Bait and switch

Size matters when it comes to web design. Working to the lowest common denominator used to be popular practice, but small screens on tablet devices have made giant layouts cumbersome to navigate. It’s not just about resolution, either: smartphones sit comfortably in the hand when in a portrait position, and rotating them to landscape will cause screen real estate is swallowed up by virtual keys. Tablet users may be able to turn their screens to fit the content, but expecting smartphone users to do the same thing could lead to usability problems.

As smartphone use has exploded, mobile versions of websites seemed like a sensible compromise. The high cost of app development has fuelled interest in mobile web development, but it’s not without pitfalls. Many mobile websites are afterthoughts: a crudely dumbed-down version of the main website, effectively. Usability may well be improved, but it’s almost always impossible to cater for every function on a small screen. All of this extra development adds a cost overhead, and many companies simply don’t anticipate the way their mobile websites will be used before rolling them out.

Responsive design

So what’s the solution to this myriad of screen sizes, devices, operating systems, browsers, platforms and dimensions? Web designers are turning to a new technology: responsive design. The response happens not to our fingers, keys or mouse, but to the physical shape and size of the device we’re using.

Responsive design can be seen in action at the new Direct.gov replacement website, Gov.uk. It’s an experimental project; with time, it could replace Direct.gov as the portal for UK government policies and citizen information.

So what’s changed?

Immediately, Gov.uk gives a wholly different impression to Direct.gov: it looks modern and clean. In fact, it looks like a mobile site. Grab the bottom corner of your browser window and move it up and left: you can ‘fool’ the website into thinking your screen size is shrinking. This is where responsive design kicks in.

Below a certain resolution, the layout on Gov.uk appears to ‘pop’ into a new simplified format: the mobile version of the site. This would be the default for iPhone and Android phone visitors. Grab the corner and expand to see the desktop and tablet version appear in its place. All the buttons and text are responsive too, resizing to fit the layout without reloading the content. Notice how the heading fonts are much bigger when the window is expanded.

Shifts in usability standards are often gradual because designers work with the most likely scenarios. As our digital world expands, those ‘likely’ layouts are becoming harder to predict. Responsive design may not be commonplace yet, but it’s almost certain to become the friendliest, most usable and most affordable method for achieving accessible web designs and applications.

Further reading: Check out 50 examples of responsive web design from Designmodo

Magento is a powerful platform used by high street and multinational retailers to run their e-commerce sites. Its modular format means it can be adapted for almost any purpose, and companies can easily run promotions and offer complex features such as wish lists, positioning them alongside companies like Amazon in terms of the features they can offer. Magento is supported by a SEO-friendly structure and comprehensive analytics, and the product admin area provides every option you’ll ever need to fine-tune your e-commerce store.

But it’s not just for big business: Magento is popular among small companies because the Developer edition is free. That means any small shop can have the same presence as a large e-commerce store without shelling out the premium price tag. The Developer edition is designed to be self-installed and self-run, so there’s no support as such, but the basic functions are more or less the same as in the Enterprise edition. Of course, for $14,420/year or $49,990/year, paying users get a massively more complex product. A hosted solution is also available for clients who want minimal technical hassle from day one. Prices start at $15/month. Magento Go, a slimmed down cloud e-commerce product positioned to compete with Shopify, which is entirely hosted.

Like Magento, Shopify can be skinned, themed and adapted for almost any purpose. But unlike Magento, it doesn’t claim to cover all bases, and this is perhaps its main strength. The lack of complexity and minimal investment of time required to get things going can be a bonus: some people enjoy an out-of-the-box solution, and that’s where Shopify shines. Large stores would probably outgrow it in time, but in the early days, most medium-sized businesses could use Shopify to quickly set up a store without delving into endless admin menus and configuration option screens.

The Shopify feature set is more compact, but the features themselves are strong. For example, all customers can process credit cards without the need to rely on PayPal or a merchant account. Although (non-hosted) Magento can handle almost any kind of transaction, it’s really up to the site owner to install or purchase the required add-ons and set up the payment gateway themselves. Fees start at a very reasonable $29/month with a 2% transaction fee, scaling up to $179/month with no additional fees.

If Magento and Shopify don’t suit, are there any other alternatives? Big Cartel picks up the slack and offers tiny indie retailers free, basic shopping cart facilities that are scalable on payment of an optional subscription: for more than five products, you’ll need to pay $9.99 to $29.99 per month. Of course, if you host your own website, you have the option of direct integration using your existing tools: WordPress users can try WP e-Commerce, a capable, free but arguably complicated plugin for the blogging platform. WP e-commerce can be extended with modules for payment processing starting at $35, and without them, it’s nothing to shout about, and the time needed to set up a blog will probably negate any savings you make on cost. For small sites, bloggers may be better off using a basic PayPal shopping cart.

