What factors affect your conversion?

Everyone who runs an eCommerce website is hooked on conversion as the vital key performance indicator to improve. And quite rightly…. It is the one metric that tells you how well your website it turning lookers into bookers (or browsers into buyers if you don’t like things rhyming and prefer alliteration instead.).
So what affects conversion? Well there are a number of factors that have an influence including:

• Usability
  How easy your site is to navigate and transact with
• Security
  How well your site conveys and actually take steps to ensure the safety of customer data
• Content
  How well  the site text and imagery informs &  supports the sales process
• Layout
  It’s not just how much you have on a page, it’s where you put it that counts
• Speed
  How quickly your site appears & displays affects bounce & therefore conversion
• Aesthetics
  How it looks also affects how it converts (try changing the colour of a few buttons if you don’t believe me)

All you have to do it find out what works for your customers.

Facebook revives Social Commerce, but will it work?

The topic of Social Commerce (or SocialCommerce if you like to remove that middle space to look modern) has arisen again recently with two announcements:

Firstly Twitter a few weeks back allowed a 'buy now' button in its promoted tweet messages.
Secondly today Facebook have announced that they will do something similar and allow online shoppers to click a “buy" button. This will allow them to purchase items in adverts or other posts, without leaving the social network platform.

But will these small but important innovations fuel the much discussed 'social commerce' development of social media?

Or will it merely create further annoyance to Twitter and Facebook users, who already have a significant proportion of monetised screen real estate taken up with promotions and ads?

Give the customer what they want

“The customer is always right, even when they are wrong”, was the phrase drilled into me at my very first retail job, a weekend activity that furnished me with enough money to gain some independence during my late teenage years (e.g. to drive a car and to date girls clearly out of my league).

I questioned this mantra at first, asking why someone had the right to reverse common sense just because they wielded money. However, I subsequently came around to this financial perspective, especially when it earned me further work and therefore some incremental income. I had therefore succumbed to one of the pressures of modern life, I had followed the money and given the customer the control.

But now, as I consult on eCommerce projects across the globe, I find a similar situation… that the online customer is right in whatever they do, even if they don’t do what you want them to do. In other words: you can craft what you think is the best online user experience, you can come up with what you believe is the most persuasive design and you can create the most engaging content I the eyes of your stakeholders… however if the relevant customer doesn't have what they want to make their decision (e.g. to take them forward to purchase), then all your hypotheses aren't worth anything.

UX actions to do BEFORE you redesign your website - part 2

Here's the second part of my thoughts on the UX actions to consider before redesigning your website. Part 1 is available here.

4. Benchmark
So who in your competitive market is doing a better job of things than you online and who isn't? What does great look like for your digital customers and why? If you cannot answer these two questions, then you clearly haven't assessed the competition and understood what makes other sites better.
Action:
Review at least a handful of competitors websites to understand how they solve the same problems you have. Assess the features that make them easy to use (you might even want to look further afield at organisations that aren't necessarily in competition with you, but just have similar goals).
Note: For a small cost you can even point your usability tool at these competitive sites and give users the same tasks you give your own site.

5. Map out the customer journeys
Not all goals are the same on each site. Whether your aim is to generate leads or to directly convert users to buy a good or service, the path to acquisition can be difficult and dependant upon a huge number of factors. Action:
Map out the journey through your site for each of your key personas, ideally from initial awareness and acquisition through to them converting and beyond (e.g. into being a brand advocate). These functional flows will explain to you, your stakeholders, your developers and your testers what is happening to your users.
Note: Remember to include the situations when things don't go exactly according to plan.

6. Build your sitemap
It's not all about functionality, you also need to map out your content and the site's information architecture.
Action:
Draw up the hierarchy of your primary content pages and understand how each of your topics is delivered (if necessary for each device).

7. Wireframe the key templates
Producing a schematic or blueprint of every key page will create a visual guide of what your online users will experience. Wireframes will explain: the kinds of information displayed, the functions available, the priority of the information & functions, any display rules and effects of personalisation & other scenarios.
Action:
Create your wireframes based upon your customer journeys and the sitemap. But remember to test your creation before going into design.

  

Digital leadership - be more than an online expert

Being a digital leader means you need to be more than just an absolute expert in one area of online technology or marketing. You may know all about PPC, display & remarketing, SEO, email , display, affiliates and social media, but this isn't enough. To truly be at (and stay at) the forefront of digital, you really need to have the following qualities or experience:

1.  A leader of people
It's not just enough to have line managed the odd eCommerce staff member or digital agency, you need to be a mentor & coach, a motivator and a decision maker who can support and build a high performing team members to do great things.

