Have you got bored of saying Happy New Year in emails yet? This may well be the last new year related article you read so I will try and make it a good one. 2011 was another bumper year for digital but like IE6, that's dead now. What does 2012 have in store?

Social Commerce

Conversion optimisation will be the SEO of 2012 (if it isn’t already). Ranking and traffic are crucial starting points but are irrelevant without conversion. Aside from applying user centric design, inspiring content and products we can greatly support conversion with social proof.

The weight of the opinion of our peers in commercial decision making is immense. Social proof is the theory that we look at what others are doing to reassure us we’re making the right decision. To date almost 50% of shoppers have made a purchase based on a recommendation through a social network. This will only increase with moves by Google to bring search results and social networking more closely aligned with Google+ data influencing rank. In 2012 brands will begin to invest more in taking a sophisticated approach to social commerce and harnessing peer power.

Location Based Marketing

Although Foursquare and Facebook Places have trail blazed location based marketing, uptake is still not that great. However targeting consumers by location is a sophisticated way to engage people in a way that’s personal to them.

Google recently announced it is working on new products that make use of its location based services. Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of product management, said during a session at LeWeb in Paris that they were exploring monetisation of check-ins. In a similar way to mainstream mobile web I can see this prediction hanging around for a while before it really takes off, but it will.

Mobile Payments

UK smartphone adoption is forecast to tip from 40 to 60% this year and for many the relationship with the phone will become more intimate than ever. 83% of millennials already sleep with their mobile. With large storage capacity and creative apps in abundance everything we need is on our mobile. In 2012 so will our wallets.

Roughly 170,000 UK shoppers a week are already using eBay's mobile app. PayPal saw mobile transactions multiplied by almost 6 times in 2011. Google Wallet should be launched in the UK for the Olympics. Near Field Communication (NFC), which enables data exchange between two devices will become a standard smartphone feature. This in turn will create opportunities for mobile operators and brands to engage with consumers in convenient new ways.

Gamification

The number one buzz word of the previous year was gamification. 2012 will be the year this evolves as brands embrace the concept, following early successes of Get Glue and Badgeville. Gamification will see brands integrate this technology into their own products and services, offering more sophisticated points and rewards systems.

Convergence of platforms

In 2012 we will see a greater emphasis on single build development projects that encapsulate all digital platforms into one single code base. HTML 5, JavaScript and CSS3 will form the foundation of all these builds with minimal native coding. This will be partly to save budget but mostly to create a consistent, real time user experience across all digital touch points.

In order to achieve this developers do require the widespread adoption of standards compliant browsers by users. Thankfully smartphones already use pretty sophisticated and up to date browsers. The acceleration of the innovative browser chrome, which is only 3 years old and already holds 26% market share, shows that we are beginning to see the stranglehold of IE, at 40%, loosen.

Social platforms to look out for

You might think its all about Facebook, Twitter and Google+ now but you might want to look out for these up and coming (mostly mobile) platforms in the next twelve months:

• path
  
• pinterest
  
• instagram
  
• ifttt

Going Public

The latest forecasts suggest that Facebook will be worth as much as $100 billion on its Wall Street debut, creating at least a thousand millionaires. The expectations for the Facebook IPO are very high. Many internet firms, including Groupon and LinkedIn, went public in 2011, but the response was mostly underwhelming. However investors have big hopes for Facebook and as regulators enforce the public disclosure of figures in the build up we will be learning a lot more about its business model and their future vision for the social web.

Did I miss anything? Please let me know in the comments below.

So rather fortuitously (or not, depending on your point of view) Third Thursday this month has fallen slap bang in the middle of perhaps the biggest controversy to affect the internet since it’s commercial release (1995, for any budding geek historians out there). I think we can all agree that since then it’s done nothing but grow, the clear principle being that the more people who have access to it, the more the amount of content generated constantly rises.

