PRWD

Last week’s Conversion Thursday saw over 40 eCommerce Managers from the country’s top brands meet up to network and hear about A/B and MVT testing techniques from two of the top experts in the field. Read more to learn about the top take-away points from the evening.

Our very own Paul Postance kicked off the evening with a talk on why a culture of testing is important and how to embed it in an organisation.

Top Tips:

• Marginal gains all add up
• “It could be done better is not an insult” – let testing take the politics out of optimisation

Matt Althauser, our testing partner from Optimizely and Head of European Sales travelled over from Holland to present an interactive talk on the importance of split testing and lessons learned from over 100,000 A/B and MVT Tests. Having worked on the Obama presidential campaign, Matt used the creative, ranging from inspirational to tear jerking to see which the audience thought would perform best to surprising results.

Top Tip:

• Small details matter. Consider adding dynamic content that builds consistency in the user experience. For example, matching your H1 header tag with the search term that brought the user to your site.

It was a great turn out and fantastic to meet so many people within the industry. The free chilli wasn’t bad either. Thanks to all who provided feedback on the event too, we’ll be putting it into practice at the next event.

Conversion Thursday is a series of free international events. The next Manchester event will be held in conjunction with this year’s Sascon on the 6^th June, with talks focused on Multi-channel attribution.

Sign up now to avoid disappointment as there are only a limited number of tickets available.

If you can’t make it along, follow the action on #CTman or follow us on Twitter

It’s time to wrap up our blog for another year, but just in case you have missed anything, we’ve created this handy list of our most popular posts covering usability best practice, persuasion, optimisation and loads more.

1. What I loved and loathed about Conversion Conference – view
2. 5 of the most influential techniques to persuade visitors to buy – view
3. Applied techniques for conversion rate optimisation – view
4. What are the most influential persuasive techniques for retailers- view
5. Postcode look-up best practice – view
6. Conversion conference slides on e-commerce best practice persuasion – view
7. 7 tips for moderating user research sessions – view
8. On-site survey tools comparison & review – view
9. Mega-menu hints and tips – view
10. Romania versus Estonia: my speaking experiences – view

Hope you find this useful,

Let us know if you had any favourites!

With so many persuasive design techniques available, which are the really influential ones that you should focus attention on? That may be one of your thoughts if you started considering the full spectrum of persuasive design techniques available that you can use to persuade visitors to buy online.

This topic is what I’ll be presenting on at Conversion Conference London 2012 if you’d like to know more. Oh and use PRWD12 to get 15% off the ticket price.

To satisfy my personal desire to continually understand consumers and the decisions they make, I spend a lot (read 100’s of hours) of time either moderating or observing user testing sessions. Based on the fact that around 90% of our clients are retailers, most of these sessions are focussed on understanding buying triggers, motivators and behaviour.

In this article I’ve highlighted 5 of the most influential techniques that persuade visitors to buy online. I have to give credit to www.getmentalnotes.com for providing the clarity of explanations which I have used for each of the techniques. If you’ve hadn’t already I suggest you go and get some –

Quick tip – retailers who are having the most success with these techniques are those that combine multiple of these techniques during their online user journey. See Booking.com & ASOS as 2 exceptional examples of this in practice.

Scarcity

We infer value in something that has limited availability or is promoted as being scarce

Limited Duration

Given a choice between action and inaction, a limited time to respond increases the likelihood that people will buy

Social Proof

We tend to follow the patterns of similar people in new or familiar situations

Commitment & Consistency

Given a choice between action and inaction, a limited time to respond increases the likelihood that people will buy

Limited Choice

We’re more likely to make a choice when there are fewer options

BONUS – Delighters & Personality

We remember and respond favourably to small, un-expected pleasures

This 6th technique is currently extremely under-used amongst retailers. Not many online shopping experiences provide what I would say are un-expected pleasures through the browsing & buying journey. An example of how a retailer can do this is to provide a money off your next order or similar promotion on the order confirmation page. Based on the fact that hardly any retailers bother to do this, instead just providing the standard order details and typically not giving any reason to remember their experience, retailers that do give customers this un-expected but welcome offer make their experience more memorable.

