Since the global economy tanked in 2008 things have been pretty gloomy for most of us. Inflation is soaring, unemployment is high, credit has all but vanished and the debt-laden government is cutting at a faster rate than happy hour in Sweeney Todd’s. Not great. However in an effort to try and look on the brighter side of life I thought I would examine how these economic conditions have actually helped progress the digital industry.

1. User Centric Design

I have worked in digital since 2001 and in that time one of the most frequently frustrating experiences has been persuading people to design for their users, not themselves.

Design solutions should be based on a thorough understanding of the core target audience and clear business objectives that you wish to convert on. However I have spent many hours in meeting rooms trying to persuade decision makers not to commit design hari-kari by letting personal preference dictate the path we took. I have tried everything from blunt refusal to regaling the fable of Homer’s Car but could never seem to surmount the issue.

However, when market conditions are tough and budgets need to work hard you cannot afford to risk losing valuable eyeballs and custom because you prefer pink to blue. Briefs have always pertained to place the user first but we have noticed clients like Channel 4, BBC, The British Library, Pearson Education and others I cannot directly mention put increasing emphasis and budget on analytical research, user focus groups and thorough usability testing during the design phase.

It is very illuminating that when budgets need to work harder you see increased investment in a particular area. You might think the trend would be to “best guess” and cut corners but when you have to get results, you can’t afford to muck around on design.

2. Wider adoption of new ideas and trends

Similarly I have also noticed corporate brands embracing and adopting fresh ideas and trends that I previously would have associated to forward thinking geeks and start-ups. Open source software is now pro-actively requested rather than suggested and a lot of the old wives tales about lack of accountability and support have been put to bed. Did anyone ever try calling Microsoft when their .Net site crashed anyway?

I no longer spend a significant portion of my week scanning signed NDAs as people have begun to appreciate that the best way to succeed online is to share and iterate your great idea rather than hide behind password protection for months whilst crafting the all-singing all-dancing solution. Instead I am pleased to see clients shipping the minimal viable product and holding budget for future iterations once real users have got their hands on it.

If the economy doesn’t sort itself out soon we might even see the Agile project process becoming a regular fixture but I think it will be a while before people can fully trust the cost effectiveness of that path.

3. Customer Service is fashionable again

About 10 years ago it was decided upon high that customer service units should be offshored to reduce costs and this would be a great deal for the consumer because of more competitive prices. I am not so sure the consumer agreed, or got a better deal, but it didn’t really matter, as they had no way of really being heard beyond mouthing off in the local pub to a few disinterested souls.

I guess the powers that be didn’t anticipate social media. When your margins are tight and undercutting on price is not viable customer service can be the differentiator. As consumers feeling the pinch we want to spend our pennies effectively and that means taking informed recommendations from others. It is near impossible for a brand to buy a good online reputation. Brands have to prove themselves if they want to build trust and loyalty. Simply put, they have to engage.

And many have! I have anecdotal evidence of BT sorting out a huge billing mess triggered by a frustrated tweet I sent out and I know of many others. It has spawned the Thank You Economy and has proved to be a champion bottom line strategy by guys like Tony Hsieh. It is a return to the principles of the local store where properly serving the community made all the difference between success and failure. Mass consumerism killed that off for a while but it is back now with a vengeance.

4. Death toll for IE6

Internet Explorer version 6 is over 10 years old and the time has come for it to take its place in the historical archives. In a tough environment you need to differentiate from the competition and maximise your budget reach. Neither of these is likely when you are catering to the low-tech needs of 2.9% of your user base (and it’s shrinking rapidly).

I was heartened to see that Google is dropping browser support on its products for anything beyond the previous two versions and the new Alpha Government Project spearheaded by Martha Lane Fox deviated from traditional Government website guidelines by ignoring IE6 and focussing on modern web standards to create delightful experiences for the vast majority. I highly recommend reading their design principles blog post.

5. Innovation in technology embraced

In much the same way we have noticed an embrace of new trends by previously conservative decision makers we have also seen dramatic shifts in how clients look at tech. Cloud platforms and virtualisation servers have been around for a while but have only been seen as acceptable solutions when the cost effectiveness of them became a determining factor on whether a project could happen or not.

Previously we were dreaming up physical dedicated server solutions housed in Central London using traditional (expensive) CDNs to distribute media. This often meant large up front costs to buy expensive licenses and kit. There used to be a sense that it was important to completely own and house your own web architecture, and there was a real distrust of using someone else’s platform, it felt that it even cheapened the offering.

Now we are not only seeing powerful and scalable cloud services becoming common for site hosting but within offices virtualised documents, file sharing, and other software as a service is being widely adopted. We are using a more diverse and tailored toolset to increase efficiency as team sizes shrink, budgets reduce and competition intensifies.

In conclusion...

I do think all of these trends were coming regardless of the economic situation we faced but the recession has certainly brought focus to what is important, killed off a few ridiculous old wives tales that were holding us back and opened our minds to new and improved ways of working.

Would you add any other items to the list? Let me know in the comments below.