And so we land in the here and now, a time at which the internet is no longer populated with reems and reems of text but also video, audio, images, satellite data, pointless conversation, pretty much anything you can imagine exists online (which is both fantastic and terrible at the same time). But hold on a second, isn’t that much the same as the real world? There’s good and bad, there’s philanthropy and there’s greed, those who give and those who take. In those terms surely it’s simple to think, we should police the internet in much the same way as we do the real world, right? Catch the criminals, and allow innocent civilians to go about their day to day business and innocent companies to carry on trading.

This is the of view I want to talk about SOPA and PIPA from, as someone who works in the tech industry I feel I have a pretty decent understanding of the internet and this is how I believe it should be viewed, as another (virtual) world in it’s own right, much like the “real” one in which we live. The opinions being bandied around by politicians and corporate execs don’t seem to recognise this fundamental fact but instead they think of the internet as a system, probably due to “technology” being involved. The internet is a living thing, a representation of billions of living beings (that’s us by the way) and therefore can’t be controlled, it will refuse to be, as we would refuse.

It’s this fundamental misunderstanding of the internet that is causing these IP owners to try and wrestle control of what we’re able to see and do online and it’s the fundamental lack of knowledge in the legal establishments that is letting them get so close to achieving it. For example, if I were to go out into the local community and look around for seedy criminal types, then go and chat to those people about their various activities (for the purposes of the metaphor I achieve this without being brutally murdered or robbed) then that would be entirely my own choice. It might not be a smart thing to do, it may even mean I have an implicit knowledge of illegal activities that makes me a person of interest, but it’s my own choice to do so.

Now imagine I do the same thing but instead what I find is the community (housing estate, street, town, etc) in which those people live, has had a 50 foot wall built around it, unfortunately cutting me off from visiting the poor innocent locals as much as their shadier neighbours. This is basically what rights owners have been arguing for with the presentation of SOPA and PIPA. Rather than targeting the criminals who steal, duplicate and distribute content, they want to take down entire sections of the web so these people can’t communicate with us regular folk and spread their ill gotten gains.

The more worrying aspect of the two bills is that don’t even operate on a “suspicion” basis rather than a “proof” basis. So if a site is reported to be under suspicion it could potentially be blocked somehow.

Up until this week the creators of SOPA and PIPA were suggesting achieving this through alteration of the DNS, or Domain Name System. A fundamental foundation of the internet that allows sites to be identified by names like www.google.com, instead of purely IP addresses, like 209.85.147.103

They wanted to be able to remove (on suspicion) a domain name from the internet registry, if that site was in any way associated with illegal sharing. This would potentially give them complete rule over the web space. So you’d either play by their regulations or have your site’s domain name removed. Fortunately, due to opposition from the Whitehouse this section of the bills has been dropped but that doesn’t mean the concept is gone. Discussions in the senate recently have been around how to block sites like this anyway, even without using the DNS.

Now as an every day internet user I have to ask some serious questions:
Firstly, what exactly is considered illegal behaviour, constituting a block on that site? They certainly haven’t gone into much detail regarding this but surely it should be incredibly well defined. I can’t be arrested in the real world without a damn good explanation so why should my online presence be impounded without a clear description of the precise charges relating directly to sections of the bills I’ve contravened?

Secondly, who’s going to police this and enforce the blocks on sites? It’s obvious that the movie and music industries want the power to do this themselves but in the real world don’t we call that vigilante justice? Surely a system based on these kind of “site blocks” needs to be run by a third, independent party, who are not on the payroll of the very companies seeking to exert more control.

Lastly, how will this affect social media? We once lived in a time when the majority of online content was created and owned by news agencies, corporations and private companies. We now live in a time where most of the content is, in fact, user generated. A lot of it may be utter rubbish but the internet is now a social space, a prime are for exchanging everything be it useful or the aforementioned utter rubbish. I’ve seen plenty of people tweeting or posting on Facebook about how to access football matches or movies online, some if it legal, some of it not so much. Would these industries seriously purport to block social media platforms because they contain normal human conversation, some of which is less than law abiding. That’s like shutting down a pub because someone once sold something shady under a table there.