2. An all-rounder
To understand how to get the best from that team, you ideally need an understanding of all aspects of online business. From being able to produce a focused digital business case to justify further investment, through to engaging with your opposite number in the technology department... you are going to have to have a broad spread of expertise.

3. An innovator
What have you done in your career that wasn't just "me too" but truly ground breaking? Have you been creative in your delivery of a new digital platform or applied a new method or approach to a building a difficult user interface? Have you been the first in your industry to trial a new device or an advanced technology that was subsequently adopted by the rest?

4. A strategic brain
Are you able to consider the bigger picture and link your team's work to the business drivers of the wider company? The creation and ownership of your organisations digital strategy should sit with you, it's yours to manage shape and develop as the company grows in its adoption of new online technologies and practices.

5. A customer advocate
Do you know who your customers are and what their digital needs really are? Do you know why your online presence or your eCRM initiatives work well (and why sometimes they don't strike a core)? It's not just a case of hiring a user experience (UX) person to do your thinking for you... you also need to get under the skin of your users and know what drives both their loyalty & resistance.

6. A scientist
Getting data from your analytics package is a basic necessity for any online practitioner these days, but being able to dive into the dashboards and analyse the insight that the information is giving you needs more than just a little diligence. You should also have experience of carrying out multiple experiments to improve your goals, ideally from a programme of on-going AB and Multi-Variate tests.

7. A communicator
It's fine to have strong views on those topics that you are passionate about, but you also need to be able to get your ideas across in a structured and eloquent manner.... especially to senior stakeholders.

UX actions to do BEFORE you redesign your website - part 1

Before you dive into a full creative redesign of your next website project, here's six user experience tasks I recommend you carry out.

1. Understand who your customers are:
Some of the biggest mistakes I've seen on sites are when they assume who the customer is... without actually find out the trust and validating that assumption. I'm sure we've all seen or heard of the exec who comes along at the beginning of a new digital project and says "I know who our customer is, I don't need to research them" or something similar.
Action:
Dip into your site's analytic package and see if this provides any insight into who your current visitors are (just don't assume this will be the same going forwards or that the same type of visitors all convert in the same way).
Note: If this doesn't tell you much, then carry out whatever research you can (Alexa demographic figures, online survey, site registration details, etc.)

2. Create customer personas
Personas are simply a way of describing the attributes, qualities and required outcomes of your key customer types. I believe that the aim here is not to be too descriptive about who they are (e.g. what income they have or what car they drive) but to describe their online needs (e.g. what they specifically want from your website).
Action:
Jakob Neilson says that you only need to test with 5 users to get the best from your usability tests [link] and I also think the same is true of personas. In other words, I recommend creating more than a couple but don't create too many.

3. Review your current site(s)
"Our site is rubbish, I want something entirely new" said the business stakeholder to me on a recent website redesign project. To which I replied... "that rubbish site is currently making millions of £'s worth of revenue for you each year, it must be doing something right!"
Yes, sure sites can always be improved... but just to slate everything about the current one without actually know what is working well (and conversely what is not) is of vital importance to ensure that you do not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Action:
Carry out a set of user test on your website to see what users like & don't, plus where they incur obvious struggle in completing their goals.
Note: A few tests using a tool such as whatusersdo.com will highlight key user issues and also provide a permanent record of just how 'rubbish' your site is or isn't. 

The Lack of Digital Skills – not just a Scottish Problem

A workforce skilled in online & digital tools & technologies is key to developing an organisation’s digital agenda. From the more specialist digital-specific & IT / IS / ICT roles, through to the generalists who may need up-skilling and re-training on average every 3 years… the hiring and development of skills necessary to take forward your online roadmap is not something to take lightly. In fact, the lack of digital skills could be one of the greatest factors in why your digital change strategy fails.

I've previously blogged about the lack of digital skills in Scotland and highlighted the lack of technical, marketing and associated skills (design, user experience, content, etc.) ‘North of the border’ where I live. But this skilled and empowered workforce isn't just missing in Scotland, or even across the UK. In a digital skills presentation today from ScotlandIS, the Scottish IT Trade body, I was actually shocked to hear the fact that there is a shortfall of 1 million digital jobs across the EU.