This approach also utilises another technique, the peak-end rule.

Peak-end rule

We judge our past experiences almost entirely by their peaks, pleasant or unpleasant, and how they ended. If you would like to read about 1 site that encapsulate delighters, personality and the peak-end rule, read my article on the art of persuading visitors to buy by Lings Cars.

Useful links

Below are a number of links which you may be interested in having a look at:

• usability & persuasion resources – a full list of best practice articles, case studies & presentation on usability, persuasion & conversion best practice
• Lings Cars and the art of persuading visitors to buy – view article
• Improving conversion with best practice persuasive design from Booking.com – view article
• ASOS and their persuasive checkout experience – view article
• 8 online shopping behavioural traits of men – view article
• 9 valuable techniques to persuade visitors to buy in 2012 – view article

Since 2008 I have been delivering training courses in areas of usability, user experience, user-centered design, e-commerce best practice and persuading visitors to buy. Training courses are either delivered for Econsultancy in both public and in-house training sessions, and I also deliver training directly to PRWD clients.

Brands I have trained in 2011 and 2012

I’ve had the pleasure of training people working at brands including Argos, Mothercare, Homebase, Aviva, Vans, The North Face, Waitrose, River Island, Visit Britain, o2, Dyson, Mencap, Sage, Brother, Schuh and many more over the years, and I thought it would be worthwhile providing an overview of the e-commerce persuasion training that I deliver.

Usability & Persuasion in E-commerce Training Overview

This engaging, audience participation course provides attendees with a comprehensive understanding and appreciation of a wide variety of usability and persuasion techniques. The course presents a detailed look at how blue-chip and multi-channel retailers are using a wide range of persuasive design techniques to improve conversion, encourage visitors to spend more and deliver a more engaging and memorable online experience.

Included are a wealth of links to expert articles, case studies and tools to help retailers understand their visitors, prioritise improvement opportunities and begin implementing and testing site changes to increase key performance indicators.

Why do users abandon the shopping process?

During the early part of this training course I ask attendees “what reasons do you feel that cause users to abandon their online shopping process?”

Below is a curated list of some most common reasons that delegates provide across a number of courses I’ve delivered in 2011 and 2012:

• Slow site speed
• Poor navigation
• Ugly site design
• Poor search facility
• Lack of a clear call to action
• Lack of trust with the brand
• Clumsy form validation
• Lack of visibility of error message
• Too busy, lack of white space
• Poor product photography
• Lack of stock availability
• Not optimised for different platforms
• Lack of clear charges i.e. delivery and returns
• Lack of contact information
• Not providing a guest checkout option
• Lengthy registration forms
• Strict security proceedures in checkout
• Distrust in the site, lack of security assurances

What are the benefits for retailers when improving usability and persuasion?

Having established a solid understanding and awareness of the most common reasons why users abandon the shopping journey, my next question to attendees is “What are the benefits for retailers if they choose to improve the usability and persuasiveness of their experience?”.

Below is again a list of the most common responses provided by delegates in 2011 and 2012:

• Increase sales
• Improve repeat purchases
• Improve average order value
• Improving referrals
• Improve business reputation
• Reduce customer service calls
• Reduce returns
• Reducing costs by doing more online
• Improving conversion rates
• Improve ROI on marketing spend – this interestingly is typically missed by quite a few groups

Training course outline

Below is a summary of what delegates learn about through the course of the intensive training day.