And that’s what I’ve been getting at throughout this whole rambling journey. The internet is a world in and of itself, trying to control it is pointless and would cost (read: waste) billions as it will grow and adapt as it always has. Besides, (outside of James Bond movies) no one has ever tried to destroy the whole world just because it was a bit flawed. The internet is fundamentally flawed… of course it is, it’s populated by us and we’re only human. The biggest thing I’ve been able to read through all the myriad of situational analyses lately in the press though is this; the institutions pushing for these changes have a complete lack of understanding of the internet in its current form. It’s evolved to a point where it belongs to billions and declaring war on the internet just to solve a piracy problem is in fact declaring war on every consumer they have. This is hardly going to endear those consumers to them and gain their support in the war on piracy. Instead declare war on the criminals themselves in such a way that the ordinary users of internet services are not even aware there is a new system in place. It’s probably difficult to achieve but it’s the only solution that won’t cause an enormous backlash, the like of which we’ve seen in recent weeks.

Blimey, it's the first Third Thursday of 2012!

Rachel shows off her rock

Other links referenced...

• TES Games, available on iPhone and iPad
• Flutr (Beta) 

This months Family Guy style light hearted rant is about my irritation of how people have started using Facebook and Twitter statuses as if they were lines in their own personal diary.

The informative nature of the Facebook or Twitter status has been downgraded. Do we really need to know what our 200 plus friends are doing every minute of the day? Do all our online friends want to know what we are doing every minute of the day? I can tell you the answer is NO!

Being part of the Facebook and Twitter generation has been incredible so far. Being able to connect with friends, share photos, and now music through the Facebook partnership with Spotify. Twitter, the social networks micro blogging system has gained over 100 million active users in just 5 years. With popstars such as Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber having over 10 million followers each, it is easy to see that it is a popular platform for fans to get a glimpse at what it is like to be a celebrity on a day to day basis. It gives them a digital friendship with their favourite stars that they never had before. Their followers get to find out what designer dress they are wearing, or what swanky Michelin stared restaurant they are going to for dinner. A far cry from some of the updates I get from my digital friends, who keep me updated very regularly with updates on how their kid just burped, or that they have just eaten a doughnut.

I love social networks, and working in the digital industry when Facebook and Twitter are evolving is great, with timeline for example which could change the way businesses communicate with their customer. Learn all about the Facebook changes in our previous blog post http://codegent.com/blog/2011/10/what_are_you_up_to_the_world_wants_to_know_apparently

I use both Twitter and Facebook every day, they enable me to see what others are doing on other digital platforms, they help inspire me, it could be a Facebook viral like the 'Take This Lollipop' campaign or an article on Mashable being thrown around on Twitter. They have become part of the creative industries modern DNA.

The openness to see and share photos, to communicate with friends in other counties, and of course the occasional stalk, and anyone that says they do not stalk their old friends or partners is a liar. Everyone loves a good self satisfying Facebook stalk.

However, this former pleasant experience has now been tainted by over enthusiastic status updaters. Now 70% of my Facebook newsfeed is clogged up with people telling me that they had beans on toast for dinner, or that they can’t sleep. What do you want me to do about you not being able to sleep, come round, get into bed with you and sing you a lullaby ? You can’t sleep because you are staring at a bright screen in the middle of the night when you should be de stressing and getting away from the technologies you are bound to all day long.

How did this happen? Is it from the influx of younger users on the networks, wanting to show off to their friends about what cool lives they lead? Is it just the users who are bored and just don’t have anything else to do with their free time?
Get out of the house, get some fresh air, go somewhere with no wi fi signal for a while.

The irritation of these insignificant, unhelpful status update is extended further with the use of incorrect, slanged English they are all written in. Incorrect spelling and punctuality is used in all of these ridiculous updates. I’m not sure if this is because of the speed some of them are written, or that some of them are written on smart phones so fat thumb syndrome and auto correct occurs. I have some sympathy for some statuses on Twitter, as there is a restricted 140 max character limit, so abbreviating a few words is acceptable. However, on Facebook you have over 60,000 characters to use, there is no excuse to cut words down, and use slang such as “bby, ppl, da, and bout” you can write a whole bloody monologue in there. It also takes me much longer to read it when it is in slang text like this, it you really want everyone to know and read your status, please write it in a language we can all understand.