Very soon a new law regarding website cookies will go into effect in the UK.

This law has been active in the EU since May 2011, and a 1 year grace period was given to the UK which will now expire near the end of May.

On May 26, sites that fail to comply with the EU ePrivacy Directive disclosure requirements could be subject to fines of up to £500,000.

This new law requires that all websites obtain consent before storing any user information in the form of ‘cookies’….

So what are cookies anyway?…Can you eat them? …not really.

Cookies are very small data files that record user interactions with websites.

Nearly all websites uses cookies to store information within a user’s web browser. Most cookies are there to improve your interaction with a website, such as the cookie that remembers your log-in information; or cookies that remember what you have previously purchased, so as to offer similar items that you might like. Cookies provide better user experiences and provide administrators with basic site data, like how many people a month visit the site, and how long they stay on certain pages which is ultimately also used to enhance user experiences.

Other cookies build up a profile of what you do on the internet on a daily basis and can use this information to send you targeted adverts and information that is unique to you. Some people are not comfortable with this kind of tracking.

Cookies do not provide any information that specifically identify internet users, they cannot be used to spread viruses and they cannot access your hard drive information.

The great cookie debate- Two very different stances

While this law does have some teeth with its £500,000 threat,  the ICO themselves have stated that they will not be actively policing  the web for non-compliance and that as long as companies are shown to be making some changes towards compliance they will not be at risk.

The ICO recognises the cost implications to businesses and does not expect an immediate overhaul of all major websites.  They do expect website owners to make the changes that they can in order to comply.

Reception of the law has not been welcoming, a survey conducted by Econsultancy found that the majority if the 700 EU marketers surveyed believed that the e-Privacy Directive is not a good or positive development.

Compliance can be costly especially for massive online retailers, both in system changes and resulting reduction in functionality and analytics which might affect sales. Some businesses are taking an active position towards getting compliant and others are waiting to see what happens. Below are two sides to the story.

Side one: ‘Wait and see’ 

    – CEO, online retailer:

“Our answer is pretty short and sweet. We’re going to wait to see if anyone gets hit by it and go from there. I.e. do nothing and waste no cash as I think it could all fall down and I don’t want to waste precious resources working on this if it’s an empty threat.

We aren’t first in line and I’m sure that any notification from on high would give you time to remedy the matter. There seems to be no benefit to investing resources and money until such time as someone rattles our cage.”

Side two: ‘Active compliance’ 

   - Depesh Mandalia, Head of Conversion & Product at ticket.com:

“I suspect the ICO is going to be firmly focusing on the larger businesses  initially so if I were a larger organisation I’d certainly aim to do my utmost to comply.

However, I don’t think SMEs are going to be in a position to fully comply so we may approach this with a conscious effort to inform and educate.”

There is a fine implication, and we do recommend that all site owners do try to do the best they can to adhere, however the choice is up to individuals.

(These quotes have been sourced from Econsultancy.com. A link to the article can be found at the end of this post)

The Oi stance

The ICO have implemented this law in response to a general public fear and lack of awareness around cookies. While we don’t think the law is particularly enforceable, sensible or valuable some action from site owners in response is VERY important. In order to avoid stricter enforcement or worse, more legislation and bigger fines website owners as a whole need to take steps to make internet users aware of cookies and their use so that the ICO need not give this law more thought in the future.

Site owners should not aim to ban all cookies, or comply fully with ‘opt-in’ functions but rather seek to education their site visitors ensuring that in the future cookies are better understood by the public so that laws like this will not be necessary.

Here is how some big digital players are responding:

http://www.bt.com/

http://www.waitrose.com/content/waitrose/en/
corporate_information_home/corporate_information/legal_notices/website_cookies.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/privacy/bbc-cookies-policy.shtml

http://www.britishairways.com/travel/cookies/public/en_gb

The Law

This law requires that:

A person shall not store or gain access to information stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user unless the requirements of paragraph (2) are met.

(2) The requirements are that the subscriber or user of that terminal equipment -

(a) is provided with clear and comprehensive information about the purposes of the storage of, or access to, that information; and

(b) has given his or her consent.

Regulation 6 of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (PECR)

Those setting cookies must:

• Tell people that the cookies are there,
• Explain what the cookies are doing, and
• Obtain their consent to store a cookie on their device.

So what do I do now?

The ICO and Econsultancy have suggested this road map to compliance.

