Bradley Howard's Blog

Updating the voting system

May 8, 2012 at 10:43pm

The low voter turnout throughout the UK for the local elections last week is a sad statistic, especially when the news is also reporting Middle Eastern states where citizens are attempting to topple dictators and replace them with democratically elected leaders.

One of the main causes of low voting turnout is that people can’t be bothered to vote, and that the vote feels too far removed from their lives.

I think the whole voting system is woefully outdated. For the last couple of centuries it was perfectly fine, and probably very efficient, to ask citizens to go to a local meeting place and vote in a private booth. However it’s now one of the only things in modern life where we have to go to a specific place, at a specific time, to do something.

We should replace the now-inefficient voting process with an electronic system.

If it’s good enough for me to file a tax return (I’m letting myself calm down before writing a blog post on that topic after the ordeal I’ve recently been through!); fill in medical advice for my local doctor; and do all of my insurance, mortgage and banking online, why can’t I vote online?

For a while, security has been the main issue, however my bank feels the web is safe enough for me to lend me a mortgage, and I’ve even leased a car online from a company which I never met.

One of the dangers for politicians is that as soon as voting becomes electronic, it could become almost too quick and easy, and the public will then want to vote for smaller issues. For instance, imagine in say, 50 years’ time, there’s a debate in Parliament which then asks MPs to vote. The MP could then ask their constituents for their opinion using the public voting infrastructure on that debate.

tags:

digital media, future, politics, trends, web security,

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Digital Media in Scotland

May 4, 2012 at 9:43am

I’ve just spent the last couple of days in Scotland to mark the opening of the new Endava office in Glasgow. We ran one event in Edinburgh (which mainly focussed on the Financial Services sector) and one in Glasgow, inviting local companies to hear about our view of the Digital Media industry, and the trends that we’re seeing.

The key topics were:

Social Media
Consumer Insight
Personalisation

Social Media

The key starting point with Social Media, is that even Financial Services organisations who don’t understand or want to acknowledge it exists, people are discussing your company, products or service, in one channel or another. Too many people associate social media with Facebook, then perform a search on Facebook and don’t find any results, and then dismiss it. However we recommend that you widen the search, even use Google, and you’ll find specialist forums and other places where you’re being discussed.

After listening, the next step is to formalise a strategy. In Financial Services, this needs to include regulation, governance, security and staffing. The technology (subtle plug – this is where Endava comes in) starts from the listening exercise, through to implementation and operations.

Another key point on social media is that it sets the expectation of the user interface. Look at Facebook, Google + and Pinterest to see how easy a user interface can be, and then look at other sites to see how they lag behind.

Financial Services companies are catching up – my bank’s website has recently been overhauled and most of my monthly tasks can now be done simply rather than the several steps it took a few weeks ago.

Consumer Insight

Sometimes referred to as ‘Big Data’, consumer insight is important at the moment because understanding the customer is vital to increase ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) and/ or profit.

I always give the analogy of the shopkeeper who knows his customers and can advise them on the most appropriate product based on their relationship and previous experiences. Consumer insight is the memory of the shopkeeper.

Personalisation

Firstly, you need some consumer insight to do some personalisation. The better quality insight, the better personalisation.

Amazon is still one of the best personalised websites – with recommendations based on not only what you’ve bought before, also what you’ve looked at, and how other customers have behaved too.

Personalisation can be applied to push communication too – email newsletters and text messages. However it’s vital to keep analysing, in detail, how these personalised messages are improving ROI (Return On Investment) and to keep tweaking them.

Trends

We’re seeing four key trends in Digital Media at the moment:

1. Mobile, mobile, mobile. Despite the title, it’s not just mobile. It’s about the expectation that consumers can access your service wherever and whenever they wish. It doesn’t need to be via Internet Explorer version 8 on a desktop device bigger than 1028 pixels wide. I recently carried out some competitor analysis for a large bank and showed each of the rival’s services on a mobile device – they were unusable.

2. Single platform – consumer insight and personalisation are linked. Push communication and Content Management Systems need to be linked. You’ll need analytics for all your channels. This all leads to a single platform requirement.

3. Collaborate. We’re seeing multiple brands work together on joint initiatives because the sum of their efforts is so valuable. This requires some lateral thinking, strategic commercial awareness and clever marketing messaging.

4. Consumer Insight. We’re seeing two trends linking distributed organisations together. One is social media and the other is consumer insight. The owner of the consumer insight strategy needs to communicate and work with the rest of the organisation. Every touch point with consumers needs to include data collection, and it takes mindset change to achieve this.