I am a believer that I am not the only person that gets irritated by this topic. Some websites and blogs have dedicated whole sections to these pet hates about Facebook statuses; here are some of my favourites courtesy of http://failbook.failblog.org/




So I plead to you social network users, make your statuses interesting for your audience. Give some thought to the topic, as well as the spelling, grammar and punctuation, and we will all reap the benefits.

That my friends is what Grinds My Gears.

This month I’m going to be talking about User Journeys: what they are used for and how to do create them.

User journeys – what are they?
It’s not hard to imagine what a user journey might look like if you hadn’t seen one before. We’re talking about how people using your site travel through it: the pages they land on, the decisions they take once there and the impact of those decisions on what happens next.

We’ve all experienced good journeys and bad ones online: some make a complicated process easy and painless, allowing you to sail through to the end with barely a thought, whilst others are infuriating and force you to re-enter details, send you off down blind alleys or simply fail to get you to where you wanted to be no matter how hard you try.

The difference between the two can often be something very simple. It might be something to do with semantics: calling something that we’re used to seeing every day something else, just to be ‘cute’. Or it might be that the logic of every possible outcome hasn’t been thought through properly. Maybe we’re forcing people to give us more information than is necessary. Often, the order with which we ask people information can be enough to send them running to the hills. 

A user journey is a step-by-step diagram that shows each part of the process through the site, using visual sign-posts to group things together and identify the danger areas where particular attention needs to be paid.

If you’re creating a new service or a new product, it really is only by plotting user journeys, that you can be confident that you’ve thought of everything and that your solution is the simplest one you can come up with.

Seven considerations for plotting a user journey
1. Use your Personas

Last month I wrote about creating Personas. This is definitely a good place to start: even if it’s only to work out how existing and potential customers will have different goals. The likelihood is that your Personas will be more complicated than this, you may have a variety of stakeholders who need to achieve different things.

2. One diagram per outcome
We think it’s easier to create a different diagram for each key goal or expected outcome. Within that diagram there might be multiple routes that people take, but essentially you’re looking for a single final outcome. An example might be getting someone to sign up for a free trial of a product (as in the image above from our recently launched Schedule App).

3. Show each step of the journey
Don’t leave anything to chance – we want to try and think through everything that a user might do and what decisions he or she will take.

4. Logical grouping of steps
Deciding whether to go for a free trial or subscribe to a service straight away: they are two different steps, but they should be grouped together to give the people working on the site a shorthand reference that these things are linked. In a user journey with 20 steps, the more you can arrange things logically, the easier it will be to use.

5. Pain points
Pain points are something we talk about a lot when it comes to the user experience. There are some things that will be a joy: choosing which colour of shirt they want. But there are other things that will potentially turn them off: logging in when they’ve forgotten their username, or entering their credit card details. Where there is a pain point – make the box red or stick a big warning sign next to it. This will remind everyone that this needs special consideration and thought. 

If things aren’t working well with an existing site, the pain points are probably the areas that need to be looked at first as they are most likely causing  the problems. It’s much better to spend your time making your pain points as simple as possible than introducing whizzy new functionality, however tedious that might seem.

6. Notes
Finally, make notes across the journey: assumptions, other considerations or 3^rd party functionality that may have an impact on what the user experiences.

7. Workshop
If you’re plotting user journeys as part of a workshop with all the stakeholders inputting their ideas, they can be sketched out in a down and dirty way, the use of Post-It notes on a wall work well for allowing people to consider all the steps and iterate.

Ultimately, it is always good to reproduce that working into an electronic format so it can be referenced by the designers and developers throughout the project.

Once we get into user testing, it’s always good to reference it against the user journey to check that the assumptions we made were correct and things like pain points have been effectively overcome.

Blimey, it's the last Third Thursday of the year!

David with the actors(!) from Skins in our 4Music Christmas Promotion

Other links referenced...

