On Thursday evening, 19th February 2009, I was privileged to be at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London for the HSBC Rail Business Awards to co-receive the Information Technology Excellence of the Year Award for the new National Express East Coast (NXEC) booking engine and website.

As any of you reading this who have used the NXEC booking engine know, it dramatically simplifies the process of finding and buying rail tickets online...not just on NXEC routes, but for any train in the UK.  We have blogged before about the intuitive user interface and its cutting edge use of AJAX technology as well as the positive customer feedback and improved business results for NXEC before.

We (and NXEC) have also received lots of accolades from customers and the industry about how great the new booking engine is.  So it fills us with a great sense of pride and accomplishment to receive this well-deserved acknowledgement from the Rail Industry for all the creativity and teamwork that went into making it happen.

It has been a long road, but the hard work and effort has paid off, not just because we won this award, but because we succeeded in creating a first-of-its-kind, innovative and successful new booking engine for trains that will set the standard for all that follow, in terms of business performance, ease of use and customer satisfaction. It is also a clear demonstration of how User-Centred Design makes a tangible difference to customers and business.

I just want to take a moment to thank the entire NXEC team from Flow:  Simon Hatch, Alejandra Obregon, Martina Schell and Kelsey Smith; our partners at Splendid: Paul Bishop, Simon Parbutt, Alistair Thomson and Karl Wortmann; the team at Atos Origin who built it:  Graham Bodman, Richard Phillpot, Ian Collier, Eleanor Waldron and Chris Rees; and the team at Tullo Marshall Warren (TMW) for bringing the marketing website together.

But perhaps most importantly, I want to thank Emma Passey and the entire NXEC team for their vision, passion and perseverance.  We couldn't have done it without you!

Congratulations to everyone. A well deserved award!

- Ian Worley, Director of User Experience at Flow Interactive

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Download Case Studies about this project:

• National Express East Coast Booking Engine Case Study (78k .pdf)
• National Express East Coast Website Case Study (92k .pdf)

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Drawing ideas in real time helps workshop teams imagine the future more effectively.

In concept design projects, we help our clients to envision how people will use technology in the future. But people who are experts in particular subjects (like their current customer experience or business process), are often less comfortable imagining or describing how things might become. Sometimes, Flow uses client workshops with graphical facilitation to help everyone get a solid grip on abstract ideas.

Augmented conversations

The idea of a graphical facilitation is simple to say, but harder to do: Draw everything that's being said in real time on gigantic sheets of paper. For maximum effect, paper the whole room, so that all ideas remain immediately available throughout the workshop.

An extract from a large mural created during a workshop

Here's some rationale...

• People have new ideas through conversation. Well managed conversations provide inspiration, as well as tests and checks that can help new ideas take shape.
• Conversations about complex things stop working well unless they are recorded as you go. A visible, running record of the ideas helps the team reach agreement and accept new ideas as building blocks for the next iteration of the discussion.
• Images are a very powerful record. Most of us can scan images quickly and find things again efficiently. They're also very information rich.
• Some concepts are more easily expressed in terms other than words. Mathematicians and physicists use mathematical notation. Architects use sketches, models and blueprints. Describing a building or a law of physics in words alone would be exhausting. Expressing complex, interrelated ideas behind a vision of the future will always be easier in pictures.

Visualising the presentation of a new system

The effects of thinking in pictures

I asked a couple of Flow's user experience consultants about using graphical facilitation.

"The future is unfamiliar territory, and that can be unnerving. Real time graphic output helps make everyone comfortable," Simon Hatch told me. "In a recent workshop, there was visible, engaging output even before we broke for lunch on day 1, and that really helped people feel they were making progress."

But as well as helping people see progress, the imagery on the walls helps people to think more effectively.

"It enables us to uncover and unpack things in a different way," explained Stuart Penny. "Seeing everyone's words represented on the wall helps each team member to absorb everyone else's ideas. And thinking in pictures reduces the effort of working an idea through and visualising its impact and consequences."

Smaller scale

Images are a great way of summarising and communicating the contents of a meeting too. We've been experimenting with writing up some of our meetings using images. You could see it as putting doodling to constructive use!

For fabulous drawing talent, we like to work with Cognitive Media.

Observing target customers in their homes or while they shop can provide the insights you need to build a better website - and a better multichannel experience.

I wrote this article about cross-channel ethnography for Internet Retailing Magazine earlier this year. I'll be talking about this topic at the Internet Retailing event in October.

Insight to innovation: The power of cross-channel ethnography

When Bronislaw Malinowski decided to study the habits and culture of the natives of the Trobriand Islands in the South Pacific during his exile in the First World War, little could he have imagined that the techniques he developed to learn about other cultures would be used to revolutionise the marketing and sales of consumer goods and services. However, this is exactly what is happening.