• Carry out a cookie audit
• Evaluate the privacy impact of each cookie
• Carry out a business risk assessment
• Figure out how you can inform users about cookies
• Investigate methods for gaining consent

 General recommendations

• Update privacy policies to include details about your site cookies
• Make cookies and privacy policies more prominent on web pages
• Explore awareness and ‘opt-in’ options
• Make sure site visitors know that your site is using cookies, how the cookies are used and how they can control this via their browser settings or opt-in functions

Sources and additional information

To find out more about the ICO directive and enforcement read this article

http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/9610-q-a-the-ico-s-dave-evans-on-eu-cookie-law-compliance

To find out more about what industry leaders are doing to comply read this article

http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/9611-ask-the-experts-will-you-be-complying-with-the-eu-cookie-law)

Industry reference on all things cookies

http://www.aboutcookies.org/default.aspx

The ICO Directive and website

http://www.ico.gov.uk/-

Download ‘Advice on the new cookies regulation’

A creative brief is a great way to impart key information about a project to a creative team, ensuring concepts; market and objectives are clearly defined. Here are five tips to give your creative brief zing.

Be flexible from the start

Social media, digital media and traditional media all present different challenges, and the output from the creative process will determine the way you approach your brief. Try not to limit your scope or rule out important options by using the same blueprint every time. Your aim is to present solutions, but you could cause problems by limiting scope and unwittingly placing restrictions on what the team can do. Use a broad set of criteria and define your concept with the medium and output in mind.

Also, remember that your success may be measured in different ways depending on the project, and not all metrics are equal. On social media, you may wish to increase the depth of engagement from your audience, rather than attracting swathes of new followers and fans who don’t interact with the brand.

Mingle with your audience

The target demographic for your product should be a group of people you respect. Try to visualise these people as family and friends, rather than a set of vague demographic data. Identify their daily habits and get a feel for their routine, preferences and personality. What kind of content do they consume already? Can you draw clues from their shopping habits or social media activity?

If you’re trying to sell something to an audience you don’t respect and make no effort to connect with, you’ll struggle to understand what their needs and desires really are – and they probably won’t believe a word you say. Understand your audience so that you ‘speak to your target audience’ in a way they relate to and leave them with no choice but to bend over backwards to tell their friends.

Never lose sight of the objective

No matter what the medium, the message or the audience, your call to action should be clear. It should be defined upfront and you should never lose sight of it. Don’t allow the creative process to dilute the key marketing message. Ensure your desired outcome is well defined on your brief from the very beginning, and use this to map your idea to the positive benefits of the product you’re working with.

Buck the trend

Just because a brand has a personality, it doesn’t mean that personality can’t be changed. Some of the greatest marketing campaigns and ads have captured the imagination of thousands, even millions, of people – purely from creating a persona so wildly different from the norm.

Consumers can’t help but remember marketing that surprises them, and the imaginative evolution of existing ideas helps to take your brief beyond industry norms. Breaking rules is the best way to ensure your brief stands out, and moving away from a safe space can breathe new life into a product. The classic Cadburys ad with the drumming ape racked up more than 6 million views on YouTube, and it’s still memorable five years after it was made.

Hone and refine your copy

Great writing is all about capturing abstract, creative ideas on paper, and writing a creative brief is no different. Avoiding technical words and stodgy marketing language is essential, opting instead for emotive, simple sentences that inspire creative ideas. You should read over your brief after letting it ‘rest’: come back to it with fresh eyes to ensure you’ve captured all your ideas. Often, less is more. People respond more favourably to sharp, condensed copy that is quick to sell an idea.

When it comes to successful promotion, social media is the secret ingredient for most brands. Marketing on Facebook opens up all kinds of possibilities for companies to market to a captive, willing audience, and it’s no wonder that the biggest brands in the world employ teams of people to tend to their social media presence. Here are five brands who have engagement down to a fine art.

ASOS have a team running various Facebook sites and apps, and their marketing campaigns draw on a diverse range of influences. Their main brand page is constantly updated with themed sales, discounts and promotional messages, diversifying their page with competitions, photography and celebrity news.

For ASOS, customer engagement is a full-time concern, and there’s clearly plenty of investment in design and app development: Facebook promotions include scratch card games and lucky dip promotional codes. They’ve cleverly created a second page entirely for customer support which keeps any delivery questions or problems separate from their marketing stream.

First Direct is a distinctive bank built on a common sense approach and a commitment to customer service. In complete contrast to ASOS, there are no promotions to be found here. In fact, their Facebook page stays well away from banking topics. Instead, the First Direct social media team comment on on current affairs, food, famous quotes and special occasions.

