The ebook covers:

- The Golden Rule of mobile websites
- The one simple thing you can do to make life easier for your mobile users
- Why mobile can be the start of something better

So why not download the ebook and get cracking?

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Last week, our intern, Charlotte gave me a very interesting example: While she was working in retail outlets, she noticed shoppers generally are attracted to designs with patterns rather than plain ones. Retail outlets know this, that’s why most of them spread out the patterned designs so shoppers will not be overwhelmed by choices. Same reason why we do not design a page that contains too much information.

Ever wonder why it is so fun to shop in IKEA? Why you will spend hours in a furniture shop when you have a whole house furnished already? Yes, it’s user experience. IKEA very smartly designed their outlets to be a one-way street. Apart for a few not so obvious short cuts, customers are forced to move from the entrance. Freedom of choice is good, but sometimes restricting them will let users experience something they normally would not and this reduces any error shoppers make in taking a wrong turn and missing the product they are searching for. Thinking of error prevention from the digital realm yet? Of course this alone does not make it a good experience. IKEA also has showrooms of bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms to show shoppers how nicely their wares will fit into their homes. Need a measuring tape? Cart? IKEA has disposable measuring tapes, shopping bags, carts everything conveniently located in IKEA stores along the path. Do you see Flexibility and efficiency of use from the Ten Usability Heuristics at work? Furthermore, most of IKEA’s furniture is customizable. It does not get any better than this, you can remove a drawer, make more space in your wardrobe, put in another shelf. IKEA products cater to different needs using the same modular design concept.

Sure IKEA has billions of dollars and with fun furniture to work with, but what about other types of retail? When was the last time you went to the supermarket with a kid? Ever wonder where kids disappear to before suddenly reappearing with a box of chocolate of candy, nagging you to buy them? Thanks to the supermarket shelving, their candies and chocolates are at a height that our sweet tooth friends can easily get their little hands on. Yes, where you shelf the products greatly affect who has access to them. Yes, this can relate to accessibility testing in the digital realm where we test the usability for all types of users.

Notice how much user experience principles and guidelines can be applied to the physical world? Retail outlets regardless of size and product should always think from the shoppers’ perspective, and a lot really do, to provide a good user experience. Keep a look out the next time you go shopping and try to identify some UX principles that are implemented to the physical realm. You will be surprised.

2013, The Year Digital Business Goes Mainstream

By Adam Sefton, Global Chief Strategy Officer, from our London office.

It might be quite strange to consider digital, a term and group of technologies we are all now so familiar with, as something that has not yet gone mainstream. However, the truth is that digital so far has been largely ignored by the wider enterprise and left to the attentions of technology and marketing departments. Chief Technology Officers, reporting into CFOs, with the remit to keep costs down and, perhaps if they’re lucky, boost operational efficiency and provide cost savings. And Marketing Directors, tasked with using technology to create spectacle; digital as a ’360 campaign’, to engage with consumers across as many touch points as possible.

But treating digital as simply a method of saving costs, or a novel way of creating campaigns, doesn’t achieve the strategic value that is on offer. The truth is that digital represents a new way of doing business. Tied up in the culture and values of the internet are opportunities to make your business work better, to create new methods of distribution, R&D and product development, to use digital innovation as a strategic advantage. To do this requires a different way of thinking. It requires an acceptance that in an era defined by the flux of new technology, a 3 year strategy will be out of date in 12 months. You need flexibility, you need to hypothesise and experiment, and you need to be comfortable with the idea of being wrong the first time if it means you’re right the second and third times. Strategies that can evolve, that can be influenced by learnings taken from implementation, that can find a home in organisations willing to be flexible, will see great success in the coming years.

And we’re beginning to see evidence of this change. According the Gartner, by 2015 20% of organisations will have a Digital Business Officer. PWC’s 2012 Digital IQ Survey revealed that top performing organisations were almost 80% more likely to have a Chief Executive that was an active champion of digital. Those that understand that digital has the power to redefine their whole business, and not just their technology and marketing departments, are the ones set to achieve the greatest success across 2013.

Ecosystem land grabs reduce interoperability

By Rob Curran, Strategist, from our London office

In the past decade or so, companies such as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google, have been quietly building environments (sometimes referred to as ‘walled gardens’) in which to house users. Each of these companies have launched their own takes on services such as online music lockers, document storage systems, media stores, and a slew of other assorted web apps. Although cloud computing is by no means a new concept (Steve Jobs even described the benefits of keeping personal documents and data in the cloud back in 1997) it has recently been increasing the speed and fervour with which these proprietary ecosystem are being built.

2012 has been an year in which these ecosystems have matured, but most are still used intermittently, with users dipping in and out of each company’s applications and cobbling together a set services made up of offerings from a number of different web companies. 2013 promises to be a year in which consumers are increasingly pressured to choose one company, and swear allegiance to a single ecosystem. Facebook, Google, and Amazon will continue to fight it out to keep users within their own environments in an attempt to have customers manage their entire digital lives using only their own services. During this ‘landgrab’ period, where companies vie for ecosystem dominance, those who have yet to choose a team sometimes lose out, and in 2013 many users may find their digital activities hampered as interoperability becomes a rare luxury.