• Our latest client Primesight (new site in Feb)
• 4Music - Hot Santa
• 4Music - Christmas Card
• TES Games also available on iPhone and iPad

Google+... that’s been around a while now hasn’t it? It’s hardly taken off as a social network but recently it seems Google have their sights set much higher than that. They know that they can’t compete with Facebook, but then they don't need to. Google are still the most used search engine in the world, they have more traffic than Facebook anyway, so why shouldn’t their social network revolve around that aspect of their platform? Well, Google have slowly been revealing that it does, and I’m here to tell you that it’s a good thing for your business. 

Combined with Google+ Business Pages, the whole Google platform can deliver more for you. It only takes 5 minutes to create a page so there’s really no reason not to. But what exactly will you get out of it?

Be Found Instantly

Not only are Google+ Business Pages another great channel to broadcast your business through, they are also an instant access point for users to reach you as a brand. For example, since the business pages went online big brands like Pepsi, McDonalds and Lexus have all signed up to the service. Users who want information or the latest news from those companies merely have to type + and the name of the company into the Google search bar.

Try it out now and you’ll see that as you type instant search literally offers you the Google+ page of that business, giving users an extremely fast way to access your social stream.

Obviously, if you’ve got a page Google will find that anyway but the Google+ integration with the search engine is just so fast and slick. It’s a service only Google can truly offer within the confines of their own platform and as users become accustomed to this unique Google offering (as we have done with so many others) it could become a winning feature.

Increased Search Ranking

Perhaps the single most relevant thing that will attract those of you who still mostly think of Google as a search provider is the ability of Google+ to improve your search rankings. There’s a new system at work to integrate with Google+ and it works like this...

Say, for example, I +1 something, a page, a product, a business (the +1 system can be integrated all over the web just like a Facebook ‘like’) and then you do a search for it. Because we’re friends (hello!), on Google+ your search results will have my relevant +1’s displayed. This means that users of Google get advice from their friends without even having to ask for it. An absolutely crucial marketing tool if you have a loyal fan base, allowing it to grow by subconscious word of mouth.

Additionally a friend of codegent who knows the guys at Google rather well recently told us that your Google+ page will be (can we say artificially?) promoted up the search algorithm for searches against your brand name. Its a very easy way to boost your search position and dominance of the first page of results.

Access to Your Customers Zero Moment of Truth

There’s been a long standing phrase in the marketing world, “moment of truth”. Traditionally this was broken down into two parts; the First Moment of Truth, when a customer sees a product they like and begins to gravitate towards it and the Second Moment of Truth, when a customer attains said product and uses it, reinforcing their belief that the product was as good as they believed it to be.

This traditional concept of these two moments is 100% accurate and has been proven over billions of sales of products worldwide since the dawn of the modern advertising agency. However, thanks to the connected world we now live in Google has assessed that there is another, more important, Moment of Truth which occurs through social media and dictates a huge proportion of peoples’ spending habits. As we now do more shopping online than anywhere else this makes perfect sense, why would we go out to do research when we have the largest compendium of human knowledge just a mouse click away? Not only that, but the benefit of the experience of millions of other customers.

This, is the Zero Moment of Truth. Gone are the days when you had to get a product home and try it out or luckily come across a good tester model of it in a shop to find out it’s real value to you. Social media doesn’t just drive peoples’ lives socially, though the name may allude to that. In reality Social media drives peoples’ opinions of everything, from football matches, to movies, to physical products. So if I were to be torn between two equally popular products, between Samsung and LG for example, not knowing what to do I might look to their social media pages. If one were to have several million more fans than the other it would certainly seem that their customers had a reason for acting in such a way and alter my perception.

That’s a high level example, but it can be equally important on a small scale, for a single product or campaign behind that product. If you publish a post (and there are over a billion a day on Google+) related to your product and it catches the right eyes it will spread. Knowledge of your product will expand and the hits on both your Google+ business page and that products own page online will increase, potentially exponentially. Many users will be experiencing a Zero Moment of Truth, proof by a large body of their peers that the product is good, appreciated, interesting.

