Last night I attended my first IDM event even though I’ve been a member of them for about a year now – actually it was a very timely piece of eDM that made me aware of the event so I guess from that point of view they know their stuff!

Entitled Emerging Digital Trends it had two speakers from very different areas, David Walmsley, Head of Web Selling, John Lewis and Katie Smith, Head of Digital Media, Macmillan Cancer support.

In addition to the two speakers there were also quite a large number of delegates from agency, client and consultancy sides, and I was pretty surprised at the turn out to be honest – pretty impressive.

When I write up events or conferences like this I tend to take short notes during the session itself and then blog it up on the train ride home – like I am doing now – so these are my interpretation of the event and obviously not official notes from the session itself.  Just to clarify…

…So, David spoke first, and went into some detail about what John Lewis have been looking into recently, and what challenges they have faced, and, looking forwards, what trends he sees that as a digital retailer could be important.

David started his talk on the subject of behavioural targetting, and how in terms of both email marketing and website strategy, John lewis have been paying this field a lot of attention.  As we converge in the digital and physical space he commented that in the future, he sees that in many ways our offline lives will be lived online – in as much as things we now take for granted as being not connected to the digital or online world will in fact become connected – but we won’t notice it.

He gave an example of how behavioural targetting is very easy to do in some ways, but it’s also easy to get wrong – using an amazon homepage example of when he bought his wife a Davina Yoga DVD, and for the next two weeks got nothing but Yoga DVDs on his custom amazon page (we’ve all been there David!)

With regard to a lot of the ad network behavioural targetting (BT) that is being offered by some of the biggest players at the moment, he thinks that it’s not really true BT in the strictest sense, but almost like a proxy via technology to really basic segmentation strategy based on the type of websites and nothing to do with behaviour itself.

In terms of email marketing, he’s been looking at RFM recently (Recency-Frequency-Monetary) and how it can be used to segment email lists and target consumers – but this on it’s own isn’t enough – and he believes that by overlaying BT on top of RFM you can actually end up with some very useful segmentations and targetting for your eDM comms.

For the website itself, he has looked into how they can replicate the excellent customer service they deliver in-store through their partners (I love how all John Lewis staff are partners personally!) within the digital environment – and he believes it’s pretty hard to do – but tools like basket analysis, post-basket contact, etc., can help to go towards that (would love to discuss this some more).

He also mentioned that goal tracking during user journeys was very key and also very hard at times.  For example, if a user is within the checkout page, the goal is pretty clear – get them onto the next page and purchase the items in their basket.  But, if the user is on the home page, what is their goal?  This is a much more complicated question and almost impossible to answer if they simply type in the URL and visit the home page afresh.

At the end of the day, it’s about using new tools to better suggest products to customers (in some way’s isn’t that what we are all trying to do?)

That’s current trends – so the future?

Well, from his own perspective, David highlighted the ways in which targetting may become more and more “accurate”, almost seeming like “magic” when we start to predict user behaviour rather than just respond to it – and with this in mind, he thinks PHORM is one to watch (right or wrong, they’re certainly one to watch I think!)

In terms of permission based targetting, he also sugested we look at APML.org – for details on APML, an XML based standard that “tells” advertisers and marketers what your ad preferences are in real-time and allows for very accurate marketing to travel around with you (I’ll def. be looking into this right away and posting my thoughts on it here – I have to admit I’d not heard of it before).

He belives that the best way to target your customers, is to get them to “design your emails and website for you” through intelligent suggestion, monitoring and targetting (seems like a good strategy to me).

He closed with an intersesting story.  Apparently, on their website, more people type the word “TOYS” into the search field, than do click on the top-level navigation button which is labelled as “TOYS”, even though it’s only 6 pixels away from the seach field   One for the IAs I fear!

After a short break for some much needed nibbles and wine, the second speaker, Katie, took to the stage.

Katie showed a very interesting and touching video about people with, or going through, or post, cancer and the issues they had to face for which Macmillan Cancer Support were there to help.

Katie pointed out that she isn’t a direct, digital or data person as such, more of a creative web designer and IA, but that she has been involved a lot in the more strategic elements of the online recently.

She also pointed out that on twitter she is @katie3059 (and if you’re interested, I am @howard_scott)

Digital, for her, has helped to clarify what they are as a brand, and it’s changed their positioning as well as their organisation as a whole.

People in general are now much more savvy [sic] when it comes to their own health, and the internet has played a massive role in that (who here doesn’t go straight to NHS Direct or WebMD when they find something weird going on? I know I do!)  As such, Macmillan have had to acknowledge that they, as “experts” need to provide information that the users will want and trust if they are to maintain a position as a major destination (something they achieved recently by merging with another cancer charity who were much more “techy” (for want of a much better phrase) than Macmillan.

One of the problems they face is that when people seach for them on google, they search for the word “macmillan” and so, when they do arrive, it tells them nothing about what they were looking for (as opposed to people who might end up on directline.com having searched the phrase “car insurance”).  In this way they had to try to work out what was an important goal for their visitors from the home page of the site – what did a visitor to the site really want when all they had typed into google was “macmillan”?