By their own admittance, the team use their page to initiate “light hearted chats”. Occasionally the company dodge criticism from users clumsily, but their commitment to customer engagement reinforces the brand image so well that this barely seems to matter.

Marks and Spencer indulge Facebook fans with lush photos of tasty food, kitchenware and clothing, each paired with a fun question or a conversation-starter to trigger viral shares. Through building trust and communicating directly with their customers, the company can get away with directly posting video marketing material on their page – though the fact that their ads are jam-packed with famous faces certainly helps. The social media team have the advantage of working for a varied brand with a vast product range and healthy marketing budget to draw on.

In an interesting twist to the idea of social engagement, Tesco have started inviting experts to answer comments on their posts. Most recently, the head of Nutrition Services promoted the Tesco Diets website by responding directly to customer queries about diet and wellbeing.

Tesco’s social media staff also make good use of the Like button, encouraging fans of the brand to Like positive status updates about charities, holidays and products. Often, the status update begins with a clear instruction to the user: Like or Share. Link shortener site bit.ly is used to condense long store links, making updates appear tidier and more friendly.

Much like First Direct, Innocent Drinks stray well away from their brand to engage their followers. Promoting the idea of Innocent as a young, funky product, their social media team post doodles, cheeky photographs and off-the-wall status updates. They also rely heavily on perhaps the most popular viral content around: funny animal photos.

Clearly, funny animal photos have nothing to do with smoothies, but by giving people entertaining and shareable content, they’ve now clocked up a quarter of a million followers. Innocent have also taken the new Timeline format and run with it, completing Timeline data right back to the company’s formation in 1998.

NFC, or Near Field Communication, is a short-range wireless transfer protocol that allows data to be sent and received between two devices, or between a device and an NFC tag. If you have a Barclaycard in your wallet, you’ve probably already noticed that your card can be used for contactless payments – although you may have struggled to find a retailer who uses the system. The most common application for NFC in the UK is still the Oyster card, a system used by Transport for London which allows travellers to pay for their journeys by tapping a plastic card on a reader.

NFC could be the future of location services and interaction, but it’s still an emerging technology. The ability to market a product to someone based on their location is an intriguing prospect, but NFC requires that the two devices – or the device and the tag – should pass within 4cm of each other. NFC can certainly be used to encourage consumers to ‘opt in’ to receiving a marketing message, but it doesn’t allow that message to be broadcast over a wider area. NFC is more suitable for applications where the device and the promotional material can physically touch each other.

Orange are the first company to exploit NFC for marketing purposes. Earlier this year, they launched Quick Tap Treats. It’s a fairly limited take on NFC, but could pave the way for more innovative applications. In return for visiting the EAT chain of cafes and triggering a game on their handset with a tap, Orange users are rewarded with upgrades to their order: a free drink, free porridge and so on. It’s very similar to specials on Foursquare, but the Foursquare app has two crucial differences. One, it’s social: Foursquare makes the checkin process into a game, with points scored for checkins and a leader board comparing friends. (Orange do provide an app for those without NFC, but will anyone except the most avid EAT customer actually use it?) Second, Foursquare has the userbase required to attract a diverse range of retailers. It’s free for any retailer to add a special offer, and they don’t need to provide any special technology on-site.

The closest rival to NFC is currently QR codes, those small black and white mosaic barcodes which have started popping up on advertisements, in magazines and on posters. Unlike NFC, no special hardware is required to use a QR code, apart from the camera on the handset and a free reader app. QR codes can be created by anyone in seconds. Take-up may have been slower than predicted, but QR codes finally seem to be taking off in the UK. In Asia, customers are now able to order their entire grocery list from a QR billboard at their subway stop.

As with any new technology, critical mass is the crucial problem for NFC. The required hardware is currently only available in a handful of high-end smartphones, and the really big hitter – Apple – doesn’t yet offer an NFC-enabled device. This has resulted in take-up in the US being slow. Although there is some interest commercially in the UK, much of the activity around NFC has been based around trials and new ways of paying for goods. Without support from the Cupertino tech giants, and with limited buzz around Google’s NFC-based Wallet software, it’s unlikely NFC will take off this year. When the next iPhone is released at the end of 2012, NFC might become a serious contender for location-based marketing activity.