The two sessions were really interesting, and I always enjoy meeting companies and people who either haven’t thought about the discussion points, or who are on the path and share their experiences with others.

tags:

Endava, data, digital media, insight, personalisation, social media, trends,

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Internet World 2012

Apr 30, 2012 at 9:24am

The Internet World 2012 exhibition at Earls Court was far improved from previous years. It was bigger, busier and generally more upbeat – perhaps a good indication of the market, even if it was the same day that the UK re-entered a recession.

There were lots of seminars across a number of theatres. In fact, there were so many seminars and theatres over the three days that I got confused and ended up sitting in the wrong theatre a few times – but the topics were interesting enough to stay.

Two of the better presentations were from Artificial Solutions and Orange.

Artificial Solutions

Andy Peart described how virtual online assistants, such as Anna on Ikea.com, provide value to consumers and increase conversion rates.

Andy started by quoting Gartner: "By 2015, 10 percent of your online "friends" will be nonhuman"

Anna from Ikea understands 21 languages across 23 countries in a natural language, and because users interact with ‘her’ (why are virtual assistants always female?) from a webpage, she understands the context (specifically, the product) of what the user is querying. She converts over $14m of revenue a year – hence the title of Andy’s seminar “Expanding the role of your most productive virtual employee”.

Artificial Solutions ran some independent research that 96% of users visit a website to resolve a query instead of calling first, and that query should try to upsell just like a call centre would.

Orange

The focus of Orange’s presentation was A/B Testing – essentially it’s testing different solutions on different sets of users to see which is more effective.

Google do this all the time and often publish their results. They tried 41 different shades of blue for Google AdWords.

Back to Orange and their A/B Testing for push communications – such as email and bill inserts.

The first take away from the session was not to take the results of these push communications at face value.

For instance, one of the key metrics for sending emails is the open rate. If users look at an email, then great – they’ve seen your ad. Orange found that their iPhone users have the highest percentage of opening their marketing emails, and they were delighted. However, one step into the detail showed that Orange iPhone users were one of the lowest click-through groups. So they opened their emails but didn’t do anything with it.

Orange had another good point with ‘holdout groups’. These are consumers who aren’t included in the A/B Testing – to prove whether the marketing initiative (i.e. the email send) is worth doing at all. In fact, when Orange segment their users, they have holdout groups inside each segment.

All this talk of email though – and bill inserts still provide the highest consistent ROI of all push communication. I think it’s all about putting the information in someone’s hand. Email is too ‘removed’ – a leaflet is more valuable. Electronic ink will become very powerful in the hands of marketers.

And finally, Orange segment their users into several groups, including Socialites, Pragmatics, Maximers and many other groups. Maximisers are ambitious and active, career focussed workaholics.

Orange find it difficult to work with Maximisers – getting them to open emails and click on them, despite extensive A/B Testing. And that was their last point – some groups are just too difficult to market too, so concentrate on the ones who you can convert and work on increasing their ARPU (Average Revenue Per User).

tags:

Exhibitions, mobile, retail, testing, usability,

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Google Drive opinion

Apr 25, 2012 at 11:40am

I've had a couple of emails asking what I think of Google Drive.

Firstly I'm a bit disappointed with Google's lack of innovation. I'd have expected a few bells and whistles because they are late entrants into the market and have the benefit of watching their competitors and market makers.

I'm growing sceptical of new Google services. If Google Drive doesn't take off, yet a business has used it for all their file server needs, migrating all those files and links to them is going to be a nightmare for any organisation.

And this is the inherent problem with immature cloud services.

This blog uses Posterous which was bought by Twitter a month ago. If Posterous is discontinued, I need to migrate all the content (relatively straightforward but a hassle nonetheless).

I use Brinkster to host my websites and domain names. For the cost of using 500Gb on Google Drive, I get the same amount of FTP storage, thousands of email accounts and a Microsoft web server thrown in.

Cloud storage is the first step to consumer IT virtualisation. Soon we'll all be using virtual PCs via a web browser. Google started this with Google Docs and Picasa Web Albums. Creating a generic file storage area is misaligned with their goal of eradicating the need for local files.

We now have a situation where the key players in the market all have competing file storage and online services - Apple, Microsoft and Google. It will be interesting to see how they compete.

tags:

IT, Microsoft, apple, consumerisation, data, google, hosting,

2 Comments

The difference between B2B and B2C

Apr 20, 2012 at 12:55pm

I originally started this blog because I was having similar discussions with a number of different clients, Endava staff and friends outside of work, and wanted to share these discussions to a wider community. Recently I’ve been discussing the difference between B2B and B2C with many people, so I wanted to share the discussion here.