Katie also mentioned a couple of trends which they are currently riding on which are proving to be extremely valuable to them – user generated content (UGC) and social-network style community.

People with Cancer, or post-cancer, want two things when they look for advice.  They want expert advice, that they know is from a trusted and valid source – and macmillan can certainly provide this – but they also want reassurance and “insider information” telling them what it’s going to be like.  This is something Macmilland find hard to provide because they simply don’t know. This is where the users themselves can step in.  By providing forums, and other spaces on the site within which users can discuss their condition, symptoms, how an operation went, how they felt during treatment, etc., other people who want to know just how something is going to feel (because, let’s face it, it’s scary stuff!) all users can discuss just what’s concerning them with other people, and as we all know by now, people trust other people’s opinion on the web more than so-called “experts” in many cases.

This UGC aspect to their site, combined with the community they have enabled, means that the macmillan site can provide both the expert, medical, clinical advice patients want when they first do research into a cancer when they’ve been diagnosed with it, followed by the more human, personal, “this is how it was for me” kind of approach only the UGC can provide.

Katie referenced the site patientslikeme.com who have forums for almost every single ailment you can think of, and people who are more than happy to share it with other sufferers.

So, for a future trend?

Katie mentioned finally that they were looking into interactive conversation technology to help users of the site answer questions which they know can prove tricky if they’re not explained sufficiently.  She’s working with technology pioneered, apparently, by a company in the US called jellyvision.com, which kind of “prompts” a user through conversation style question-answer-question scenarios, each new question being based on the answer previously given.  (This is something I’ve seen on the NHS direct site myself, where in order to diagnose a condition, they ask you a series of pretty simple questions you can answer with multiple choice until you arrive at the end result).

Oh, and one last thing, Katie kept apologising for the state of her slides – I think because, as she said, she’s a designer at heart.  Katie, I honestly don’t think any of us would have noticed a great deal if you didn’t keep pointing it out – the content of your talk was interesting enough to make us overlook the slide design – and, let’s face it -it’s all powerpoint anyway!  It’s going to look bad

So, to wrap up, it was an interesting event – I met some knowledgeabe people on various subjects – interestingly there seemed to be people there from a whole variety of digital related fields – eCRM, Search, eCommerce, promotions, and I am sure there were more. There wasn’t anything too revolutionary presented in terms of future trends, although I am keen to now look into APML some more after David brought it to my attention, and of course PHORM was mentioned, but aren’t they often nowadays?

Thanks to the IDM for putting the event on. For those interested I should be getting the slides from it shortly, so when I do I’ll link them from this post.

Howard
–

OKA Direct, the last site I produced whilst at TEQUILA\ London, just got reviewed in the NMA this week.  It scored a pretty healthy 88% overall.  Congratulations to all the team still at TEQUILA\ as well as those moved on to different strokes.

OKA was actually three sites produced at once, RAPT direct and Cath Collins (although CC appears to be down at the moment for some reason) being the other two, all based on a common architecture. 

NMA particularly liked the idea of being able to buy a whole room at once, rather than selecting items individually.  Good – that was my idea

Well done OKA and TEQUILA\

Howard
–

Blogged with Flock

Tags: nma, oka, ecommerce, web site, rapt, cath collins, tequila

It’s no surprise that I’ve been using computers since I was about 9
in one form or another, but in recent years the way in which I use them
has changed significantly, and I know for sure that I’m not the only
person out there who knows this.

The web, and i guess web2.0 in particular, has altered forever our
relationship with these tools that effectively run our careers for us
in many ways today.

So, I decided to put together a list of the tools I use on a daily
basis, and how they’ve evolved from one form into another over time.
Basically, a list of stuff that I simply can’t do without on a daily
basis.  Some of these are web based, some are at a higher level, and
some are even hardware.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s probably the more common things I use in both professional and personal life.

EMAIL – Gmail
My email life started out a long time ago but for
majority of my life i’ve really used outlook for my client.  Since
switching to Mac that’s become entourage and both of these are OK, if a
little bloated at times.  But, and this is a no brainer, all of my
personal email, from five or so accounts, is now handled directly
within Gmail.  For me, Gmail is the ultimate email client.  I use it as
a spam filter, email aggregator, file storage, and on top of all that I
can use it on a PC or mobile phone.  I was lucky to be in on the beta
and to be honest it’s been non stop ever since.  All of my personal
email accounts are redirected to gmail and I never log into the pop3
services any more.  in fact, I hardly ever sync up my email by actually
downloading it onto a computer any more.  All  is done virtually within
gmail itself.  my wife uses gmail.  all my mates are on gmail, and so
is my dad.  quite simply, it’s great.

