A review of usability best practice for UK Universities

I worked in Higher Education for 14 years, so I found Wedcredible's Education Report 2013 extremely interesting, since their survey benchmarked the websites of 10 UK universities to assess their online user experience. With changes over the past few years, with higher UK fees and more demand on universities and FE Colleges to provide a positive experience for home and overseas prospective and current students, from the first and every ongoing touchpoint - it's increasingly important to engage and provide a good experience throughout the customer lifecycle (from enquirer - applicant - student and beyond to alumni). Students or at least their parents are paying customers with 'set expectations' and the HE market is very competitive multi-nationally and domestically, as the government changed regulations and opened up HE provision to more providers such as FE colleges.…

A briefing on the options to turbocharge your Wordpress Blog

With more blogs and company sites hosted on Wordpress today, it's important for marketers and agencies to understand the options available to optimise Page Speed for this key platform. Marketers need to ask providers or their technical team about page download speeds and optimisations used such as content distribution networks (CDNs), caching and code minimisation. In this post I'll explain some of these concepts and give some practical examples of how to implement these features.

The need for a focus on Page Speed improvement

In a digitally connected world, the speed of websites is becoming increasingly important for consumers. In 2006, Amazon.com reported increases in revenue of 1% for every 100ms of page load improvement. Reports by the Aberdeen Group in 2008 stated that a one-second delay in load time…

Customer experience management (CXM) for multichannel commerce - moving from insights to action in 4 steps

In my previous post on practical improvements to CXM, the advice was around creating a path in your organisation that includes customer journeys. This article explains how you can plan a better customer experience for multichannel commerce. By implementing certain steps in your organisation you can overcome the difficulty of creating and implementing actionable insights based on qualitative data. Planning is the process of thinking and organising a group of activities towards desired goals. There is not a convenient one-size fits all solution for structuring your customer experience. It is important however to build a structure that gives you the control and flexibility you need to grow. Most organisations are now looking at the opportunity given by multichannel commerce by including their customers into the brand’s journey. But to improve the customer experience all you need…

CXM vs UX - an introduction

The children’s TV programme Barney may not be the first place you would think to go to for business advice. But watching an episode last weekend (with my 3 year old cousin I must add) I did start thinking about Customer Experience Management (CXM), the new marketing phrase currently doing the rounds. Barney and his cronies were singing a song about how 'everyone is special' and telling the audience 'you’re important' and 'you’re the only one like you'. I sat there with my cousin, (who was by now not sitting but instead jumping on the sofa with excitement) thinking that Barney had inadvertently done what many experts have managed to make a mess of in recent months, and that is define CXM without any marketing hyperbole or ridiculous buzz words. CXM is essentially understanding that everyone is different…

Using customer surveys and feedback data as part of a methodology for improving customer journeys

If you want to improve your customer’s experience, listen to what your customers are saying.

Like any cliché, it is easier said than done... Over-simplification can be misleading and it misses the most important point: what are the drivers for customer to follow the path-to-purchase?

If you want to improve your customer experience you need to be focused on the path or the journey and the reasons behind it. Along the way you may find that some aspects you previously considered as the only way to do things are actually not enough. Marketing automation is not enough.

As shocking as it seems for some of us, many businesses worldwide still prioritise outbound marketing and customer acquisition; by speaking at customers, rather than inbound marketing and retention; actually listening to what customers are saying with the objective to provide a good…

Using Adobe Edge Reflow for RWD

In a recent blog post we wrote an article on the importance of taking a content-centric approach to responsive web design (RWD) in order to future proof your site from the endless stream of new devices of various shapes, sizes and resolutions. In this follow-up MMT Digital’s CTO, James Cannings, talks about new tools to help in this process. James spoke about this approach passionately at Internet World earlier this year. Everybody we speak to (or has responded to our blog posts) agrees with the responsive approach in principle, but there are problems with many implementations... The reality is that many responsive websites are still built with the key breakpoints set at device specific resolutions (e.g. the pixel width of an iPad in landscape mode) rather than setting the breakpoints where your content 'breaks' (or just doesn’t look great on…

Sharing screengrab tools (including how to screen grab a really long post with a single click)

I mark a lot of student marketing assignments. It's good to see students using visuals, but I'm often surprised at how many are still using "Print Screen" to do a full screen grab when what they actually want is just a  section of a page. So here, I share three of the many screen grab tools that I use.

1. Windows Snipping Tool

This is an under utilised tool that comes free with Windows. The screen grabs below are  self explanatory as to the steps involved:

   

With this tool you can highlight text or underline/circle etc:

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If User Experience (UX) is a no brainer then why isn't it higher on the agenda?

There are many tools and resources available to help us ensure that the user experience is improved; whether its enhanced through  user testing, eyetracking research or third-party experience evaluation tools.

Vitamin's Talent's Infographic reminds us of the powerful impact of getting this right since:

97% of websites fail at the UX due to a poor customer experience.86% of users give up as they feel companies don't care.Developers spend 50% of their time fixing issues which could be avoided.

We also included this as an example of a full page interactive infographic.

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Match personas, content changes and stages of the buying cycle to help you nurture your leads

In my last post, Personalisation 101- How to increase customer engagement and conversion rates, I introduced the main types of personalisation available to make your site more customer-focused. In this post I'll expand on this by recommending approaches to segmenting your audience and making sure that your website’s personalisation directly meets your overall business objectives. I will show how to: Use business objectives to define measurable actions Identify the weaknesses in your website Create personas for your core audience types Use a Digital Relevancy Map to plot specific actions to personas and buying stages Create a wireframe to translate this knowledge onto your webpages Test and measure personalisation.

Making actions meet your business objectives

The first step is to lay the foundations for personalisation. To make a business case for personalisation you need a clear map of what personalisation…

Building a website that predicts the future (sorry no lottery numbers included)

You will have heard a lot about responsive web design (RWD) over the last 12 months, everyone seems to have an opinion about this hot topic. This post discusses the issue from a different viewpoint, showing the importance of creating responsive websites for devices yet to be invented. Often posts on responsive web design explain what it is and the benefits of this approach. Here, however, we focus on the best, and in our opinion the only, way to design a responsive website to avoid this problem...

Responsive design has gone the way of the Discman!

As with other web technologies, the more popular and common responsive web design becomes, the more we expect from it. Let’s have a bit of nostalgia to make our point.

For those…