Posts Tagged 'UX'

 

Another year has passed – and what a year it was. You certainly kept us busy (and we love that you did!) While it’s fresh in our mind here’s a taster of a few of the things we got up to in an eventful 12 months…

Grew so big we had to take over another floor in the building – big hello to all the new faces and talent who joined our ranks.

Launched Pancentric Labs – a shiny new facility totally kitted out for all your user research and testing needs.

Bolstered our clients up the Search rankings, hired some fantastic additions to the team and launched PancentricSearch. Tweet them @PancentricSEM.

Found out we won The X Factor pitch at 5.30pm on a Friday – you can guess what happened next. Our only complaint is it wasn’t Simon Cowell who delivered the news.

Created a learning experience for kids that was nothing short of magical, launching a series of next generation interactive apps for Disney Create.

Took a breath of fresh airline – Scandinavian Airlines welcomed us on-board for social media campaigning.

‘How musical are you?’ struck a chord with the nation – 50,000 people took part in the first 24hrs alone.  Since then we worked on a further 5 BBC LabUK projects.

Popped champagne corks when Petplan won the Best New Media award for our ‘12 Plays of Christmas’ campaign.

Continued to pick up awards and press coverage left, right and centre for the multiplatform interactive game we designed and built for Kew Gardens.

Thanked everyone who voted for us in the COGS awards – we won 3!

Hit a home run with RSA’s ‘Big hitters’ campaign – overall sales increase 26%.

Converted Facebook ‘Likes’ at a rate of 75 fans per second for Gear4′s Angry Birds campaign.

Helped Partnership win the ‘Most Outstanding Information Innovation in the UK’  for the Paying for Care portal.

Supported Bluewater’s biggest marketing initiative in the past 12 years – building a web presence for brand new events venue Glow.

Introduced Zurich’s broker engagement programme to dynamic, preference drive e-communications paving the way for a major campaign coming this year.

Sported some mighty displays of facial hair (well at least the boys did anyway) for Movember and raised a bob or two for a great cause.

Welcomed 3 Pancentric babies to the world, toasted 3 weddings and 2 engagements.

Witnessed the most spectacular dance off ever at the Pancentric Christmas party (if you ask nicely we might just show you the video).

Watched Santa Dipper make his annual appearance at the Christmas party – who knew Santa spends the rest of the year moonlighting as a developer?

Worked hard (blood, sweat and tears some might say), played hard, loved what we did and ready to do it all again.

Happy New Year – Look forward to working with you.

World Usability Day is all about making our world better, simpler and more user friendly. This year the theme is Communication, which is something we at Pancentric think about all the time. Whether we reach our audiences through websites, social media, traditional advertising, on the phone or face to face, we are entering into a dialogue with them – but are they listening, and do they understand our message? How far is the online world removed from the end-user? Are we talking the same language as our customers?

WHAT WE DID

We wanted to know if the jargon that we use every day without thinking is actually understood by the man in the street. Armed with a camera, we went out to Borough Market in London to ask a few questions – some fun, some more serious.

WHAT WE LEARNT

Social media
Some of the results were surprising. Not one of the 19 people asked said that they used Twitter, with some of them airing very negative views about the micro blogging service. However, Facebook remains ever popular among all age groups, with the majority of people knowing what it means to Poke somebody (even if only 5 of 19 asked had actually done so). Geo-location tools such as Gowalla, Foursquare and Facebook Places may have not penetrated the masses yet.
When asked “What is the difference between social media and social networking?” those who weren’t immediately baffled by the question (around half) were able to come up with reasonable distinctions and definitions.

Online jargon
A few years ago, Google went onto the streets of New York to ask the simple question “What’s a browser?” The lack of knowledge displayed by the people they spoke to surprised everybody in the digital industry. We repeated this experiment in Borough Market, and found a similar range of answers.  Half of the people we spoke to thought Google was a browser (they were not talking about Google Chrome), and others mentioned Yahoo, AOL and BT.
Our respondents were similarly baffled at the question “What’s a URL?”

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?

We use jargon all the time.
Why should people know what a URL or a browser is? When we think of communicating to customers in the online space we naturally think of the messages we put onto our websites, social media, email marketing and so on. However, the customer experience has many touch points, all of which combine to create the view your audience has of you. One of the most commonly seen touch points, no matter how hard we try to ensure everything runs smoothly, is error messages. The following examples are likely to be seen on all of our websites by countless people every day – and the message is not user friendly:

The Guardian’s otherwise good website is let down by this message which many users will find hard to interpret.

Google’s “Page not found” message is a classic example of an error written in technical language.

The BBC shows how error messages can be designed to be understood by all.

Social media needs to be more compelling
It may not be enough to have “Follow us on Twitter” in the corner of your screen without a very good reason for your customers to do so.  Companies that have been successful in the social media space take the time to interact with their audiences, and use it as a channel for two way communication – a visible, accessible customer service channel. Companies who use Twitter and Facebook to push their products without engaging their followers risk at best apathy, at worst a PR disaster.

CONCLUSION

The recent “Multichannel Customer Experience Survey” report from Econsultancy states that “an increasing number of online and offline customer touch points are making it even more difficult for organisations to ensure a consistent cross-channel customer experience.”  Only 32% of the companies they surveyed said they have the ability to give customers a joined-up experience.
World Usability Day’s Communication theme is a useful reminder to us that dialogue with our audiences must always be a two-way experience. We must be careful to not only deliver a coherent and cohesive message across all channels, but to make use of the ever-increasing ways our users can speak to us – and listen.
Our Vox pop interviews were intended as a fun way to explore this theme, and reminded us that it’s amazing what we can learn when we go out and engage with our audience.