CONTACTS – Plaxo
For a long time  I didn’t have contact lists.  I
had a little black diary stuffed with peoples names and numbers and
email addresses.  That book travelled everywhere with me around the
world, and I would frequently go into a state of panic if I lost it.
Zip to about 1998(-ish) and i am using outlook for contact gathering.
Tom hedstrom, with whom I used to work at TDPL/Leagas Delaney, handed
me one day a Palm V and I was amazed.  I loved that thing.  All of a
sudden my little black book was redundant.  disregard the PDA for now
(see below) and zip to a few years ago when Jason Smith at EA sends me
a weird email from a company called Plaxo, and in it is all of his new
contact details.  Me being me I sign up for plaxo and, once again, i’ve
not looked back.  Plaxo is amazing IMHO.  All my different machines,
all my different operating systems, phones and other devices (even my
iPod) sync the contact into plaxo.  my mates use plaxo (not enough of
them though!!) and I love it.  God help me if they ever shut down (and
no, i am not a pro member – their price is still too steep – come one
plaxo!  make it a micro payment and you’ll get 1,000’s of us signing up
I am guessing!)  I know Soocial is coming out soon, and I look forward
to that, but it’ll have a tough job to beat plaxo.

MUSIC – iTunes
I discovered MP3s in 1997.  Way before Apple got
into the scene.  Winamp was the app of choice, and MP3s were a rare
beast in the public domain.  I remember a mate of mine, Matt Francis,
telling me how he was testing them out to see how the sound compared
with CDs and how he was amazed by the quality of something that came
out of a computer.  Then Steve Jobs released iTunes and I dropped
Winamp as quick as you could say AAC (although i still use MP3 of
course).  Now, it’s a rare occasion that I buy a CD (linda buys them
all the time, but not me), and all (that’s ALL) of my CDs (and that’s a
LOT) are now encoded into MP3 format and stored on my Media Centre PC
as well as my iPod and a backup HDD. So, iTunes is, for me, the killer
music app.

CALENDAR – iCal & Google Calendar
Once again I’ve used Outlook for a long time.  I could
never get used to Palm’s version – seemed a bit clunky.  But then OSX
came along, and I jumped onto iCal.  It even syncs up both ways with
Entourage, so for work and home I can use it as required.  Google
Calendar is as good as it gets in an online version, and it syncs
one-way into iCal, but not the other – which is a major pain.  Apple -
work out a deal to sync with google both ways please!  So, calendars I
use two – iCal and Google Calendar.

CHAT – Meebo & Skype
OK.  Time to geek out majorly.  I had a 5 digit ICQ number.
yes, I know – how cool is that!  No idea what it is now – I lost the
email address it was on for a long time – so now I am on a 6 digit
one.  829889 if you’re interested.  At the same time as using version 1
of ICQ i was using a MUD called Sleepless Nights as a chat room to talk
with a few people, especially Gash.  Now, I have accounts on all of the
major ones, and I use them all the time to talk to lots of different
people.  But, I use them from one place – Meebo.  Meebo is the best IM
aggregator for me in the same way that Gmail is the best email client -
because it’s web based and you can access it from any computer in the
world.  A phone version in Java would be great, but these things take
time.  The only problem – no Skype Chat support.  So, I still use Skype
as an app.  Meebo is the killer IM app.

OS – MacOSX and Windows
OK.  There’s been a lot of these in my life, so here goes…

1. BBC Basic
2. Sinclair Spectrum
3. Atari ST
4. DOS
5. Windows 3.1
6. Windows 95
7. Windows 98
8. Mac OS 9
9. Windows 2000
10. windows XP
11. Mac OSX

and now?  well, who cares?  MacOSX is great – I love it.  But then,
so is Vista – I love that too, even with it’s faults.  But, to be
honest, I couldn’t give a monkeys.  I use the web for most of my
communication, if not all, and I use web apps to do what I need to do
(and with Adobe soon to release a web based photoshop probably using
Flex and Apollo, I won’t need that either) so the OS, for me, isn’t
highly important.  I’m not sure a web OS is the key – because I think
the web IS an OS. 

RSS – Sage
OK. So RSS doesn’t have a history for me, but it’s a killer
app and I use it all the time.  Sage, for Firefox, is the RSS reader I
like the best.  I’ve tried a lot but this is the one I prefer.  So,
killer app for RSS is sage.

Browsers – Firefox
Firefox 2 – end of.  Need I say more?

Howard
–

What are the most popular user-centered design methods? I have 12
here but surely there are more that I am missing. Can you add to this
list:

1. Focus groups
2. User research, user requirements
3. Questionnaires & surveys
    
4. Interviews
5. Usability testing
6. Participatory design
7. Paper prototyping
8. Verify story boards with a user walkthrough
9. Expert review
10. Card Sorting
     
11. Ethnographic research eg. Observe and interview users on job
12. Monitor help desk calls
13. …

    Jonathan
     

What design approach do you use, or does your agency use.

The dominant approach is User Centred Design, but there is also:
Activity-Centred Design
Systems Design
Genius Design – you count on your very own design genius to get it right.

I would be grateful if you could find a minute to fill out this super quick survey below:
Click here to take survey

Many thanks!

I will post the results here in January.