It’s impossible to emphasise the importance of this effect to you and your business but Google are helping with that one too. They’ve introduced a feature called Ripples, which allows business people, marketers and general speculators to view the effect a post had, a sort of butterfly effect on Google+. Your post flapped it’s wings here and then what? You can see where it spread, to which users, how it spread on from them and the impact it had on your site traffic.The ramifications of this type of awareness are astonishing, allowing marketers to tailor their posts to mimic their most effective campaigns.

The simplest way I can summarise is - get your business on Google+. There’s never any telling how a new service or product will pan out but Google+ has a lot to offer you right now and you shouldn’t miss out.

If you’d like to know more about the Zero Moment of Truth and how it really drives your customers then Google literally wrote the book on it, which is a free download in all the common eBook formats and can be found at www.zeromomentoftruth.com.

What is Recurring Billing?

Recurring billing is effectively subscription modelling for businesses transacting online. You automate charging customers for a product or service at a predefined cost and schedule. There are two key factors involved in planning recurring billing.

1. The time span between charges that affects how you retain and acquire custom.
2. The access model - usually different price plans, options and possibly a freemium service, which offsets the cost of giving away a limited but free service against the profits of more likely upgrades.

Why is recurring billing good for my business?

A business relying on one-off transactions may initially bring in more revenue but will most likely struggle to retain the customer over a long period of time. Recurring billing usually results in a higher Average Customer Lifecycle Value (ACLV), a predictable income stream (Monthly Recurring Revenue - MRR) due to a combination of customer inertia and commitment as the relationship shifts from a purchase to opt-out decision and has more potential for up and cross sell as you have good reason to be in regular contact with your users.

In terms of valuing a business these patterns of predictable recurring revenue are hugely attractive to investors and purchasers as they can see genuine opportunities to scale and mitigate risk.

What the potential pitfalls?

The two major areas of difficulty revolve around the security of the sensitive information you acquire and the technical systems you need to put in place to automate these processes.

Security
Storing sensitive financial data about your customers presents you with massive security risk and plenty of legislative red tape to boot. Your servers must be PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliant which is costly and complex to achieve.

In addition to that you may be more susceptible to direct fraud as criminals often use free trial offers to verify stolen credit information.

You might remember the Sony PlayStation scandal in April this year when its systems were breached and the personal data of 75 million customers including some credit information and passwords were compromised. It brought the network down for several weeks and caused a public relations furore. Their systems were not fully restored until June and the trust of their customers was severely damaged. The whole episode is believed to have cost Sony £105 million. A security breach is not something to be taken lightly.

Technology
Building a recursive billing system quickly mounts up to be a considerable technical challenge (and therefore requires time and investment). Here is a quick brain dump of functions you will need to deal with:

• Daily invoice generation and account management
• Sending emails and dealing with spam filters, bounce backs etc.
• Multiple prices plans
• Credit card fails and re-attempts to bill
• Discount coupons and free trials
• Upgrades and downgrades
• Expiring cards
• Different currencies (potentially)
• Tax implications of multiple geographic regions (potentially)

A complex system like this is inevitably going to have errors and bugs in it at launch. Every system does. Will your early adopters tolerate this whilst you fix the problems?

On top of that you will have a system running that needs to be continuously up, processing data, being maintained and scaling in order to keep the engine alive and up to date. And of course you need to make sure it is secure! For an engineer’s perspective check out this blog from Freshbooks.

What recursive business model should you adopt?

Broadly speaking the model splits into Annual or Monthly billing cycles with free trials or “freemium” no cost limited accounts as a popular extension.

Annual payments give you more cash upfront, guarantee customer retention for at least one year and reduce invoicing and collection costs. However monthly payments are less risky for the customer who may not be keen on such a long upfront commitment or high cost. Monthly therefore creates a lower barrier to entry so you could see an increase in customer acquisition. Your sales process should shorten, as the proposition is less risky and more cost effective.

