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

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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

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Booking train tickets online in the UK has always been a fiddly and tiring business. But in a couple of weeks, GNER will launch their new website and booking engine. We think it's the first of a new breed of easy, powerful, flexible travel booking applications. And we're proud to say that Flow designed the user experience.

The project is in a "live pilot" stage now and the feedback from the pilot groups is looking good. Here's a what a few UK railway fans are saying...

It's really quite powerful. It can be a very simple, clear 'cheapest fare available' system by clicking on lowest fare button... I'm quite impressed really.

Personally I think this site is a huge improvement on the The Trainline/ National Rail style sites. It makes it a breeze to find the cheapest fare / service combination. The user interface to me is much cleaner and easier to understand than the National Rail site.

Risky business

GNER saw they could gain competitive advantage by innovating a new kind of booking engine. Customers needed something more powerful, but also easier to use. But with any innovation comes risk: the chance that the market will reject the product or service.

To reduce the risk we to followed a user-centred design (UCD) process. We grounded design decisions in research and evaluation with over 100 target users right the way through the design process. We also worked collaboratively with Atos Origin, GNER and our favourite design agency Splendid, to make sure that user needs were balanced with technical and commercial requirements. Doing things this way gave us the insights we needed to develop break-through ideas. And it also made sure that the solutions we came up with really matched customer needs and business goals.

New ideas

We explored some different conceptual approaches including an interface that reflected the simplicity of the over-the-counter travel centre experience, or one that was more like a vending machine. But ultimately, the approach that worked best was to give the customers the control and freedom to select the tickets and trains themselves. Giving power and flexibility to your customers is a great way to gain their loyalty.

It may look simple, but finding and choosing the right train ticket is a complicated business. We all trade off factors like price, flexibility, arrival time and date every time we do it. We chose to use rich internet application technology (AJAX and DHTML) to make sure that customers got rapid feedback and a chance to experiment with different journey possibilities easily.

A simple benchmark: tickets to York

Throughout the design of the booking engine, we used a simple user experience benchmark to help us chart our progress. We asked people to find the cheapest ticket from London to York.

On the current site, feedback from this task was not very positive. People mostly failed to find the cheapest ticket that suited their requirements, took a long time and felt frustrated by the experience. On the final prototype of the site prior to build it was a different story. Just about everyone could quickly and easily find the cheap tickets, and people were extremely satisfied with the speed and ease of the design.

This kind of feedback gave management and the technical team confidence that the project would deliver a great result - before the code was ever written.

Mostly positive

Launching a new site is always controversial - you can't please everybody all of the time. But we're very satisfied by the feedback we're seeing from the pilot testers. And we're certain that UCD is the only way to deliver a new product to this high a standard on its first release.

As for the site, I really like it! [...] I found the cheap fares with ease using this site.

It doesn't force you to reserve a seat if you pick an open ticket. That alteration alone makes it a vast improvement...

I think the original Trainline matrix (with the single fares add-on) takes some beating, TBH. It [GNER] it's fine for people who will spend time learning it […] but it's too damn complicated for the end user.
-- Neil

I disagree. IMX most people are just after the cheapest fare and clicking on "low fare finder" and just selecting the best time/fare on the grid couldn't be simpler.
-- Philip

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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.

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Stephen Fry, captain of wit, brains and volatility has started a technology blog on the guardian website. I'm a big Stephen Fry fan, so I was slightly disappointed by his first posting- a sort of extended apology/justification for even admitting and interest in technology. As Stephen himself would say: Bah! I'm certain Stephen will find his stride very soon. He recently wrote a much pithier posting on his own site.

We know that sick building syndrome is real, and we know what an insult to the human spirit were some of the monstrosities constructed in past decades. An office with strip lighting, drab carpets, vile partitions and dull furniture and fittings is unacceptable these days, as much perhaps because of the poor productivity it engenders as the assault on dignity it represents. Well, computers and SmartPhones are no less environments: to say "well my WinMob device does all that your iPhone can do" is like saying "my Barratt home has got the same number of bedrooms as your Georgian watermill, it's got a kitchen too, and a bathroom." We spend our lives inside the virtual environment of digital platforms - why should a faceless, graceless, styleless nerd or a greedy hog of a corporate twat deny us simplicity, beauty, grace, fun, sexiness, delight, imagination and creative energy in our digital lives? And why should Apple be the only company that sees that? Why don't the other bastards GET IT??

Now that's more like it! (Thanks to Martin Storey and Debre Barrett for the pointers). No comments

http://www.jamesandjoe.co.uk/

This is the finest Google mashup I've seen since the last Google mashup, and possibly the most original use of the Google maps api I've seen. Why? Because it's not with maps. Instead, they use the functionality to zoom into images and let you get a closer look at their work.

Which makes me think: the Google maps api is free, there's no limits on commercial use that I can find in the terms of use - so why do retail sites continue to pay for Scene7 and others for their zoom functionality?

Anyway back to James and Joe. You need to go into Projects to get to the mash up goodness: these guys are very funny, very engaging, very clever, and very creative; I'm particularly fond of their dairy council diet coke parody, possibly because I'm a new dad.

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An article in the Guardian last weekend (01/09) gave a disappointingly narrow view of 'good design', missing an opportunity to demonstrate design that supports modern social challenges. Instead the article focused on aesthetics, creativity and novelty - important, but not exclusively so.

The '50 best' selection included practitioners known for creative lateral thinking (e.g Thomas Hetherwick). Much of the featured work is clever and creative and aesthetically ground-breaking. Other work is novel or witty or classic or otherwise interesting.

These expressions of creativity perpetually take the limelight over designers or agencies or companies that use design to directly address contemporary challenges. It is worrying that this old fashioned view of design prevails.

Missing out is a design that looks to directly improve quality of life, rather than amuse or provoke intellectual exercise.

Into this category we could fit, perhaps, user-centred agencies looking to improve lives by encouraging industry to create better things. But could also include the likes of Hillary Cottam, who applies design to improve health and education services, Dot07 who bring together designers and thinkers to discuss contemporary issues or for celebrity cachet, Wayne Hemmingway who is, after fashion design and punditry, addressing the insanity of the product packaging industry. Doubtless there are others.

I'd have thought the time was right to consider carefully the design 'trends' aligned with contemporary challenges. I found the article supported a version of design that didn't need the attention and didn't tap into a contemporary reflective mood where manufacturing, consumerism, sustainability and ultimately, for me at least, design are in the dock.

Article: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/design/story/0,,2159165,00.html

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