According to the latest IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index UK, e-commerce sales grew by only 5% in January 2010, in comparison to January 2009 . At the same time, some retailers have posted large year on year online increases, House of Fraser and Faith have both posted sales growth of 91 and 128%. Online only retailers saw sales drop 2% through 2009 while Multi-Channel retailers have seen growth of 10% according to the IMRG.

These figures tell us a number of things;

• Retailers with strong brands can still gain sales by entering the online market – customers expect them to be there, so even late entrants such as House of Fraser can make progress.
• The greater your brand reach, the greater your chance of making sales in a tough market. People expect to have choice and convenience. Online-only brands will struggle unless they have a true point of difference in a fiercely competitive market.
• Retailers who really understand their customers will succeed in a fierce market.

I have spent many years working in marketing departments of retailers and in stores, and I have never spoken to a retailer who would ever say they don’t know their customers. They must do – customers walk through the doors in their hundreds of thousands each week. They speak to staff at tills, on shop floors, by phone, via e-mail, on doorsteps and in focus groups, every day. Market Insight teams carefully examine basket data from tills, loyalty cards and web analytics. There has never been more data on what people are doing in stores, online or over the phone.

For many years retailers have prided themselves on their ability to second guess what a customer will respond to. How they should lay out a store, what to merchandise by the till, the front door, on the home page or at a category level on a website. They think about which tools will be useful, which image is right and which promotion is best.

Ever better, retailers carry out multi-variate testing to find out what works best, they test press ads, TV ads, e-mail campaigns and direct mail shots. They can prove which version works best, and back the winner.

But do they know why?

In the course of my retailing career, I put together successful promotions, advertisements and product launches. I was even involved in some that were not so good. For all I would be able to tell you why I thought they worked or had failed but I could never actually prove my theory. Did we hit upon a lucky idea, or find the secret formula? If so, could we re-create it for a new product, different category or new season?

The answer to this question lies in talking to customers, observing their behaviour and listening carefully to what they tell us. When done properly, this can give real insight into the most important question: why?

Can I repeat that, yes, like many retail professionals my experience and skill meant I could get it right more times than I got it wrong, but is that enough when we face tougher trading in 2010 than most of us have ever seen at any time in our careers?

Do you know how much it costs to talk to your customers and what the returns could be? Here at Flow, we do and I know you would be surprised.

London’s first UX Camp, a BarCamp-inspired unconference for the User Experience community, happened on August 22 at Gumtree’s offices in Richmond. Over the next few days I’ll be posting my rather belated reactions to some of the best sessions.

X-Ray Listening

Judy Rees, co-author of Clean Language showed us how she teaches people to listen better, using techniques developed in Cognitive Linguistics and Psychotherapy.

I won’t attempt to explain Judy’s method in detail here, as I’m not sure I can do it justice (and, ahem, because my notes aren’t that detailed), but in a nutshell it is a way of combining template questions with the respondent’s own words, to produce endlessly adaptable, open questions. So for example, a template question might be “Is there anything else about...”, onto which the questioner adds a key word or phrase used by the respondent themselves.

After a brief introduction Judy took the group through an exercise. We broke up into pairs, identified some relevant topics for investigation, and took turns at asking questions and listening to each other’s answers. First we did this spontaneously, using our own choice of words, but the second time we used Judy’s Clean Language technique to frame our questions.

The results were striking: everyone said that they felt more comfortable and more ‘listened-to’ when answering the ‘clean’ questions, compared to the spontaneous ones. On the other side, the questioners said that the ‘clean language’ made it easier to formulate the questions on the fly, and elicited more detailed, more honest answers.

At Flow, we spend a lot of time talking to people, trying to ask the right questions, and trying to listen. Most of us find that scripts are too rigid, so we use semi-structured discussion guides to keep us on the right topic, but we formulate or questions spontaneously, using a variety of ad-hoc rules and best practices to get the best results. We are always looking for the best ways to make people feel comfortable, while still getting the freshest and most honest nuggets of information from them.

This brief introduction to Clean Language showed that it is a potentially useful technique for improving both the quality of interview data and the efficiency of the interview process, all the while making respondents feel more at ease. A win-win-win scenario, if I’m not mistaken. I look forward to finding out more about this, and trying the techniques out in a real interview. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The next article in the series is here.