Introduction – challenges

• What are your key challenges?
• Industry insights and statistics
• Key principles which encourage visitors to buy
• The benefits & ROI of improving usability & persuasion in e-commerce

Search, Navigation & Browsing

• How can online shopping replicate and improve the offline experience
• How can the search experience deliver an intuitive, engaging experience
• How to present persuasive triggers through the browsing journey

Product Page

• How to keep visitors in browsing and buying mode
• What are the most influential and persuasive elements to include on your product page
• How to focus visitors attention on what is most important for them and you
• How to encourage visitors to buy more than they intended to

Persuasion

• Overview of designing for persuasion, emotion and trust
• Understanding the most influential persuasive techniques through the online journey
• Learn ways to emotionalise your proposition and empathise with visitors
• Understand the importance of trust and ways to build and maintain it through the online journey

Shopping Bag

• What is the objective of the shopping bag?
• How to remove friction and encourage checkout
• Introduce persuasive techniques to nudge visitors towards checkout
• Advanced techniques which provide a more intuitive experience

Checkout

• Understand the most common and damaging causes of checkout abandonment
• Why to enclose checkout and how best to deliver this
• How to encourage more 1st time customers to become loyal account customers
• Why checkout form usability is crucial to the success of your site
• Why testing & optimisation are the next big thing

What do delegates say about the training course?

Kathryn Charles-Wilson, Web Content Executive at Anchor Trust

I attended Paul’s Econsultancy training course last week and found it not only thoroughly interesting but packed full of real-life practical tips that the whole group could instantly benefit from. Paul’s presentation style is engaging and inclusive, he covered a wealth of topics in depth and encouraged discussion at every stage of the day to ensure we could relate the learning’s back to our own websites and user journeys. Paul clearly has extensive knowledge of all aspects of user-centered design and is really passionate about user experience. I would highly recommend his course.

Amy Weaverm Business Analyst at Javelin Group

Paul is a knowledgeable and enthusiastic e-commerce professional who clearly enjoys sharing his experience via his incredibly useful training courses. Paul has a great way of sharing lots of information in an easy to absorb way and is very inclusive and down to earth, encouraging lots of interaction. I think anyone who attends one of his courses will come away feeling they’ve had a very worthwhile day and with lots of ideas to develop.
Paul is a knowledgeable and enthusiastic e-commerce professional who clearly enjoys sharing his experience via his incredibly useful training courses. Paul has a great way of sharing lots of information in an easy to absorb way and is very inclusive and down to earth, encouraging lots of interaction. I think anyone who attends one of his courses will come away feeling they’ve had a very worthwhile day and with lots of ideas to develop.

Nadim Othman, Director Of European Creative Services at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe

Really appreciated today’s course on e-Commerce run by Paul. Conducted with a great felexibility and fluidity the course was well structured and provided a format that in addition to giving great insight into best practice and principles also acted as a very insightful and completely relevant forum for sharing of experiences. I would thoroughly recommend this course and commend Paul on bringing the learnings to life in such a friendly and well thought out way. Thanks Paul.

Kari Peters, Founder and Director at Factor-e

Paul has the useful ability to personalize his training sessions into practical workshops. Instead of walking out with a notebook full of impractical theory, you walk out equipped with a list of practical plans to apply to your own website. I would attend Paul’s training sessions again, as well as send my staff to keep up-to-date.

Marie Page, Co-Founder & Director at Musicademy

I attended one of Paul’s training days at Econsultancy. Having run an e-commerce company for several years I had already implemented a lot of good practice to our store. However, following the training I made a series of changes to the store, in particular presenting products in “tab” settings and improving the checkout process. Paul was really helpful in recommending changes on a tailored basis to the store and followed up with me after the training – really impressive. The site looks a lot better as a result. Basket abandonment is reduced, and sales are up. There is always more you can do to improve your website, and it was great to access Paul’s tried and tested principles.

Sider Genoveva, PR& Events Manager at Mediafax Group

We were honored to have Paul Rouke as trainer for a Usability workshop we have organized at SEM Days 2012. He is an outstanding professional, with a very good knowledge of e-commerce usability, persuasion and conversion. Paul insights are valuable and his message is essential to those who want make money from online business. The feedback was extremely positive and many participants congratulate us on bringing such a professional for this workshop. Paul is one of the most approachable and collaborative professionals I have ever met. He really took the time to make sure people got what they needed for a positive learning experience”

Further training details

If you are interested in learning what brands like Argos, Mothercare, Homebase, Waitrose, River Island, Visit Britain, o2, Dyson and Mencap have over the last few years, below is how you can come along to one of the training courses:

Option 1 – In-house training for 8-12 people
Call me in the office on 0161 228 0585 or email me at paulrouke at prwd.co.uk.

