Six ways to improve online experience
There has been much discussion and comment recently about the quality of online customer experiences. Even small companies, run by specialists in their chosen field, need to provide a good online experience if they are to capture a share of the rapidly growing online spend.
Here’s my novice's guide to improving the quality of your online experience...
Job search is latest .mobi launch
Recruitment agency PFJ has launched a version of its job search platform for mobile phone devices.
The new website is available on the .mobi top-level domain at pfjjobs.mobi and allows handheld users to interrogate the company's database of vacancies.
Usability research attracts more than 600 participants
Those interested in online usability issues are encouraged to take part in the user experience survey which we are running in association with behavioural research consultancy Bunnyfoot.
Yahoo! intros content separation tag
Yahoo! has introduced a new tag that lets site owners make their core content more visible in search results.
The robots-nocontent tag allows webmasters to define areas of a page that are merely navigational elements or other secondary constructs that should be ignored by search spiders.
Feature filtering - what is it and why do you need it?
Providing effective feature filtering - allowing users to narrow search results and / or navigate through a website by selecting multiple product features - can make a big difference to customer experience.
Many people will only use the search option on an e-commerce site as a last resort, and most prefer to navigate through a site using links, because this requires less mental effort.
comScore metrics re-jigged to acknowledge AJAX
Web stats auditor comScore has introduced a new 'visits' metric to augment its 'page views' tracking after conceding its previous system unfairly represented Yahoo!
Yahoo! protested in December after comScore data placed it behind MySpace for pages viewed. Yahoo!'s increasing use of AJAX means users create fewer page views because tasks can be completed without reloading pages.
Interview: Persuasion guru BJ Fogg
BJ Fogg directs research and design at Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab , and is pretty much The Don of captology - the study of how computers can be used to influence people's behaviour.
We asked him a few questions about how internet marketers could be using persuasion techniques more effectively, as well as some of the more scary implications for individual web users.
Accessibility - are 'trustmarks' the answer?
Accessibility group Segala’s recently-launched partner programme has been adopted by a number of agencies in recent weeks, which can now award ‘trustmarks’ to accessible websites.
Online charities and Web 2.0 - interview with Dean Russell
In summer 2006 E-consultancy published a report called Online Charity Benchmarks, which was compiled by iConcertina, a London-based new media agency with a focus on the charity sector.
We talked to iConcertina's Dean Russell to further investigate the study and the drivers behind it...
Your chance to improve usability standards
I have recently returned from an international standards meeting in Washington (and that is a story in itself – I nearly had to fly without my laptop and Treo – aargh!) where we were discussing the revision of the human centred design standard ISO 13407.
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