We all get to that point, two or three years after launching our ecommerce website, sales growth isn't want it used to be, new customer acquisition is faltering, the site has lost its "magic". Yet we're all terribly busy maintaining it. How did this happen? How did our wonderful source of revenue become well, stagnant?

Don't fear Stagnation

Stagnation is a natural part of any system lifecycle. After the initial jump in growth you experience after implementing a new ecommerce offering, your ability to sustain it is limited. The features and quick wins that you achieved are already out there, you focus on ensuring the visitors are catered for and most of your effort goes into the day-to-day operations of running your site. Coming up with the Next Big Thing is increasingly hard. Frequently more money is pumped into Marketing, vastly increasing your cost per acquisition because your site simply isn't converting like it once was.

However, when you realise your site has stagnated, this becomes a wonderful opportunity for change.

Featuritis

Featuritis is a symptom, rather than a cause of Stagnation. Featuritis is a term coined by Kathy Sierra, a prominent blogger on User Experience, to describe what happens to software when new features are continually added.

Thanks Kathy for allowing re-use of your work

She describes the point of the Happy User Peak, the point when there is just enough functionality to please the user, without leaving them wanting more, or conversely, reaching for the instruction manual.

However, after the initial stage of growth, it's very easy to get into the mindset of adding new features, sections and functionality to your site to help maintain the growth you've achieved.

Without pragmatism, not just from you but your Board, and quite importantly, your Helpdesk, you can easily find yourself responding to users' demands through continuous developments. Multiple exotic payment options, unnecessary wishlist & comparison pages, complicated delivery options and "me too" social media integration are just a few of the ways to add complexity that can frustrate a large percentage of your audience.

Operational vs Strategic

After successfully running an ecommerce operation for a year or so, it's easy to get stuck in the day-to-day operational tasks. Content creation (certainly for smaller shops), catalogue management, helpdesk management, can all make you lose site of the vision of your ecommerce store.

Econsultancy, back in the day, created an incredibly useful map of the tasks that need to be undertaken to run an ecommerce store. Taking the ACRA model - Acquisition, Conversion, Retention & Analytics - these can easily be carved into a series of remits for you and your team.

If you find yourself consistently working on the Operational side of the business, with no time to work on the Strategy & Planning, then we have a problem. Not only are you not keeping an analytical eye on your competitors, you are also unable to focus on your vision and drive innovation - a quick route to stagnation.

Don't be reactionary

So, you've sat down with your Board, and said "I think our site has stagnated". My aren't you brave! There's often a compelling urge to scrap everything and start again, to rebuild from scratch and let's do it better this time.

However this is not only costly, but unnecessary and dangerous. Within larger organisations a considerable amount has been invested in integration, certainly with fulfillment and CRM.

Remember when you conducted Stakeholder Interviews at the start of your project? Do it again with your Board. Find out what the current perceived failings are - these won't just be quantifiable like sales and average transaction value, but emotional failings as well. Once you know this, then you can work on how to improve it.

A platform's just a platform

I'm not sure if everyone will agree with me on this!

Ultimately, a platform is just a way of skipping over building a database, business logic and an API yourself. If you've chosen a platform, then you were probably sold on features, but the real issues such as cost, integration, administrative overhead and scalability were why you bought it.

But do your customers care one jot what platform you use? Does your platform choice directly affect the experience that they have? Of course not. Which is why in most cases, a few pragmatic steps is all that it takes to get you back on track.

1) Understand what matters

Why do people actually visit your website? Do you know? We'd love to think that they're there to Buy Buy Buy! but often that simply isn't the case. What's going through their minds? What's their motivation? Are you catering for this, not only in your site content but in your marketing?

If you'd like to read more about this, here's a post on user-psychology I wrote for Econsultancy.

Just as we measure Conversion Rate, we can also measure how often users are able to do what they came to your site to do - a "Task Completion Rate". Remember that not every visitor comes to your site to shop. Just as we do when we enclose a Checkout, when your visitor knows what they want to achieve, your site should get out of the way and let them do it.

There are a number of tools to let you measure Task Completion Rate - predominantly based around user surveys. The most popular is called 4Q from iPerceptions and takes the form of a pop-under survey.

You can then measure your Task Completion Rate amongst a sample of your visitors and see in which areas you can improve. You may of course, have a site that doesn't cater to your users' needs. They may be looking for a store finder, or an offers section, or something that isn't currently in your strategy. In which case...

2) Go back to your IA

During the information architecture process, you should have come up with 3-4 user personas, with needs and wants and clear goals and motivations. However, if your site is failing, then either a) the personas are incorrect (which can certainly happen when these aren't based on user research) or b) the personas aren't being catered for. Either way, when visitors use your site "in anger", they will become frustrated and leave.

Once you have catalogued the objectives and motivations of your user personas, you need to see how well your site fits these. If you don't feel that the site fits, or your personas are wrong, then you should conduct a new round of user research. I always recommend doing this in the user's homes, so you can see the environment in which they interact with you, and the discussion becomes more of a "chat" than a survey, but this isn't always possible.