Option 2 – Public training with Econsultancy
Visit the e-commerce persuasion training page on Econsultancy to see upcoming dates and register with them.

You’ll all be familiar with Mega Menus, in fact a majority of the retailers we work with now have them, but there is a great deal of variation in the quality that we see. Are retailers getting it right? How could they be improved? And if you haven’t introduced a mega menu, but are thinking about it where should you start, what should you consider? In this brief introduction we will offer a few hints and tips and point you in the direction of some great posts for further research.

The business case for improving your navigation

If you sell online your users need to be able to navigate to products intuitively with minimum effort. Endless unstructured lists of links that make it harder for users to find what they’re looking for will not help users checkout. While users may persevere to find a product that they set out to find, users are less likely to bother to find complementary products. So as well as harming conversion, poor navigation will hurt your average order value.

Use Categories

Mega menus allow you to structure choices into panels or sub-areas and illustrate these choices. Therefore selecting appropriate categories is of crucial importance. Categories also give you the opportunity to cater for different types of user with different priorities.

Order – Alphabetical or Top Selling Categories?

When arranging the menu items a key question emerges. Should the links always be in alphabetical order or should your best selling categories be promoted for maximum exposure. In some of our recent moderated usability test session we found that some users expected items to be order alphabetically while others where happy to scan small groups of menu items and often selected key categories that were placed near the top, in particular ‘New In’ categories.

In the example above from Surfdome they have selected some key ‘New In’ categories, followed by the full list of categories in alphabetical order. In further columns they provide users with more options if the main categories don’t grab the user or they’re looking for a different way to browse. I guess this leaves us with another “it depends” answer and so as always we’ll have to say, “Test it and see.”

And finally, make navigating easier, not harder!

It shouldn’t have to be said really, but you’d be surprised how often simplicity is undervalued. Multiple columns should not mean more space to bombard users with links, but a clearly ordered easy to scan

Further Reading

This post only covers the tip of the iceberg. If you’re driven to read more, here are some good places to start:

• 25 ecommerce mega menus dissected – Matt Clarke on Econsultancy
• Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well – Jakob Nielsen
• Mega-Menus Gone Wrong – Jakob Nielsen
• Designing Drop-Down Menus: Examples and Best Practices – Smashing Network
  

Through our on-going consumer research, particularly for our multi-channel retail clients such as Speedo, Lakeland, Molton Brown, AllSaints and Monsoon Accessorize, we are finding that postcode finders are now becoming almost expected amongst consumers.

Thankfully many retailers and other brands that require visitors to provide their address details are featuring a postcode finder. But, and this is a big but, how postcode finders are implemented can have a major impact on the user experience for visitors.

Why invest in a postcode look-up facility?

Postcode finders should have 2 clear objectives that they should do exceptionally well:

1. Provide visitors with a quick and intuitive way to find their address without having to type it all out
2. Provide the business with a more consistent and robust database of customer address details

As the ever informative and valuable Graham Charlton (view his Twitter profile) has recently detailed in this excellent post over at Econsultancy ‘Is postcode entry making your customers abandon the checkout?’, there is still plenty of work for businesses to do in order to achieve these 2 objectives.

Postcode look-up best practice tips

Based on the user insights that we continually witness, coupled with what we see working well for both our clients and other industry leading retailers, below are the 5 most important best practice tips and techniques to make this stage in the user journey intuitive and effortless.