Scotland is therefore only a drop in the ocean compared to this, with only 10,000 people a year needed here to fill the gap.

So what is being done about it?

• Are schools, higher education and further education producing the right courses and talent?
• Are companies investing enough to drag seasoned employees (who may have previously resisted or ignored the use of digital)?
• Are cities and even governments doing enough to encourage digital enterprise in specific areas that need it most?
• Are boards hiring Chief Digital Officers to champion online excellence?

I fear not.

Social Media in action – CalMac Culture

As some readers will know, one of our clients at Ideal Interface is Caledonian MacBrayne, the ferry company known as CalMac. Based on the west coast of Scotland, they are the UK’s biggest ferry operator by size of fleet and cover 60,000 square miles of land and (mainly) water.

One of the initiatives that I’ve been involved with has been CalMac Culture #calmacculture – an online competition to find original singer / songwriters, leading to a slot in several of Scotland’s key festivals (e.g. Tyree Music Festival, etc.)
If you happen to be online tonight, you can see the ‘Battle of the Bands’ being streamed live from King Tut's Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow:

Take a look:
https://www.youtube.com/user/calmacculture

5 reasons your Digital Change initiative will fail

Nearly every business I now speak to is going through some form of digital change. From smaller organisations assessing the capabilities and skills of their online marketing teams & agencies, through to major multi-nationals looking to transform their IT systems, business processes and customer engagement models around electronic services... the mantra is clear “change or be changed in this new digital world” and I bet yours is very similar.

But transforming your company into a digital leader isn't easy and “becoming the next Amazon” is neither realistic nor practical for most organisations.

To give some ideas of the challenges faced, from my experience here are some areas where organisations fail to get a grip on their digital change:

1. Your delivery model is wrong:
Are you still creating lengthy waterfall project plans more suited to industrial age delivery expectations? The age of agile development and iterative delivery has not only been around for decades now, it has evolved into different flavours and techniques. However, just diving into a fully-blown scrum delivery method without fully understanding the implications this will have on the wider business (and setting these up correctly) is also a recipe for failure.

2. You don’t have the right skills in place

Just giving people new digital job titles doesn't cut it. There’s a talent war out in the wider marketplace right now, where businesses are struggling to hire and keep the right people with the necessary online skills to take big steps forward in technology, marketing and other commercial areas.  Assess what makes your company different and how you could attract and retain the right talent to realise your digital ambitions.

3. You don’t have digital business leadership

Ask yourself who in your company is actually responsible for the ownership and stewardship of your digital strategy? Where are the priorities, road-map and alignment of this digital strategy to the rest of the business set? If this role is not represented at your boardroom table, then you’re probably not taking it seriously enough.

4. You haven’t defined your technical vision and solution

It’s one thing to make bold claims about where your company will be in the future, it’s another entirely to assume it will get there without a technical vision of what the end solution looks like. I don’t think I have ever been on a successful change programme that failed to have the solution architecture for the main features or components defined in advance.

5. Your culture doesn't accept failure

Sure, every company likes to say it gets everything “right first time” but in reality this never happens… there is always room for improvement and things always go wrong. Or in other words “fail forward” by: accepting it, getting on with it, learning from it and move forwards quickly. One client I worked for in the past had a company policy of actually rewarding when a member of staff accepted they had made a failure (and quickly wrote up what went wrong and what they would do better next time). 

Has anyone got any others?

Ideal Interface is looking for a part-time administrator

Ideal Interface is a privately owned, strategic digital & eCommerce consultancy based in Bishopton, Renfrewshire. The business consults to a number of household names on all aspects of online sales, marketing and delivery.

Due to continued growth in the business, we now need a part-time administrator to help with key support tasks including:

• Processing of contractor expenses
• Creation of monthly invoices
• Basic client assistance (e.g. website updates)
• Interaction with suppliers

Skills you will need:

• Computer literacy (Windows, Excel, Word, etc.)
• Numeracy
• Good communication skills
• Attention to detail
• Basic internet (browsing, social media usage, etc.)

What we offer:

• A flexible working approach
• A competitive rate
• An opportunity to be part of a growing company 
• An opportunity to learn about Digital Marketing and the future eCommerce environment

Note: Because we are flexible, this role might well suit a parent who wants to return to work part-time.

8-16 hours per week.
Non-smoker and own transport preferred.