3) Simplification

Once you have a newly defined set of goals and objectives, you can simplify your site design to cater to these. John Maeda has a wonderful book called the Laws of Simplicity in which he states 10 (well, 9) laws that you can apply to any design or process to make it simpler. For example, whilst you can't remove elements that some users may find useful, you can Hide or Shrink them in the design. You can use this process to not only rationalise your product taxonomy, but also rationalise your language.

A case in point here, on a site I once worked on we had 12 different methods of getting help, none of which were labelled "Help".

4) Take time out

Pause, breathe and have a sit down.

As I said before, when you hit this point, it's very easy to run around, firing & hiring agencies and switching platforms in an urge to have something new. You can do this, sure, but it's not very Strategic is it? You need to take a little time out.

5) Visit some aliens

Go and visit another ecommerce operation, that has nothing to do with your business. You'll see that they have the same processes as any other business, a helpdesk, customer returns, a CRM strategy - but by doing this you can not only gather ideas, but share skills and see how their success can be adapted for you use.

6) Think strategically

Work out what makes you money. Start from "we receive money from our customers by" and work backwards from there. Look at your net margin, and what's actually driving value. See how you can align this with your customer's objectives, simplifying the process and creating an engaging experience, and you're onto a winner.

We have just launched our latest CBS Outdoor campaign promoting Bus advertising. You have probably seen promotional adverts for it driving around!

The 2009 Creative Challenge runs until July and features a different creative agency every two weeks. Each agency showcases their best work on some actual buses, in Campaign Magazine and our site. Users can review and vote on the designs and influence which pieces will feature in the "Grand Prix" final, where the winner will then be selected.

This campaign is the latest in a series promoting the benefits of bus advertising that we have worked on for CBS Outdoor and so far the results have been really encouraging with some great ROI for the client.

We are also busily working on a large international project for CBS Outdoor's main website so look out for that when we launch in the Spring.

Up Everyone's Street »

Last time, we looked at how the Social Media omnipresence is changing consumers' behaviour and concluded that marketers need to change their mindset and techniques to shift from traditional marketing to more of a conversation: a real dialogue with their audience.

It seems to us that most marketers and web users are talking at crossed purposes these days. Marketers are still broadcasting interruptive one-way messages, speaking loudly to target audiences and controlling the message. The video above is a good example of the traditional marketing model, reaching out to a large volume of consumers through messages without listening directly to the needs of the customer.

But forget about your monologue if you don't want to be abandoned. Instead let's create a dialogue between your clients and you. Dell finally managed to do this and have significantly improved their customer service, you should be able to as well!

Web users have fully adopted social media tools that enable them to create, share, discuss, and participate online. This results in empowered users who can say anything they like about brands: the good (Zappos) and the very bad (Taco Bell).

Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do about these conversations happening online, on blog comments, on customer reviews, on feedback platforms... They are taking place with or without you and travel even faster and further than you think.

So what should you do? Don't ignore what people are saying about your brand, a bad customer experience leads to a bad reputation which loses you money! Furthermore, if you're not part of the conversation, other people, competitors, are.

The best communicators start as the best listeners (Brian Solis – Social Media Manifesto). It is no longer what you say about yourselves, but what they say about you! So LISTEN to what people are saying then analyse what is being said and why. Only then should you ENGAGE and PARTICIPATE.

Some tips:

• Think like a customer and talk to them with a real voice.
  Don't make them feel small!
• Be transparent and honest: if you are wrong, it's ok to admit it.
  Honesty is rewarded and it will bring back customer trust.
• Provide your customer with tools that they are happy to use and help them accomplish what they want (suggestion platforms, voting system, blogs, comments, video sharing...)
• Create opportunities to make them feel owners of the brand. They can become your strongest advocates!
• Think of Social Media as a long-term strategy not a one-off communication campaign.
• Remember this is a two-way communication so be prepared to relinquish some control.

If you engage people by building relationships, you can expect your customer service to improve significantly. In addition to helpful feedback on what you currently offer its also a great source of fresh ideas, free R&D!

According to a recent study published by Opinion Research Corporation for Cone, consumers are enthusiastic about companies involved on social media platforms as it opens new channels to interact with the brand. So what are you waiting for? Start now before it's too late!

This summary of an article from the December issue of the Journal of Advertising Research says that common word-of-mouth advertising by regular people is more powerful than a message from a  “key influencers.” Which is to say that sucking up to A-list bloggers may not be worth it after all.

James Coyle, assistant professor of marketing at Miami University’s Farmer School of Business, Elizabeth Lightfoot of CNET Networks, and Ted Smith and Amy Scott of MedTrackAlert conducted the study by surveying website visitors, conducting in-depth reviews, and analyzing website usage patterns. Said Coyle:

“We find that trying to track down key influencers, people who have extremely large social networks, is typically unnecessary and, more importantly, can actually limit a campaign or advertisement’s viral potential. Instead, marketers need to realize that the majority of their audience, not just the well-connected few, is eager and willing to pass along well-designed and relevant messages.”

After all if you think about who is your strongest "Key Influencer" more often than not they are going to be your friends and family, and not a self obsessed blogger in middle america.