There have been several instances in 2012 in which the convenience of users has been sidelined as companies fight to keep users from migrating from one ecosystem to another. One such example is Instagram recently disabling the ability to view Instagram photos through Twitter’s card function. The move is intended to ‘encourage’ users to commit to using Instagram (and its recently launched web presence) for all their web photo needs. This will only become more frequent as web platforms seek to squash interoperability – ultimately duplicating each other’s features and promoting proprietary environments in the name of monetisation.

In 2013 web companies will continue to encourage users to jump ship and wholeheartedly commit to their services over those of a competitor – some will be subtle with their encouragement, others heavy-handed. While each individual ecosystem gets better at serving user needs, the fight to lock down users means that using a wide selection of services will undoubtedly become more difficult.

Marketing as Digital Services

By Shaun Rowland, General Manager of Reading Room’s Melbourne Office

Brands will develop more digital services that provide customers with real utility and benefit. The pioneer of this trend was Nike with its Nike + running servicewhich fulfilled a genuine consumer need which resulted in a deeper level ofengagement with its audience than could ever be achieved with traditional advertising. The application has become a ‘must have’ application for runners worldwide and connects them to Nike in a meaningful way. Other brands such as Chipotle and Dominos have developed apps which make the process of ordering their products as easy and as transparent as possible.

Brands will release apps which help consumers improve their lives in a way that is consistent with the brand proposition – BUPA in Australia provides an app which helps its audience make healthy choices when shopping for food. The first wave of branded mobile apps floundered because they didn’t effectively answer the golden consumer question: what’s in it for me? As always, what makes a digital service successful is uncovering real insight into audience behaviour and needs and then providing a service which consumers find genuinely beneficial. Brands stand a great deal to gain by becoming a trusted service provider to their audiences not least the huge amount of behaviour data that can be mined from such services which can be used to target content and offers more precisely.

Service design: User experience design breaks out of the screen

By Tom Voirol, Head of User Experience, from our Sydney office.

Over the last 15 years, we have seen digital communications agencies slowly catch up with the realisation that they need to apply user-centric design principles and methodologies to the way they develop user interactions. Now, increasingly, clients are demanding that user experience design (or UXD) be no longer confined to just digital interactivity, but that it encompass all aspects of the – well – user experience.

Businesses and forward-thinking government agencies increasingly understand digital communications to be an enabler for true, strategic business results. As a consequence, they are more and more trusting their digital agency to extend their scope beyond the interfaces of websites, smartphone and tablet apps, and shape the full 360° experience, including all offline touch points.  When a customer has received your email and decides to visit the showroom, will you recognise them and treat them accordingly? How can you acknowledge a pre-existing offline relationship when a customer starts using your app? How seamless does the entire multi-channel purchasing journey feel to your users? These are the kinds of questions the discipline of service design helps answer.

Service design makes use of many of the same techniques as digital user experience design, including user research, personas and prototyping. Applying them to the offline context, however, makes even more obvious the need to have a user experience strategy that is derived from and aligned with your organisational strategy. Giving your digital agency a seat at the strategy table is a great start to ensuring your customers are delighted, regardless how they choose to interact with you.

Headset launch will mark the next evolution in augmented reality

By Jenni Allen, Strategist, from our Singapore office.

Augmented reality (AR) headsets will generate heightened publicity of AR in 2013, with the projected launch by Google and other manufacturers.

Whilst AR has become more prevalent due to the proliferation of smartphones, its application has remained limited because to date it has been enabled via software applications. The launch of AR hardware onto the consumer market will, therefore, mark the biggest step in AR since it was initiated into manufacturing processes in the 1990s.  The headsets will therefore enable usage like self navigation and the ability to view a person’s social profile as soon as you look at them.

While the price points of the headsets will not enable mass uptake, it will enhance business and consumer understanding of AR potential and stimulate increased creation and demand, primarily of mobile applications. We will, therefore see a surge in the number of businesses experimenting with AR elements in their mobile marketing.

Whilst Europe has been the innovator in AR, here in Asia, the market has grown fast and the opportunities are immense, particularity when you consider the scale of the smartphone market within the region.

Whilst marketing usage will be the most popular application of AR in 2013, most interesting will be the continual growth of AR in e-commerce and m-commerce as a method of product engagement and integration within the consumer purchasing cycle. Indeed, in October, China based e-commerce company Yihaodian announced its plans to launch 1000 virtual supermarkets across the country. This move will soon see others follow suit.

The Humanisation of Content Creation

By Adam McLeod, Project Director, from our Canberra office.

Yesterday, we uploaded 8.1 million photos an hour to Facebook, 78 hours of video a minute to YouTube, and we sent 294 BILLION emails. And that’s not counting all the check-ins, tweets, friend requests, Yelp and Amazon reviews, and pins on Pinterest.