• Postcode look-up should accept entries with and without spaces – users hate being restricted when completing form fields, especially on something like this which seems very standard
• Address fields should be auto hidden at the start to reduce the amount of fields users have to contemplate completing – but there should be a link directly next to or under the find my address button to ‘enter address manually’
• If you don’t ask for the house name or number along with the postcode, when presenting back a list of addresses for user selection, ensure users don’t have to scroll up or down to discover
• Once users have entered their postcode and chosen their address, they shouldn’t have to then specify other required fields like their county, for instance
• Remote or moderated user testing is the most insightful way to understand how your postcode look-up facility is genuinely performing from a user perspective
• For a variety of reasons including issues finding or entering their address, users should always have immediate access to customer service contact details within checkout, including clarity on opening times to manage expectations

Checkout best practice advice

If you’d like to read more about how tips and techniques for improving checkout experiences, we’re written a number of best practice articles which provide clear tips and advice.

• Answer user questions = increase conversions – View Article
• Persuasive checkout best practice from ASOS – View Article
• How ASOS, Lakeland and Speedo increase new customer conversion rate – View Article
• Increasing new customer conversion rate – View Article

Would you like to understand all of your visitors’ checkout frustrations?

Postcode look-up issues and frustrations are just 1, albeit it very important, element of checkout experiences. Much of our time is spent helping retailers gain a true understanding of how their consumers and prospects experience their checkout – they typically know what % of visitors are abandoning their checkout process and where, but they want to know why.

The following graph of results from the Reducing Customer Struggle 2012 Report from Econsultancy highlight just how important retailers see the whole area of understanding why visitors abandon.

If you fall in to this category, and you would like to join the likes of Speedo, Monsoon Accessorize, AllSaints, Lakeland and Molton Brown in working with ourselves (we’re really nice people to work with too, honestly) please do get in touch on 0161 228 0585.

A few months ago I received an email out of no-where from Genoveva Stanitchi, Events Manager at 2Parale. Genoveva was planning a two day conference in Romania for 2Parale, and I was invited to be one of the international speakers delivering workshops to delegates.

Not knowing anything about 2Parale, and wondering whether my memories of Hostel 2 could become a reality if I take up this opportunity, my concerns were soon dismissed when it became clear that 2Parale are the largest affiliate network in Romania. They also had Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder of SEOMoz, lined up amongst others, so I was sure going to be in good company.

With the 2 day conference SEMDays having a strapline of ‘All about SEO, PPC & Social Media’, I was privileged to have been identified as the suitable international trainer to deliver a workshop on e-commerce usability, persuasion and conversion – topics which no other speakers would be talking about in any depth. I must say I was relishing delivering the training course, especially knowing that I would be bringing a different flavour of drink to this Romanian party.

But will Romanians be as introverted as Estonians…

This was my next area of consideration. In October 2011 I was invited to deliver a one day training course to marketers in Estonian for Best Marketing, on a similar subject of e-commerce usability, persuasion and conversion best practice. The lack of feedback and perceived engagement from the audience that day was tough going to say the least. I had to seek re-assurance from the event organiser during lunch that the audience could understand my northern accent and that they had turned up to the right training course.

I was that intent on getting delegates to engage and participate that during the afternoon, I really put the wind up them. At 2.30 I said “I have seen that many of you have been making notes during the course of the training. What I will do at 3.30 is ask each of you to share amongst us all the top 2-3 things that you have learnt so far today.” Of course I was keeping my fingers crossed that they hadn’t been drawing cartoons or making a list of what they need to buy on their way home from the supermarket.

The look on their faces was a picture. I can imagine what they were thinking, “who is this evil man, I didn’t sign up for this ordeal”.

At 3pm I really turned the screw by reminding them that in 30 minutes I’ll be asking each of them to share their key learning’s. I did expect some walk-outs but to my surprise they all stayed on.

At 3.30 and with over 40 people in the room, it wasn’t realistic to give everyone time to share their thoughts, so I said that I won’t be asking everyone for their feedback. On the one hand I could feel the sigh of relief, although this then changed to a feeling of ‘will he won’t he’ as the delegates did their best to not make eye contact or appear keen to share their views.

To my complete surprise, after a lady near the front tentatively put her hand up and started sharing her key learnings, this suddenly injected confidence amongst others in the audience. Over the next 10 minutes I was relieved that delegates had been learning plenty, and I was particularly satisfied when a guy at the back of the room, who had looked the most dis-interested through the day, put his hand up and spent the next 5 minutes sharing this big list of things he had learnt.