I’ll start with my original position – that on the Internet there is no difference between B2B and B2C experiences. I argued with people there is no longer a difference between B2B and B2C on the Internet, because the same people who used B2B websites during the day, switched over to B2C (consumer) websites during their lunchtime and evening, and wanted that B2C experience after their lunchtime had finished.

I gave a speech last February to 100 Financial Services organisations explaining that they needed to upgrade their websites to include the usability features that social networks provided – such as search boxes which have type-ahead functionality (e.g. the search box on Facebook). I gave an example that the night before the speech I paid a bill using my online banking service, and it took 6 screens to make a payment, compared to just one screen to send a message to someone on Facebook.

The old transactional website paradigm of a page per step in a long process, was great in the 1990s, unwelcome in the 2010s.

My position on this has changed though. B2B sites haven’t all died and been replaced with B2C. There are still differences between the two of them, but the usability has become the same. B2B sites have adopted the same user experiences. Old green screens are being replaced with iPad implementations because CIOs and CTOs have bought an iPad for home and said “this is the future”, and demanded the green screens receive funding for the first time in 40 years and become reengineered for 2012.

There are still differences between B2B and B2C, but the grey line between the two of them hasn’t moved – it’s just become a lot greyer.

Image courtesy of s_falkow on Flickr

tags:

business, consumerisation, technology, trends, usability, website production,

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3 components for perfect m-commerce

Apr 17, 2012 at 9:45am

Every day I receive a link to a news article describing how powerful mobile shopping, or m-commerce has become. 98% of mobile commerce revenue is from iPads and there were $240 billion of mobile payments in 2011 – rising to $1trillion in 2015, Amazon have sold $1bn of products in the last 12 months, and eBay sold $5bn of products last year.

However, I think we’re about to see a step change in these revenues, because most m-commerce offerings are simply migrating their web offering to a mobile equivalent – either through app or a web browser. The statistics above are still mightily impressive, however there’s a lot more room to grow.

Amazon’s one click ordering makes it easy to buy a product, and eBay’s feedback rating is a brilliant piece of loyalty marketing – once you’ve won an item via Buy It Now or through an auction, the feedback rating psychologically compels consumers to go through with the purchase without any of eBay’s manual overhead.

Both of these systems are great for impulse buying, but are separated from marketing.

The next version of m-commerce will marry brand marketing and impulse buying. Consider these two scenarios:

A consumer sees a poster advert in a train station promoting a new film. The consumer will soon be able to connect their smartphone to the poster – whether through the camera, wireless or another communication channel, and order tickets to the film at their preferred cinema.
A consumer sees a poster advert of a perfume. They connect their smart phone to the poster, enter a quick and fast security check, and that perfume is then ordered and delivered to the consumer.

These scenarios require a number of barriers to be broken down before the purchase process can be made quickly and easily. Consumers won’t have the time or inclination to enter 4 pieces of information from their credit card for each purpose – it needs to be simplified. A current example of this is PayPal’s mobile app which has been simplified recently to remove long passwords and replace them with a 4 digit PIN number.

In order for this new world to occur, three things need to happen:

The technology needs to be in place. As pointed out, with PayPal and existing smartphones, I think this is already in place.
Marketing agencies need to help design the buying process. The agencies will need to help the commerce store with the actual purchase rather than a brand awareness exercise - and this will be difficult to achieve. It will be a huge educational process and mindset change for marketing and design agencies.
I don’t think this can be achieved with QR codes because they are still clunky; require their own app and a decent Internet connection. Most consumers still don’t understand what a QR code is. QR codes also fragment the buying process, sending consumers off to websites rather than enabling a one-click, under 20 second buying process.
The single fulfilment store. One key player that has the infrastructure to do this is Apple. Imagine if they rebranded the App Store as simply ‘The Store’. A consumer sees the perfume poster above, links their iPhone to the poster, and orders through ‘The Store’. Apple already has the payment information and owner’s address – in the App Store. They also have the cash to setup the distribution infrastructure.
Other contenders to be able to do this are Amazon and possibly Google. Or we could see a new player/ brand emerge, who won’t need to worry about the legacy of ‘old’ e-commerce systems and behaviours. Tesco have tried a system in Korea, however I think it was more of a marketing stunt or a proof of concept. And when I mention legacy systems, the future of m-commerce described above will be single, impulsive purchases, probably linked to brands, unlike the Tesco video which is a small step forward from shopping online.

Once these three component are in place, consumers will consider this as standard shopping behaviour. The holy grail of marketing will have been achieved – Marketing will have become directly linked to the purchase.