Ethnography, once confined to academic research departments has, over the last 20-30 years, become a widely used and powerful research technique for companies seeking to improve how they market and sell to customers. They have even turned the lens on themselves to improve how they manage their own businesses.

More recently, the desire to provide compelling multi-channel customer experiences that lure customers away from competitors has become the holy grail for many retailers. However, there is a noticeable gap between the precision with which research is used to understand customer behaviour offline and how it is applied in the design of online stores.

This gap is closing, however. As online retailing enters the mainstream, multi-channel retailers are investing more to improve the quality and effectiveness of their online stores. They are also looking for ways to build customer loyalty in a world where technology is making customers more and more promiscuous. Cross-channel ethnography is one of the tools retailers are turning to for insight.

The trouble with websites...

"Well, I can't really tell what the phone looks like from the picture...", said Katie, a participant in a recent usability study for one of the UK's leading mobile operators. "I would go to a shop at this point, before I make a decision".

From a research point of view, this is not surprising behaviour. It has long been understood that Read more

Freemans has launched its new website, delivering a state-of-the-art online customer experience. Flow was pleased and proud to help them on the project.

Freemans understood that the right user experience would increase visits, sales and repeat business. But to deliver those benefits with minimal risk you need a user-centred design process. So we started our engagement with Freemans by creating a user-centred design project plan, then got started on the first step - research.

Research

Paul Heath was Flow's lead consultant on the project. I asked him about the research phase. "The research told us what users think and feel, and the kinds of experiences they encounter when they are shopping online and offline. We also undertook a competitive analysis of the fashion sector and an expert evaluation of the Freemans site."

"All of this data let us understand and priotitise the project requirements effectively. But it also let us innovate new ways for customers to interact with the site. During the concept phase, our understanding of our customers' ideal shopping experience let us create Read more

Ian Worley, Flow's Director of User Experience, was recently on a panel at the Media Futures 2008 conference in London. He was talking about the value of research in the design process: it lets you innovate with your eyes open.

Here's Ian's post...

Research is the foundation of all innovation. Design teams that augment their thinking with insights and feedback from their target audience will deliver better results. Be it ethnographic observation, participatory design or usability testing, research provides the stimulus and the constraints for a real (and really successful) innovation process.

What is the creative process? Here's one definition: it's about transforming what you observe in the world into meaningful and valuable artefacts through play, experimentation and feedback. What we call design research is really just a formalisation of those observation and feedback elements.

New technology is transforming the media. It's changing how people create, access, collect, share and consume information and entertainment. Ethnographic and participatory research are really valuable tools for understanding these changes. They uncover the nuances of new attitudes and behaviours at different social and cultural scales from individuals to communities.

If your organisation is hoping to turn a profit in this new media landscape, you need a deep understanding of the new ways people are consuming media now. Then you can design how they will consume it tomorrow.

Media Futures 2008 was an interesting day, a great opportunity and an amazing collection of people.

• Flickr set of the conference by Nico MacDonald
• More about the Media Futures 2008 conference

It’s great to stumble across books that tap into our current thoughts. The two books introduced here address two of my recent conundrums, respectively how creative thinking can fit into our working lives and how ‘everything is designed’. Neither was written by a designer.

'Orbiting the Giant Hairball' guides us to protect inspirational creativity in corporate environments - chucking out the rulebook seems to be the secret. Gordon Mackenzie describes the unnoticeable, incremental creep of conservatism that reins in freethinkers, creative mavericks and mad genius. He likens the web of rules, regulations and corporate policies to a hairball you can get tangled up in. Gordon instructs us to find ways of avoiding the hairball - orbiting is his metaphorical solution.

This book did a valuable thing - it made me look at how many rules I follow, doing things the way they have always been. This approach can be limiting and demoralising. I vowed to at least try to untangle myself from familiar routine and look for experimental alternatives.

‘Mezzanine' is a microanalysis of everyday objects and situations - revealing the impact of the tinniest design decisions. Nicholson Baker describes, in fine detail, his observations of familiar and everyday objects and our interactions with them. He draws conclusion as to why they are the way they are. Drinking straws, shoelaces, paper towel dispensers are discussed from a engineering, social and psychological perspective. His style is akin to a design analysis and this is why it is interesting. Reading his book is like listening to an overly analytical talk-out-loud user session. He draws attention to the tiniest of details and explores there meaning.

Some everyday human behaviour is given the same scrutiny. He dissects small talk and considers the strategic motivations behind it - with cringingly familiar conclusions.

By focusing in the small details he draws attention the bigger decisions that influence their creation. I appreciate his analysis, it supports my desire to celebrate the ubiquity of our great industry.