They say appearances can be deceptive, and this sure was the case during that day.

So how could I get Romanians warmed up and participating?

So my challenge at SEMDays was to get the audience participating from the start – I couldn’t go through another training session wondering whether delegates could understand me or had come in to the wrong workshop. I turned to Twitter to ask my followers if they had any recommendations, and thankfully there was one in particular…

This worked perfectly – to get all 60+ delegates participating I asked “hands up who has ever bought online?”.

Included in my training slides early on were photos and quotes from Pulp Fiction. I was prepared to skip these slides if most of the delegates hadn’t seen this film, but I didn’t. I got the impression this is one very popular film amongst Romanians (for what its worth I love it. “Bring out the gimp” = priceless).

For audience participation, Romanians trump Estonians

What followed was a really enjoyable, interactive workshop. In terms of their willingness to take part, ask questions and respond to questions I was asking of them, Romanians are certainly more confident and open that Estonians.

A dogs got personality, personality goes a long way

Part of my workshop looked at personality and how brands can introduce personality and emphathise more effectively with their target audience. The workshop also used content from my e-commerce usability, persuasion and conversion best practice training course which I deliver for PRWD clients and for Econsultancy.

I recently delivered a presentation for Econsultancy at their Digital Shorts session in Manchester, and below are my slides which feature some of this content.

Five presentation tips for presenting in a foreign country

Based on my experiences below are 5 tips if you are presenting in a foreign country, particularly Estonia and Romania.

• Ask for a show of hands at the beginning, ideally with a question which means most, if not all, people will put their hand up
• Reference iconic UK or US films which participants will more than likely have watched
• Unless people are actually leaving during your presentation, don’t worry that they don’t appear to be engaged – chances are they are very engaged but they don’t show this
• Encourage participants to discuss some of the key issues in their country that relate to what you are presenting on – this can lead to quite heated debate amongst the audience which can be great fun
• Share links to useful content, ideally using short links (I use the excellent Bit.ly) – it seems like people love to have things to do after the training
• Don’t do death by powerpoint, or more precisely death by bullet points – this of course applies to UK audiences too
• .. and a bonus tip – don’t pass up the opportunity to go out drinking with the event organisers. On saying this, taking part in drinking games at 12.30am with a 5am taxi to the airport was great at the time but not such a great idea on the flight back to Manchester

If you’re anything like me you’ll have used websites on your mobile that are basically fine, except for when you try and click a link or button. Often the main reason for this is that tapping a link with your fingers will never be as precise as clicking with a mouse.

Striking a balance

A key question will be should you have a separate mobile site and simply leave the desktop version as it is or, or should your current desktop site be tweaked to be more mobile-friendly. This will vary on a case-by-case basis depending on your priorities and the type of visitors your website attracts. The best place to start is to have a look at some industry guidelines.

Recommendations

Above are some industry recommendations for target sizes for links and buttons. As you can see Apple are the most generous to chubby-fingered techies like me, recommending 44×44 pixels. Nokia on the other hand recommend a daintier 28×28, with Microsoft hedging their bets in the middle.

Google Redesign vs. Bing examples

Google’s recent re-design has included a set of buttons for selection that are really easy to click and absolutely finger friendly. As you can see the links are large and have icons. Not only that, there is a generous amount of space around them meaning that there is less chance of clicking a nearby link by accident.

In comparison, the Bing example above is less finger-friendly. With links hidden in drop-down menu and with only a small gap between them. In fact the drop-down over the main listings could easily lead to attempting to select shopping and hitting the top link in the search results beneath.

This type of thinking leads to important tweaks to even the simplest areas of the site, such as the pagination links. Below are screenshots from the two sites that clearly shows difference. This attention to detail shows that Google have clearly taken target-size and mobile platforms into consideration in their latest design.

Manchester Uni. Wi-fi Login page – Example

For the last nine months while I was studying I have been regularly furious at the design of the Manchester University wireless login screen and I’ve finally found my opportunity to vent my anger … except that it now appears they have fixed the main problem! And while this cruelly robs me of my chance for a little closure, at least they’re making it better.