There is a school of thought within usability that asserts that during
facilitation, moderators should not speak to the participant as this interaction affects behaviour, and so invalidates the research.

It’s similar to the idea in ethnography that the very presence of an observer will lead to modifications and unnatural behaviour.

There is also the idea that people may not have conscious access to the real reason for their behaviour. In trying to explain their actions to the moderator they will introspect and provide an answer that they feel is rational, but is effectively made up.

Malcolm Gladwell sums this up something like this (I’m paraphrasing here): Basically—we feel about a thing, then act.

And then, the moderator asks us why.

Faced with this question, we try to think up a plausible, rational-sounding explanation for our actions. And then—here’s the thing—we alter our future behaviour to match that rationalised thinking.

Wilson and Schooler investigated this phenomenon in depth, concluding: “We come up with a plausible-sounding reason for why we might like or dislike something, and then we adjust our true preference to be in line with that plausible-sounding reason.”

So if we had never been asked why we did something, we might continue doing things differently.

However, without entering into conversation with a participant we can only say what happened; and with no insight as to ‘why’ we can’t make decisions and can’t improve.

The problem then is that we need to know ‘why’ but can’t ask ‘why’.

Here’s a few methods that we use at Flow:

Sometimes more open interviewing will tell you what you need. If you need to know why a participant clicked on that link (or didn’t), questions such as “Tell me about the kinds of things you have looked for in the past on a site like this?” can tell you about the keywords or visual elements that a participant is searching for.

“What are you interested in finding out at the moment on a site like this?” can tell you what it is they haven’t found yet.

Ann Light continues in this vein: “An undesirable, but common, way of interrupting evocation [the flow of recall, in this instance] is to invite the interviewee into a judgemental mode. To avoid this, there is no use of questions starting ‘Why... ?’ Instead, carefully manipulated ‘How... ?’ and ‘What... ?’ questions cover the same ground: ‘How did you know that X?’ ‘What were you thinking at the moment when X?’ This does not interrupt the recounting process. So ‘tell me how it was that you came to be looking for this site that day’ does the work of ‘why were you looking... ?’”

Of course together with the different ways of asking why, the facilitator needs also to combine high degrees of empathy and observation. Interpreting what the participant does and says, and ultimately understanding those things will enable us to make better decisions about what to do next.

References

Wilson and Schooler (1991) Thinking too much: introspection can reduce the quality of preferences and decisions, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60 (2), pp181-192
Light, A (2006) Adding Method to Meaning: a technique for exploring
peoples’ experience with digital products, Behaviour & Information Technology 25 (2), pp175-187

Ethnographic research involves the study of people and groups as they go about their everyday lives.  The ethnographer participates in daily routines within the context of the research setting, observes what is going on and systematically records his or her experiences and thoughts. Participation based on social and physical proximity is key to this process.

Flow frequently uses ethnographic research methods to gain a deep understanding of the social and working lives of people who use different products and services in different contexts. The findings provide richer insights into service and product design requirements and opportunities for innovation, particularly when designing for global and multi-cultural audiences.

One of the key questions around ethnographic research is how its findings are transformed into design. One example of such a process was presented at a recent UX Brighton: ‘A Journey from Ethnography to Design’. The event included two speakers: Simon Johnson, User Experience Consultant at Flow and Miles Rochford from Nokia. Simon spoke about the ethnographic research and subsequent design that he completed for the Environment Agency. Miles’ presentation focused on using ethnography to design products for emerging markets.

The Environment Agency commissioned Flow to conduct contextual research and subsequently design an interactive map that will provide users with coastal erosion information – a national project that will affect 2.1 million houses on the coast. The key objectives were to establish what an erosion map should look like, how it should work and what sort of information should accompany the map.

Claire Mitchell, Flow’s Principal Consultant on the project and Simon started the project with a research phase that included ethnographic field observations in two coastal settings: Norfolk and Hastings. Simon spent two weeks documenting the lives of coastal communities, interviewing local people and immersing himself in their lives. Additionally, Simon interviewed eight professionals at Flow’s experience labs in London.

Ethnography enabled Simon to apply his empathy and humanistic values to drive the project. It was clear that his findings provided the Environment Agency with a rich understanding of the concerns, information needs and myths that people who live in rural coastal communities might have. Simon described how his research findings confirmed some of EA's current thinking, provided new insights and defined the subsequent design process and deliverables.