Photo courtesy of Eric on Flickr.

tags:

Amazon, PayPal, QR codes, Tesco, advertising, agencies, apple, brands, eBay, ecommerce, ipad, m-commerce, marketing, mobile, payment, trends,

2 Comments

Retail and brand convergence

Apr 10, 2012 at 9:35am

The line between brands and retailers is now greyer than ever. Fifteen years ago customer bought products almost exclusively through retailers. Then the Internet changed that model, and brands started going direct to customers. Facebook further changed the model, enabling customers to interact with brands even more easily.

Let’s take an example of airline tickets. Fifteen years ago everyone booked flights through a travel agent – basically a retailer. Nowadays most people book flights direct with the airline (the brand). On average, 200,000 people ‘Like’ Virgin Atlantic, British Airways, RyanAir and easyJet on Facebook.

We’re already seeing electronics manufacturers setting up their own High Street shops – Sony, Panasonic and Apple are good examples. Except for the last brand, I imagine most people who go into the shop are there to browse and try products, which then go on to purchase online.

One key advantage of brands, (or manufacturers – most of the time they are the same thing), going direct to the consumer and having an interaction with them, is that they can better understand the market, and improve their product or service. A lot has been made of consumer insight and its value to marketing department; however I think the value of consumer insight can and should be to the whole organisation.

The future will enable more customers to buy directly from brands up to a point – I can’t imagine a time where I’ll stop using a supermarket and start buying soup from Heinz, drinks directly from Coke, frozen vegetables from Birds Eye and crisps from Walkers.

Photo courtesy of Laurent Dechoux on Flickr

tags:

Facebook, High Street, apple, insight, retail, trends,

0 Comments

Windows 8 first review

Apr 5, 2012 at 11:51am

It's funny how the 'computer busy' state is shown on PCs. 15 years ago we all got frustrated when we kept seeing an hourglass that prevented us from doing some work. So Microsoft rebranded the egg timer/ hourglass, probably because some psychologist recommended taking our mind off of 'time' being wasted. And so we ended up with a circle. Well in Windows 8, even the circle has been replaced (perhaps Google trademarked 'the circle' as part of Google+?) – this time it’s dots flying around the screen, usually in some oddly attractive patterns.

The ‘please wait’ icon isn’t the only change to Windows 8. It’s very, very different throughout. I’ve been using Windows 8 for a couple of weeks now.

WIMP

I remember the acronym "WIMP" when Windows 3.1 was launched. It stood for Windows, Icons, [dropdown] Menus and Pointer. It was the move away from black and white text terminals into graphical interfaces so that humans could start using computers without a Computer Science degree.

In Windows 8, the only part of WIMP that is left is the ‘I’. Windows have been replaced by full screen, errrr, Windows. It’s a bit like using a tablet on your PC – more of that later. You can switch back to a desktop that looks like the current Windows XP or Windows 7 desktop, and I guess that users will spend most of their time in this view.

Where to start

One of the most obvious missing features in the desktop view is the start menu. ‘Start’ has been totally overhauled into a separate interface. If you’ve used an Xbox before, it will look very familiar. And if you haven’t used an Xbox before, well, Start is like a games console.

Start is the default screen, not the desktop. In ‘Start’, you see a link to the commonly used apps, and some of the icons contain extra information. For example, the email icon contains some of the subject lines of your emails. The first time I saw this it was really disconcerting because I’d just installed Windows 8, and I was looking at the icons, when a personal message caught my eye and I thought “How does the computer know about that???” – only to realise soon afterwards that it was an email subject line from my wife.

And disconcerting is a recurring theme. It’s only natural to use a different interface and wonder where certain familiar features have been moved to.

Then, by luck, you realise that if you right click on various areas of the screen, you get a simple, context menu appear at the bottom or sometimes the side of the screen and have a Eureka moment.

Right click back

I remember going to the launch of Windows Vista when Microsoft announced that their usability strategy was to remove right clicks from as many operations as possible because it’s just not obvious to end users. I get the feeling that guy left Microsoft before Windows 8 was created, because right click is everywhere.

As well as using your mouse’s right button more, you’re also going to be using the Windows key on your keyboard more during Windows 8. I already use shortcuts like Windows +E (to get a new File Explorer window), Windows+M (to minimise everything) and Windows+L (to lock my PC), however in reality I hardly need any of those commands over a working day. To use Windows 8, you’re constantly pressing Windows+C to get the context menu working. I can’t remember how I heard about it, but before you know about Windows+C, it is almost impossible to use Windows 8 because you can’t ‘get to’ any other installed programs.