The first 90 days of the Chief Digital Officer

The first ninety days in any job are important. But in such a new and exciting industry as online & digital, the first 3 months in the role of Chief Digital Officer are key.

Here are my thoughts on what should be the main areas to focus of the CDO during this period:

1. Understand the overall business strategy
   Any digital strategy created must be completely aligned to what the business is planning (Commercial aims,  new products, marketing, etc.)
2. Learn the culture
   Every organisation has a "way of doing things" and seeing itself. This doesn't have to perpetuate, but it is good to know what sort of people your peers and team around you do and think. Most important is the appetite for change... which can either be a critical success factor or a big nail in the coffin of a lot of the most forward-thinking digital plans.
3. Set a benchmark
   Recognize which of your competitors (if any) are doing innovative things, or just doing the same stuff but better! 
4. Identify your stakeholders and make friends
   From marketing and customer insight through to IT and Operations... if you are going to be an agent for inevitable change, you will need to build allies first.
5. Research your customers
   It's no good setting yourself up to digitize everything if that's not the correct way forward. And it's no good rolling out smartphone apps if all your potential business is using tablets. You don't have to know everything about every one of them, but being able to classify and segment them into target audiences will help you create the most relevant products and experience for them.
6. Build your vision
   Create an idea of what success looks like. What is the end game of all this change and how does it help the user and company? (Tip: Then give this vision to your strongest critic and ask them for feedback - this will iron out a lot of the wrinkles)
7. Create the roadmap
   Draw up and digital roadmap of short and longer-term projects & tactical changes that move the organisation forward towards your vision. 
8. Justify investment
   Where necessary develop businesses cases that explore the investment required to realise the roadmap.
9. Deliver something quickly
   Nobody is realistically going to wait for you to see out your initial 3 months without some business improvement. This shouldn't be too difficult for any CDO new to the role, as there are always quick wins to be had
10. Have fun

Have I missed anything?

How to get your Amazon product images wrong

Whilst researching wearable technology on Amazon, I saw this array of strange images for sale:

Now I'm not that familiar with the latest gadgets, but I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to attach a kitchen tap and sink to your body. 

Advanced robots.txt techniques – Crawl Delay

We have a client we have been carrying out search engine optimisation work for over the last 3 months. However, recently we noticed that they had a bit of an issue with their robots.txt

Now for those who don’t know, a robots.txt file sits in the root directory of your website and it is there to tell search engines which files they should and should NOT index (The only real exception to this rule is that some search engines also allow you to provide the address of your XML Sitemap in this file)

Note: placing a file or directory to exclude in your robots.txt file is no guarantee that these pages will not be indexed by search engines. It is merely a way to indicate that you don’t want the page appearing in Google, Bing/Yahoo, etc. … but it still might.

Anyhow, back to this problematic little robots.txt file – here it is, in all its glory:

User-agent: *
Crawl-Delay: 10
Disallow:

The main issue here is with the command “Crawl-Delay: 10”

Note: This was put in automatically by the client’s eCommerce application and not manually by the client.

It is important to know that the “Crawl-Delay” command is not a representation of crawl rate (e.g. the amount of pages indexed at any one time), but instead it defines the amount of time (from 1 to 30 seconds) that the search engine "bot" will wait between crawling each and every page of your site. Meaning that the higher the figure, the lesser the number of pages on your site that actually get indexed.

The original purpose of this command was to stop search engine spiders from tearing through a large site and having a performance effect (e.g. too many crawls at once could even bring a site to its knees). However, Google publically states that they do not support the crawl delay command, (although Bing does), so the case for actually having this command there in the first place is significantly reduced.

Moreover, this crawl delay command poses an issue for some search engine optimisation services, such as Raven Tools. Which can’t effectively crawl sites when this single line is present.

So my advice…. Unless you have strange and less common search engine spiders frequently visit and they have a noticeable effect on your site’s stability, I would remove this command if at all possible.

Presenting at the ETAG Technology Solutions Conference 2014

Ouch, I've just found a rather cringe-worthy video of me going 'Umm' a lot, especially at the beginning of this presentation I gave in front of 200 people. This was at the ETAG (Edinburgh Tourism Action Group) Technology Solutions for Tourism Conference 2014 a couple of months ago.

My focus here was on the opportunity for International eCommerce, although there was a bunch of stuff I covered generically around online selling of tourism.