In the screenshot above you can see that in order to gain access to the login fields you need to check the checkbox (highlighted). Until recently the last three words of the sentence were in fact a link to the Acceptable use policy. As you can see they have now placed this link above, which is a major improvement. It was a common occurrence for me to attempt to select the checkbox on my iPhone and ending up selecting the link instead. However much I wanted to read their acceptable use policy in full, it was just never the right time!

However the improvement only goes so far. If you remember back to the size recommendations before there was a basic agreement that between 28×28 and 44×44 was a finger-friendly target size.

However the checkbox here is still only 10x10px. Considering space really isn’t an issue on this page, an even greater improvement would be to have a large button with a call to action, such as ‘Accept and Log-in’.

Best practice tips

So to recap, what have we learned?

• A finger is significantly less precise than a mouse
• Space around targets is important. Placing links or buttons too close together will frustrate users.
• There are widespread applications for this type of finger-friendly improvement, even down to the spacing of the pagination links.
• Why not make some simple changes to spacing around links and split test it? Be sure to check your mobile conversion rate for improvements.

Further Reading

This article on finger-friendly design was particularly helpful while writing this post.

Our Ferbruary Newsletter below provides an update of our recent work with clients Hitachi and AllSaints, along with some useful links to a recent presentation I have delivered on conversion optimisation.

In-house Training with Hitachi

I’ve recently had the pleasure of delivering our usability and user experience training course to the Hitachi team in Manchester. The full press release can be seen here, which includes comments that I’m really proud of such as this one below.

“I searched high and low for a reputable company to provide guidance and training to my team in order to further bolster our capabilities around ‘User Centric Design’. I became aware Paul’s company PRWD and was immediately impressed with the level of expertise and reference able collateral on show on their website. It was a no brainer for me; being local was also a major plus point as there is clearly a lack of expertise in this field north of London. Paul proved invaluable on the day as he led us through ‘idea after idea’ in which we could improve our services to our clients. His knowledge of the subject was clear for all to see and his approach to training very professional.”

Taz Ali, Creative Services Manager

Remote User Testing for AllSaints

Also in the last month we have been working with the AllSaints team to deliver a range of invaluable user insights, using our partner company Whatusersdo to provide the remote testing videos. The AllSaints e-commerce platform is developed and maintained in-house, and no sooner had we presented back the findings and recommended user experience improvements, they set about starting to plan in development time to. At the time of writing the first site improvements are due live in the next few days, with more to follow in early March. Below are some comments from AllSaints on the project.

“I have been very impressed with the user testing service PRWD have provided, from initiation through to delivery.

The insights that we gained from the users have been valuable, but what made the project a particular success was what Paul brought to the table. Without his considerable experience we would never have created the right scenarios for the users, or indeed have been able to glean the right information from the videos.”

Stuart McMillan, E-commerce Operations Manger at AllSaints

Lings Cars and the art of persuading visitors to buy

This truly is a fascinating site, one that generates sales of £35m per year, yet on first viewing is one of the most insane, wacky and unbelievable site designs that you will find.

I’ve recently published an article on Econsultancy examining how they employ a wide range of persuasive techniques to deliver their proposition and engage visitors for conversion. The comments are well worth viewing too, which include some extremely valuable insights from Ling Valentine who owns and runs the website.

Presentation – Applied Techniques for Conversion Rate Optimisation

I’ve recently spoke at the monthly Northern User Experience session, with a talk dedicated to sharing customer insights and some performance improvements for some of the main conversion rate optimisation techniques we use when working with our clients, particularly retailers.

View full details and the slides for Applied Techniques for Conversion Rate Optimisation

These are my slides from my talk at Norther User Experience in Manchester on 6th February 2012. They include extensive notes which can be seen if you view the presentation slides on Slideshare.

I must say this was one of my most enjoyable presentations I have delivered, and if you would like to know more about the group please visit the Northern User Experience website.