrospective element that I feel is slightly flawed!

Obviously if you’re a member when you book a flight, you use your frequent flyer number upon booking and the miles are added automatically when you’ve flown. When looking to add miles for previously taken flights however, I expected to see a clear link in the ‘Manage my account’ section, but that unfortunately wasn’t the case. The left-hand navigation is actually very well laid out, but it’s really not immediately clear where the required section would be.

After a good few minutes of searching I did find it in the ‘Collecting BA miles’ section, under the ‘Flights’ sub-menu, right at the bottom of the main content on the page, with the link text ‘More about claiming missing BA miles’. Now in hindsight, this does seem like a logical location, but for new users it can be very hard to find and surely should be promoted much more actively (as they are the users likely to need this facility).

I admit this is a minor point when it comes to the overall user experience of a very good website. But, when it comes to recruiting new members to its Executive Club, this point could be important for BA.

Given the partnerships between airlines to gain rewards for one airline from flights on another (I’ve accumulated most of my BA miles on Cathay Pacific flights for example), customers don’t have to join BA’s Executive Club to gain rewards on BA flights, and herein lies the point. If users have trouble claiming the miles on retrospective flights on BA’s website then they may simply head to another airline’s site and use its reward scheme instead.

Photo credit:  lrargerich via Flickr / Creative commons

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Eye tracking - A short-sighted future?

By Trenton Moss on 8 December 2009

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A trend that we’ve noticed this year in the user experience sector is a dramatic decrease in demand for eye tracking. When the recession first kicked-in at the start of this year we were warned that usability was going to be thrown out in view of reduced budgets. We’ve seen no evidence of this whatsoever - budgets have been cut and the amount set aside for usability and user research has decreased slightly, but no longer is an excellent user experience just a nice-to-have. Usability and user research are still at the core of good web design and development and companies are still investing heavily in these.

So what of eye tracking? Why does it seem to have fallen by the wayside? I have a few theories:

The novelty has worn off
There’s no doubt about it - marketing managers love eye tracking. They love being able to see where people are looking and they love getting back nice looking heatmaps. The thing is, eye tracking’s not that new anymore and there are far cheaper ways of getting images of where (lots of) people clicked on the page at far lower prices (think ClickTale and Crazy Egg).
It’s a nice-to-have
The recession has seen a lot of losers as nice-to-haves products struggle to maintain demand. Eye tracking is fantastic at evaluating the effectiveness of the creative design & execution, and for noticing whether users see those key messages and calls-to-action quickly. But this can anecdotally be picked up in regular usability testing, which will also provide a wealth of additional findings (which can be used to significantly increase conversion rates).
It’s too expensive
Eye trackers are very expensive to lease - with a virtual monopoly, the main worldwide supplier has had little incentive to economise. I suspect that many companies are perhaps not bothering to hold on to the kit anymore in light of the cost cutting that’s hit us all. This in turn means that less people talk about eye tracking studies and reduced word-of-mouth means less people are thinking about doing eye tracking.

By the way, I still think eye tracking can be really useful when used  for the right reasons and in the right context (see our article on the advantages and disadvantages of eye tracking). I’m not putting down eye tracking here, I’m just reporting back on something I’ve noticed this year.

I’d be really interested to hear anyone’s thoughts on this - have you seen any noticeable drop in demand like we have? My reasons are purely speculative - do you agree or disagree?

Finally, I’ll leave you with an eye tracking video featuring our PR & Marketing Manager, Jon using Amazon.

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