The research that Claire and Simon conducted described how emotive the coastline is, an institution in British history that invokes strong feelings and forms a strong part of a shared heritage. The implications were the need for the Environment Agency to communicate that it cares and to reassure people that action was being taken to protect the coast. It was also clear that people trust locals and distrust central government, erosion maps caused alarm and that a certain amount of local knowledge derived from  ignorance and/or myth. An example of a myth was the commonly repeated argument that the government was making money dredging ‘their’ sand.

The design approach focused on a simple website that addresses the needs of both professionals and locals. Claire and Simon decided that the design should answer core questions and myths, stick to plain English, use local materials and represent risks  without alarming local people.

Is it Ethnography?
After the presentation the audience participated in a lively debate, which had a particular focus on the true meaning of ethnography. For some designers ethnography was a new concept and their reactions during the Q&A sessions and after the presentations indicated that they found both Simon and Miles’ presentations truly thought provoking. Some felt that rapid ethnography with a specific structure and design agenda was different from “ethnography” and needed a new term associated to it.

Theoretical research has two main aims – the validation of existing knowledge and the acquisition of new knowledge. Flow uses research to acquire and validate specific knowledge, the context in which services and products are used.  Flow uses principles and techniques taken from social sciences such as sociology, anthropology and psychology to inform design decisions. Our main aim is to design solutions that work outside of design studios, laboratories and meeting rooms. As a result, we often use appropriate research techniques to focus on specifically targeted contexts and activities. A term that is often used to describe this work is Design Ethnography.

Simon's presentation

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Many thanks to Danny Hope and former Flow Consultant Harry Brignull for organising the event.

--Ofer Deshe

We seldom discuss mediocre experiences with our friends. The ones which do get mentioned are the exceptional - both great and bad.

A bad experience is one where:

• My needs and desires are not provided for.
• The product itself doesn't deliver as promised or is confusing / hard to learn.
• The interaction (at POS and afterwards) is confusing, patronizing, inflexible, or unusable.

A great experience is one where:

• The concept is utterly relevant for me.
• The product itself exceeds expectations and allows me to focus on the task in hand.
• The interaction (at POS and afterwards) is simple, fast, accessible and structured appropriately for me.

Countless online communities & blogs have built up around recommendations and many ecommerce sites have integrated a recommendation network into their shopping experience e.g. Amazon. Many books have been written about the power of recommendation in marketing including The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and Buzzmarketing by Mark Hughes. Terminologies have developed around the roles individuals play in such recommendation networks (Connectors, mavens & salesmen in the Tipping Point). If you want to know more you can get the books... suffice it to say that recommendations work best the closer the source is to you... or the most highly respected the source.

The power of a recommendation is undeniable - it creates buzz which is the marketing holy grail.

The first step in getting recommendations is to create outstanding experiences. In designing any product or service the 3 key questions are:

1. Is the product/service relevant for the target market? Does it address the real needs and desires and will it fit effectively into the context in which it will be placed?
2. Is the product/service marketed effectively to enable customers to fully understand its potential whilst retaining clarity? Is it intuitive, accessible and enjoyable?
3. Do the sales and post sales processes support customers' behaviour? Will they allow them to engage in the optimal way to ensure a great experience?

As a producer of such experiences the only way to ensure you are getting this right is to involve the end users throughout the design process from concept development through functional specification and visual design to marketing and post sales. See the Flow case studies for numerous examples across different industries and product types.

It's great to hear people being positive about something which went right to such an extent that they make conversation of it. Let's learn from some of the positive experiences out there. Please add a line or two on your great experiences.

Thanks to Pierre Lenfestey for the use of his artwork.

User centred researchers and designers working in developing markets are finding new ways to understand their target users.

In the early 70s, Prof Geert Hofstede ran surveys with IBM employees worldwide and produced a set of four cultural dimensions which he used to categorise countries in terms of national tendencies. His four dimensions were:

• The Power Distance Index, which looks at how much people accept and expect that power is distributed unequally.
• Individualism, which considers how far people operate as part of extended loyal groups and families.
• Masculinity, which considers how far men's values are from women's in a society.
• The Uncertainty Avoidance Index, which measures a society's tolerance for uncertainty, ambiguity and diversity of approach.