The unpaid invoices of Stephen Halpin of Merchant Soul

As regular blog readers will know, I'm owed a significant unpaid sum by Stephen Halpin of Merchant Soul. I therefore thought I would detail the specific unpaid invoices, to let others know of this man's inability resolve his debts:
merchantsoul-invoice-oct012 (£1,920.00)
merchantsoul-invoice-nov-dec-2012 (£7,680.00)
merchantsoul-invoice-jan2013 (£2,400)
merchantsoul-invoice-feb2013 (£3,360)
merchantsoul-invoice-mar2013 (£3,480)
merchantsoul-invoice-apr2013 (£2,400)
merchantsoul-invoice-may2013 (£1,680)
merchantsoul-invoice-june2013 (£1,680)
merchantsoul-invoice-july2013 (£1,680)

 As you can see, I not only gave Mr Halpin significant credit but allowed him to not pay me for a significant amount of time. To date, Merchant Soul has not paid any of the above invoices nor has there been any explanation for this failure to pay.

UK financial comparison homepages - revisited

Over a year ago I posted an article on the homepage file size differences of several financial comparison websites.

I therefore have revisited this topic and thought it would be good to see what's changed... once again using the Firebug and Google page speed plugins for Firefox.

moneysupermarket.com 
Homepage weight: 384.1K
Number of items: 60
Page Speed Score: 80/100 (Desktop)
Page Speed Score: 65/100 (Mobile)
A decrease in page weight but an increase in the number of items means that the page speed is now very slightly less than it was.

comparethemarket.com
Homepage weight: 468.2k
Number of items: 34
Page Speed Score: 82/100 (Desktop)
Page Speed Score: 76/100 (Mobile)
A slight decrease in page weight and a decrease in the number of items has not had the desired effect on page speed.

confused.com
Homepage weight: 419.9k
Number of items: 38
Page Speed Score: 81/100 (Desktop)
Page Speed Score: 66/100 (Mobile)
A small increase in the homepage weight but with a significant reductions in the number of items on the page has not improved the page speed score

gocompare.com
Homepage weight: 1,100k (1.1Mb)
Number of items: 106 
Page Speed Score: 70/100 (Desktop)
Page Speed Score: 59/100 (Mobile)
An increase in the weight of the page by over 200k coupled with an increase in the number of items gives a significant reduction in page speed score (from 87 to 70 - the greatest difference in this test)

The transitional Chief Digital Officer role

We live in a changing world and titles come & go over time. One of the more modern roles to gain more of of the recent spotlight has been that of the Chief Digital Officer or CDO.

In a post a while back, I commented about why the role of CDO is needed, but that some organisations may choose to use a digitally-savvy Non-Exec Director instead.

However, I've give this topic further thought and can see the role of CDO becoming more popular over the next couple of years, but then gradually fading away... as the rest of the board becomes more digitally aware and knowledgeable.

If this scenario is likely to become a reality, it does then beg the question as to who would put themselves forward to become a Chief Digital Officer now?

NHS decommissions website early

So NHS Direct is shutting down it's service on 31st March 2014. So what does it do several days beforehand?

It closes its website...

Winning further international SEO business

February was a busy work month for me and the rest of the team at Ideal Interface.

Not only have we fitted in a presentation at the Edinburgh Tourist Action Group (http://www.etag.org.uk) on the opportunity for International eCommerce, delivering the digital strategy for a financial services company, consulting on one of Scotland's biggest digital platform projects and hosting a table of clients at the Scottish e-Commerce Awards... it's been an eventful month.

However on top of all this we won a new search engine optimisation client http://www.fmwfasteners.com an American-based eCommerce site that sells nuts, bolts, wall mountings, screws and a whole lot more on top. Making this our first USA client, on top of others closer to home in Europe and the UK.

A big thanks must most go to Jon at Cobnut Web Services (http://www.cobnut.net) for the initial referral.

You can read the official press release here on our website:
http://blog.idealinterface.co.uk/2014/03/06/fmw-fasteners-seo/

The signal and the noise of The Oscars

I'm a big fan of predictive data and analytics, with the statistical findings of Nate Silver being a pet subject.  The ability to see through statistics and see the patterns than some data makes is: part skill, part art and part alchemy.

So it was fun to see that Nate has focused his attention on this weekend's Oscars:
http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2014/03/oscar-winner-predictions-nate-silver

However rather than picking a winner, such as best film or director, the Moneyball statistician has analysed previous films for trends and common themes.