I think for most online businesses the monthly billing cycle is better for the reasons outlined above but also as it provides you with an opportunity to talk more frequently with your customers, make sure they are still using your service to it’s fullest potential, up or cross selling and reminding them you are here and happy to help.

With annual payments you run the risk that your customers may have completely forgotten who you are, or moved on from their jobs or decided to seek an alternative. There is also a legal implication (in the US at least) that if you bill on anything over 60 days you must send ample warning of the renewal, at least 30 days. This gives the customer more time to consider cancelling or shopping around. On a monthly billing cycle you can bill and email them the same day but as they should be used to receiving the emails this shouldn’t be too great a shock.

You could also consider a combo deal that has a monthly plan as well as a reduced annual option for those customers that know they will stick with your service and are happy to just to pay in one go and save some money. These customers are less likely to fall into the annual payment traps above.

A few golden rules for emailing your bill:

1. Always explain the charge. Remind them of the service they are getting and that it has been previously authorised. “You have been charged $XXX” does not cut it!
2. Don’t miss the opportunity to upsell or add value with marketing copy. A slight discount on the next product tier could be all it takes to bring more revenue in. Likewise a gift or a simple thank you could seriously impact your retention and reduce “bill shock”.
3. Make it super simple for the customer to access your customer service team. Preferably by simply replying to the email or with a clear phone number. This is really the point at which you want to be talking to them and cementing/saving your relationship.

What technology is out there to help me?

Over the last few years several companies have been launched to help alleviate the issues around recurring billing. These guys sit above payment providers such as Sagepay and do all the hard work so you don’t have to.

Chargify, CheddarGetter, Recurly, Spreedly and Zuora (more of an enterprise offering) are the major players in the space. Sadly most of them have quite poor UK payment gateway support so we plumped for Recurly for our apps who have been excellent. Spreedly also have good UK support and hopefully the others will catch up soon so you get a greater degree of choice.

Paypal have a recurring billing option but I would highly advise avoiding them despite the fact that getting setup is relatively painless. My reason? Poor support, random behaviour, tricky deep integration methods with a lack of features and customisation.

What you should be looking for in your billing partners, aside from price

• PCI-DSS Level 1 Compliant service - which makes verifying your own business’ compliance easy
• Support for your favoured currency(ies) and payment gateway
• “Grandfathering” of costs - a pledge to honour the deal you sign up to if costs change in the future
• Adherence for the Data Portability Standard to ensure you own your customer credit data
• A complimentary feature set or flexibility for custom elements to fit with how you want to run the accounts of your business
• Developer friendly tools such as well documented APIs and relevant code integration examples for your tech team’s preferred language

Phew, that was a longer article than I had planned! If you have any thoughts or questions on this please leave a comment below. Happy billing!

This month’s festive grinds my gears is something that I'm only reminded of once a year, but every year without fail it gets to me. Christmas Pudding! Hot, delicious, moist, fruity goodness topped off with a bit of booze and cream. What could be better? Nothing.

So, why if it's so great, are we restricted to only enjoying Christmas Pudding at Christmas?

On Christmas Day millions of us tuck into the Great Christmas Pudding (herein GCP), even when we are ready to burst from a full days eating, we force it down knowing "eat it now, or regret it for another 365 days". Surely I am not the only one that wouldn't mind, after a dinner party in August, being offered a yummy bit of GCP?

I guess a similar thing could be said for mince pies, or even pumpkins at Halloween. Every year in early November there are loads of people serving up delicious pumpkin pie or pumpkin soup, under the pretence that they are just getting rid of the left overs from Halloween and it's the seasonal thing to do. If you look to other countries however, you can buy pumpkin no matter what season, because the fact is people actually like it and people generally buy what they like regardless of the time of year - there is demand all year round.

Which brings me to my tenuous link to agency life. Let's adopt the Christmas spirit all year round. At this time of year everyone is thinking "let's do something festive". Briefs suddenly have that fun factor, with clients wanting to be more humorous and light hearted....because that's the spirit of Christmas.  But do their audience actually change at this time of year? Do people go from being miserable, serious types to jolly, cheerful folk just because it's December? Does what they desire from a brand suddenly change because the sound of The Pogues is in the air? I don't think so.