It doesn't take long to notice that Hofstede's ideas have little to do with interaction design as such. They are focussed on management and communications and offer analysis at the level of general tendencies; they are not about use. But Prof Hofstede's name has become synonymous with cultural research in interaction design. He is quoted extensively. He is held up as evidence that tidy answers exist somewhere to untidy problems.

Interaction designers do need guidance on how to handle cultural diversity when designing technology with international reach. But that guidance may not be best in the form of metrics and measures. The OzCHI 2008 conference on Designing for Habitat and Habitus explored cultural aspects of designing. And every single experienced researcher came back to the same point: The best way for designers to understand the cultures they are designing for is to go get first hand experience.

Good listening

The OzChi2008 conference began with a workshop on 'Inclusivity, Interaction Design and Culture' . Participants discussed flexible and fine-grained ways of understanding difference in interests, values and use of technology. This understanding, it was agreed, did not come from metrics focussed on national characteristics.

So what did these researchers advocate instead? Read more

We've done a lot of travel site design, for companies including EasyJet, Hotels.com, National Express East Coast. In honour of World Usability Day's transport theme this year, we've pulled together eight design and usability tips from our travel-related ethnographic research and usability testing.

1. Support multi-variable trade-offs

Some people prioritise the cost of the ticket whilst others prioritise the time of travel. The type of trip will cause a person to prioritise one of those variables over the other, but most booking journeys involve trading off these two factors. Successful travel booking interfaces help people understand how time and cost influence each other.

For a holiday maker, the choice of location, duration and hotel make the activity even more complex. "I can go to Rhodes from Manchester on the 16th for 300 pounds, and stay in the four star excelsior for 7 nights, or Cyprus from Gatwick on the 19th for 312 pounds and stay in the 5 star Grand for 6 nights." These are really complex decisions, made in conjunction with family or friends, so you'll need to pull out all the stops to design an interface that really helps.

2. Present a well-defined proposition

Trying to be all things to all people is very expensive. Players with a tightly-defined target market will always do better at serving their market than generalised players spread thin over lots of markets.

Know your market and offer a proposition that appeals to that market - whether it's group travel, business travel, family holidays, design hotels, skiing etc. Then build a site that profoundly and accurately addresses those people's behaviours and needs.

3. Fight "search fatigue" - catch people early in the decision process

People are overwhelmed with choice in the travel market. On average, people in our research visited 22 sites before deciding to go with a provider which they visited 2.5 times. By making site that supports people early in the decision making process and helps them fast track the exploration and decision process, you create awareness in people's mind and they are more likely to go with you.

4. Surface the right information to help people make a decision

Choosing hotels is hard. People find it difficult and stressful to make decisions when their criteria are flexible and the field is large.

Good pictures, features, location with map, star rating, Trip Advisor rating, price per room/night (not per person), hotel name and short description are what matters most when sifting through lists of hotels. Enabling people to get this information without having to 'pogostick' is vital.

5. Focus on selling the experience not the product

Beyond the basic factors above, there's a whole list of things that users want to know before they make a decision. Focussing on the experience of staying in a hotel, rather than the generic factors, makes it easier for people to make that final choice.

For example, a hotel in Paris is not just a "3 star hotel in the city centre". It's a fantastic base in the vibrant Place de la Sorbonne, it's ideal for food lovers with 6 gourmet bistros, it captures the image of Paris with its view of the Eiffel Tower, it's ideal for families or ideal for romantic getaways. Understanding what a stay there will be like is what will help people to decide and to buy.

6. Be transparent and honest

Trust is a major sticking point for travel sites. In our research, users rarely trusted the price shown and were always prepared for some last minute surcharges.

Travel sites want to show low prices (excluding as many elements as possible), because they believe it help buyers get started. The flip side: a slippery and arduous booking process repels buyers (one where surcharges slowly build up, and cross-sells appear in your basket uninvited).

Would giving the real prices transparently build reputation and trust that exceed the pulling power of a low offer? No one knows for sure. We do know that removing some of the automatic cross-sells does produce a short term loss of revenue. But whether it offers a long term boost in loyalty, no one has yet had the guts to find out.