Last week, almost everyone in Britain became aware of a rumour about petrol strikes. This rumour would go on to spark a nationwide mass panic about the fuel supply, despite the fact no strike had been announced. Within a day, queues formed at forecourts, prices went up and the ripple effect became more and more severe. Police closed petrol stations, scuffles were reported and a woman was critically injured while pouring petrol in her home. Everyone could see that the situation was spiralling out of control, but nobody wanted to be the one without fuel in their car on a bank holiday weekend. The decision to store fuel, to queue at a petrol station and block roads: these were emotional decisions based on the actions of others.

Advertisers have long been aware of behavioural economics. The phenomenon drives many successful promotional campaigns. When you buy a jumbo pack of washing powder instead of a small box, you’re acting on a range of subconscious assumptions. Your jumbo pack might be harder to carry home and more difficult to store, but something in your head tells you it’s worth the investment. Likewise, supermarkets regularly convince people to buy double the amount of whatever they planned to buy, simply by knocking a few pennies off the price if they buy more than one. As economists predict gloomy times ahead – and potentially another recession – shops rely more on behavioural economics to keep us all spending. The satisfaction we feel when we’re ‘getting a bargain’ is enough to bring us back to the store the next weekend, despite the fact that we may not be able to afford what we’re buying.

Behavioural economics also offers marketers and advertisers a whole range of clever tools to make their advertising more effective. Simply changing the wording of an offer can make a product more appealing, more desirable or more economical in the eyes of a potential buyer; this is a well-known technique called ‘framing’. Rather than having a 50% discount, wouldn’t you rather get 100% extra free? Products are framed and re-framed to make them more attractive, and research tells us that it works.

Through product design, consumers can be convinced to act in different ways, like we assume the discount deal in the supermarket is saving us money, even though it may not be saving us much at all. We make decisions based on these assumptions every single day.

At the end of last year we surveyed a range of businesses in the Channel Islands to find out how they were using digital marketing as part of their marketing strategy.

Did you know that only 60% of local marketers use digital marketing as part of their marketing strategy?

Click here to view the infographic.

The Oi creative team recently produced these amazing backgrounds for the THAI Airways UK website including new designs for some of the widgets. As someone rightly pointed out to me recently one of the differences to their work is the attention to detail, as shown in these. Visit the THAI Airways UK website for more or read on to see the recent emailer we produced and sent out as part of a special promotion encouraging people to sign up to the THAI Airways UK Facebook page, which we also designed.

Having the flashiest, most expensive website is no longer a sure-fire way to attract visitors. You need to make sure your website is fit for purpose. If your company or organisation is planning a website redesign, you need to look at getting your SEO right, but you also need to ensure that most people who visit the site can see the layout and content as your designer intended.

Google Analytics tracks all kinds of complex data about your visitors, but the basics are all you need: in other words, data about their computer, their software and their operating system. Over time, this data builds a picture of visitor trends from most people who view your site. It also becomes a goldmine of useful information for your web development projects.

Installing Google Analytics is as simple as pasting code into the header of your website; you’ll find easy instructions on the Google Analytics website on how to set it up. It’s wise to run Analytics on your old site for a couple of months before you start development on the new site to ensure you have useful data to work with.

How to act on analytics

Take the browser your visitors are using. With Google Analytics, you’ll be able to track exactly which browser – and which version – is most popular. This also means you can track the least popular browser and ensure your web development budget is skewed in its favour.

Without stats, you might assume that everybody is using the very latest version of Internet Explorer, but that’s not always the case. For example, many organisations in the UK are still using older versions of Internet Explorer, and staff are not permitted to install alternative software. If half of your users are still using an out-dated version, you should ensure you have a really good, solid, working version of the site for them.

Of course, if your analytics reveal that a really tiny fraction of visits are from an out-dated or unsupported browser, you have justification for limiting investment in backwards compatibility. It follows that some companies place emphasis on developing accessible sites, or mobile sites, because of the nature of their visitors – as proven by analytics. This is the value Google Analytics can bring.

You can extrapolate this idea to other visitor data as well. You might choose to develop your website to work on small monitors if your Google Analytics shows that a high proportion of users are using 800×600 resolution screens. Create an alternative version specifically for smartphones and tablets if analytics data tells you that users are visiting on those devices.

Measuring improvement

Once you get to grips with Google Analytics, you can start to compare and measure different statistics across different weeks or months to see what’s working. For example, its very common to simply accept that designing a site for a screen resolution of 1024×768 is best practice – but have you looked at your Google Analytics reports recently to see that 80% of your visitors are using a screen resolution of at least 1280×1024? That’s a lot more space for your design.

Remember: the golden rule is to invest time sensibly. Building a website for a target audience means making sure that the site works for most people most of the time. It’s rarely possible to cater for everyone, but with a little careful planning, you should be able to improve your user experience dramatically.