I think we stay the same. The way to capture our attention and engage with us stays exactly the same. What we like and don't like stays the same. What a brand/product/service is offering should be consistent with the audience, not the season. Fit in with what your customers want, not what tradition tells you to.

In an attempt to reinforce my point I'm going to turn to GQ's chef of the year Mr Heston Blumenthal. Last year his GCP's flew off the shelves, there was unprecedented demand, Waitrose (the only place to buy them) couldn't keep up and in the final days before Christmas the only way to get your hands on one was eBay for over £500. So what did Mr Waitrose do to respond to this demand, to capitalise on this cash cow? Well obviously, because it wasn't Christmas anymore he took them off the shelves.  For 9 months in fact, only making them available again in September. And now EXACTLY the same thing is happening again. I just don't get it. Give us Christmas Pudding all year round!

And that my festive friends, is what really grinds my gears. Merry Christmas!

For the next few months I’m going to write a bit about User Experience. I firmly believe that User Experience shouldn’t be the dark art that some portray it as. There is no reason why good UX can’t be put into practice within a client company or by an agency (or both). Like most things, it comes down to common sense and an ability to think laterally – very laterally at times. Working with a professional UX expert can pay dividends, especially with a challenging content structure, and they will help you get to where you want to be quicker, but it's not impossible to get there yourself with a bit of time and thought.

The thing I love about UX projects is that it combines analytics with creativity. In many ways it is the bridge between the nerdy researcher and the wacky creative. Although in my experience, most successful agency people have a bit of both in them anyway.

One great way of focusing everyone’s attention on what they really need to  concern themselves about is the development of Personas. A persona is a (largely) fictional snapshot of a typical user. It can be based on research or, in the absence of research, instinct. It can be an ever-evolving tool that is updated as the project goes along and more insights and ideas are generated.

Of all the tools in the UX professional’s armoury, Personas are the least statistically valid, accurate or meaningful. So you might be forgiven for asking ‘why the hell should we waste time creating them?’. And in some cases there isn’t the need, the time or indeed the budget, to develop personas. However, in many cases it can be a great help.

What is a persona?
If you think about your business, you will be able to picture a typical user. That person might be your customer. But then, after a few moments you’ll think that actually you will have more than one typical user – what about returning customers? What about small customers vs large ones? What about suppliers, or potential employees, investors, or the press? What about customers who have radically different needs: maybe one needs some detailed product information but another just needs a phone number?

Personas help you get all these ideas into one, “at-a-glance” place. They are a visual shortcut that allows everyone to think about their range of different users without having to keep describing them.

A good place to start is to imagine each of your core audience types, give them a name, an age, a gender and a profession. It is counter-intuitive in our age of politically correct avoidance of stereotypes at all costs, but just run with it for a bit. In some cases, there may be some research data about users that can be employed, but if there isn’t you can still have an educated guess – remembering that this isn’t meant to be an accurate piece of data. 

Then consider how they consume digital media. Are they likely to be confident, need hand-holding, happy to explore or time poor? Are they going to be mobile? Do they like to interact using social media?  You should also consider what types of things they are going to be looking for from your site: do they just want to find something and move on, or do they want to be inspired or convinced?

Image courtesy of cxpartners.com

Bringing this altogether will give you a series of references that can be used at each stage of the UX process:

Developing user journeys: the personas act as a way of ensuring that the key user journeys have been considered

Task modeling: a way of understanding how users behave and reasons why they may drop out before they achieve their goal.

Content auditing: looking at the current/proposed content and checking it against each persona allows you to work out whether there are any gaps.

Design concepts: for the designer, having a sense (however artificial) of the different users provides a backdrop against which to pitch the creative.  

Functional idea generation: often having a persona will spark an idea along the lines of “you know what would be really cool?” It’s often only when you try and put yourself in someone else’s shoes that insights arise that you mightn’t have considered otherwise.