7. The seducible moment comes after the sale.

When people go into low-cost flight booking mode, they are very task-focussed and don't really care about anything else. We think that's a learned behaviour coming from the situation that a) the good flight deals go fast b) they need to concentrate to make sure they get rid of insurance etc.

Low cost flight booking is like bargain hunting, and trying to up-sell users during the booking process is like taking the bargain away from them. The seducible moment for up-sell is not really during the flight booking process, but after. Most travel sites are stuck in the business model of trying to up-sell during the booking process.

8. Ensure localisation is an actual part of the design phase.

The most planned and least actualised design stage is LOCALISATION. Lack of effective internationalisation and localisation is costing travel sites money.

There's a myth that Europe offers a unified culture with different languages, but it's not true. Language, rating systems, research, booking and payment behaviour vary significantly from country to country.

A simple example: some cultures will tend to assume that a rating of 1 is the best rating, others that a rating of 5 is the best. (The solution is to use a visual rating scale which is less ambiguous).

To maximise adoption, conversion and revenue, travel sites need to research, and test internationally. Using design skills from a range or different countries helps too.

A market opportunity: Design the next generation of travel sites.

People have very quickly learned how to dodge the failings of one website by jumping to another. In our research we have seen that people have no loyalty, there is no trust and that means that online travel companies will always have a major element of uncertainty in their future.

But the development of the web shows that people are open to new ideas and new ways of doing things. So we urge travel companies to innovate based on these design tips. Come up with the iPhone of the online travel industry. The opportunity is there for the taking.

Thanks to Louise, Peter, Karl, Lola, SimonJ, Ofer, Claire and Alejandra for the research and insights.

The BBC used ethnographic research to inspire and inform their Audio & Music team, as they design new services for young people aged 13-18.

How do young people find new music? What do they do with it? What technology gets used and why? Rather than statistics or abstract trend statements, the BBC Future Media and Technology department wanted vivid examples and concrete insights about the user base they were designing for. They asked Flow to help them.

Learning about people's lives

We worked with four different target groups, which we named The Gamers, The Streetwise Teens, The Social DJs and the Indie Teens. Each group had three members – all close friends with each other.

We worked through 4 activities with them over the course of a few weeks:

• Group sessions
• Diaries
• Shadowing
• Follow-up interviews

Shadowing means spending time participating in each person’s day-to-day life. Our ethnographers enjoyed a night out in Camden with two 18 year-olds, some live gaming on the Xbox with a 14 year-old boy in his bedroom, gossiping with two 16 year-old girls at their home and a lesson about hip-hop dance from a 17 year-old dancer. The insights from experiences like this go much deeper than surveys and focus groups ever can.

Sharing what we learned

We had workshops with the BBC team all the way through the project. This let the team hear discoveries "as they happened" and be inspired to ask new questions. The research team were about to direct their enquiry towards the areas which our clients thought looked the most fruitful.

The final results were written up in a highly-visual, 80-page book. The goal was for people all over the BBC to engage with the study so we made sure that the results were presented in an interesting and visual way. The report was publicised in Ariel, the BBC’s internal newspaper.

Observations

I asked Jude Rattle, the lead consultant on the project, what she had learned from the study. “All sorts of things that you can’t mention in a blog post,” she told me. “But a few that you can.”

“Sharing music with friends is an important social activity. In the 70s and 80s young people made mix tapes. Now MP3s get swapped from phone to phone whenever people feel like it. But there’s a twist. The DRM mechanisms designed to stop digital piracy also stop people from engaging in that key social behaviour. So a lot of our participants had an added incentive to seek out pirate MP3s on Limewire: the file they got would be readily shareable.”

“People often think that young people are universally brilliant with technology, but they are not. In our study we found that teens will go to great lengths to use technology that does things that are important for them. But there are other things that older users might take for granted, which teens don’t know how to do. For example, some of our participants did not know how to burn a CD, even though they did know how to copy an MP3 onto a mobile phone’s memory card or Bluetooth it to a friend.”

Giving innovators an edge

Imagining the future is hard. Designing future products and services that will be discovered and adopted is harder still. In large organisations, design teams can easily become far removed from the people they are designing for. To stand a chance, they must have rich detail about what their target users actually do, what they like and what they need.

Ethnography helped the BBC to connect with teenagers as they consume music – and gave them practical insights that they can use as a basis for innovation.

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