Similar to when you use any Google product where you use your Google account to sign in, Windows has the same feature with its Live ID. In fact, you sign into Windows 8 with your Live ID. Anyone with a Hotmail account will have a Live ID already.

Like all new Operating Systems, half the previous functionality feels like it’s playing hide and seek. Doing Windows Update for example, I had to go to desktop view, open IE, press the Alt button to get the old drop down menus back, and then select Windows Update.

New apps

Some of the apps aren’t quite finished. Windows 8 comes with SkyDrive, which is a bit like Dropbox – a file system ‘in the Cloud’. Skydrive shows all the files you’ve uploaded, but when you want to edit say, a Word document, the interface to use Office Live is quite clunky and doesn’t even start to compete with say, Google Docs. Also, because the Windows 8 SkyDrive and Windows 8 Internet Explorer are all full screen experiences, you start getting a bit lost after opening a couple of documents.

Fast

Finally, the performance: I’m running Windows 8 in a virtual machine (perversely it only runs inOracle’s VirtualBox, not Microsoft’s Virtual PC) and it’s very, very fast. It’s faster than running Windows XP in Virtual PC, and just as responsive as my native Windows 7 installation. Bearing in mind the virtual machines only uses 2Mb RAM (half my laptop), I’ve been very impressed.

Summary

In summary, Windows 8 is very different. It’s clearly targeted at consumers more than corporates, and just as much a tablet Operating System as a desktop. It will take a lot of getting used to, and with the refined start menu, although using ‘classic’ apps such as Word or Excel it will feel the same as Windows 7. Perhaps that’s Microsoft’s strategy – it’s like releasing two Operating Systems at the same time for its different sets of users.

The one thing that will drive you annoy you within a couple of hours are those dots! Bring back the egg timer.

tags:

Internet Explorer, Microsoft, Windows 8, application review, cloud, google,

0 Comments

Short term companies

Apr 2, 2012 at 10:36am

Recent news about RIM, the makers of Blackberry mobile handsets (when did people stop calling them mobile phones?) pulling out of the consumer market and maybe even putting themselves up for sale, got me thinking about other high profile, modern companies emerging, peaking and struggling in a short timescale.

Think about companies such as Blockbuster and TomTom.

Blockbuster first opened in the UK in 2009 and was sold to DISH Network last year after filing for Chapter 11.
In the last 5 years, TomTom's share price has gone from €64 to the current price of under €3.5, and regularly falls below €3.

Note that I’m not including short term, boom and bust .com-style companies from 2000, or more recent companies. I’m including companies that created a new market and had great profits for a period of time.

Have markets always been like this?

I hope that RIM recover. They found the ‘killer app’ – email – to drive smartphone usage into 21^st century levels, at which point companies such as Apple and Microsoft improved the experience (mainly by moving the keyboard on to the touchscreen). However with technology become more consumer centric, I don’t think that exclusively targeting the corporate market is a successful move.

tags:

Microsoft, RIM, apple, economy, finance, video,

0 Comments

Why email should be taxed

Mar 30, 2012 at 9:44am

I_love_tax_mug-p168336032186946309z89we_4001

Yesterday’s news about the price of a first class stamp rising to 60p made me think about post’s arch nemesis: email.

Firstly, I still think that paying 60p for a near guarantee delivery the next day is remarkably cheap. To send a birthday card by post is cheaper than driving the card round to anyone who lives more than 1.5 miles away (I’m thinking about the round trip!). In Germany, a first class stamp costs £1.21.

Back to email - everyone seems to be complaining about receiving too much email. On the other hand, I complain about receiving too much post as well, because every item of post seems to be a bill - but that’s different.

Back to email again - and the fact we all seem to receive too much of it. I even get cc’d on social emails now. So my grand idea is... the government should tax email.

The government is losing revenue from falling post volumes: it’s fallen 25% since 2006, and more falls are expected.

All other forms of messaging have a direct or indirect tax - mail, phone calls, mobile phone calls and even text messages have a cost which includes 20% VAT. The only messaging I can think of that don’t include VAT are email and public messaging (Skype - assuming it’s free, Microsoft Messenger or Google Talk equivalents).

So in order to reduce the quantity of emails addressed to me, and to raise more money for government, please start taxing email!!!!

Photo courtesy of Zazzle, where you can buy that lovely mug.

tags:

Europe, Royal Mail, Skype, economy, email, tax,

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Updating the voting system

Digital Media in Scotland

Internet World 2012

Google Drive opinion

The difference between B2B and B2C

3 components for perfect m-commerce

Retail and brand convergence

Windows 8 first review

Short term companies

Why email should be taxed

Bradley Howard

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