The sheer volume of information we create, upload and save is growing faster than the majority of us can comprehend.  We’ve created autonomous tools to try to filter, organise, and present this content; we create favourites and lists, use apps like Flipboard to aggregate our interests, and rules to control the flow of email.  Yet despite all this many users feel like they are drowning in the sea of content being pushed or pulled their way.

But where do your potential users go when they need specific and clear information to make a decision about your product or service? There are lots of ways for them to engage with you on social networks, but the top choice for information seekers is still your website. In a recently released report , 89.3% of potential purchasers went directly to the company website.

What’s happened is the web has gotten better at making data. Way better, as it turns out. And while algorithms have gotten better at helping us organise it, they aren’t keeping up with the massive tide of real-time data.

So how do you sort the chaff from the wheat, so to speak?

In 2013 we see a trend back towards the humanisation of content creation and curation.

There is a driving need for those content superstars in your organisation to carefully craft content for your website or social media channels that is sharp, to the point and well-structured to stand out from the crowd .  Check out thischeeky Google ad on the challenges your users can have finding what they need when the content authoring has been left to an amateur!. Have your people understand your users through quality research and analytics, learn how they like to be spoken to and how they like to consume information, and then leverage that understanding to your advantage to take the crown as being the source of quality information that truly engages and directly addresses your audience.

2013, the year Responsive Design is understood

By Darren Cousins, Senior User Experience Developer, from our Manchester office.

We’ve heard it many times now that the mobile internet is going to be huge. We are all agreed on this. However, how we approach this is only just being understood and for the most part is still often mis-understood.

The terms “Adaptive” and “Responsive” are so closely linked in the English language that it’s hard to describe one without using the other; a simpler understanding is required.  Adaptive is what we are capable of achieving right now, mostly layout and, if we are extremely diligent, adapting content to the users’ needs based on solid research. However, squashing images and moving things around the screen is NOT a mobile solution.

The truth is that real responsive is not yet possible. For this we need real time evaluation of a user’s bandwidth and to change the page based on the quality of that bandwidth.  Initial discovery research shows that bandwidth conditions fluctuate wildly, and do not directly correlate with the type of device being used, thus this final condition for true responsive may yet lead to more technical hurdles.

So if Adaptive design is not always desirable, and Responsive design is not yet truly possible, what other choices do we have?

The full desktop version?

Unfortunately, this is just not fit for purpose on mobile devices, and in fact is not at all what a user expects. To illustrate, in the commercial world of retail, when I walk into a Metro version of a supermarket, I wouldn’t expect it to look EXACTLY like my full size Mega version of the supermarket, likewise, why should mobile try and pretend to be a desktop?

The Tetris Media Query version?

Maybe, if research shows that users wish for all content to be visible and usable on page load and displayed in a format best suited to their device.

A highly targeted functional version?

Unlikely, unless very strong research has backs this approach, this could be potentially seen as alienating lots of user and will certainly gain the attention of the usability and accessibility advocates.  Offering a link to a version of the site with full content will avoid any potential conflict with users and experts.

A simplified design version?

This is an “old is new again” approach, which involves simplifying the design for all devices and thus removes any need for any extra effort to make it work cross browser and cross device.  This is effective but limited, not every client or every solution can be reduced to a simple “stack it high don’t be shy” approach.

There is no right or wrong answer to this, ultimately it will depend on user needs and technological requirements.

The coming year will see a greater move toward user research to ascertain mobile expectations backed up by more in depth traffic analysis to serve the optimum delivery for the best user experience.

The screen resolutions and media queries that have served us well to this point aren’t disappearing but they will be joined with data quality analysis, dynamically adjusting image quality size and backed by solid user research to ensure we aren’t over delivering or underwhelming the largest growing sector in internet usage and commerce.

Retail Growth will be underpinned by behavioural targeting

By Friendy Sin, Lead Technical Developer, from our Manchester office

2013 will see a rapid growth in the online retail business. In 2012, online accounted for a record high of almost 18% of the total retail sales in the UK. Clearly, consumers are feeling more confident than ever in online purchasing.

To help increase sales, larger companies such as Amazon and eBay have embraced behavioural targeting: the ability to track consumer activities on site, to ensure the relevant products are displayed to that consumer. Whatever products the consumer browsed on his first visit to the site are given more prominence in future visits.

And targeting doesn’t just happen on-site. Information collected about a consumer’s browsing history and search engine usage is all used to determine products that consumer is more likely to be interested in.

In 2013, we’ll see a growth in this method of personalisation and behavioural targeting, with retail stores outside of just the big players picking up and using this technology. Some content management systems, including SDLTridion, Sitecore and Unbraco, now offer this type of tracking and targeting. They have similar kinds of marketing suite extensions to allow content authors to define promotional rules, helping to display relevant content on the homepage and advertising banners.

As this technology becomes more common, and therefore more affordable, it is not just the large commerce sites that will be able to benefit from it. Small and medium-sized retailers will be able to use this technology to help them increase the relevance of their online offers, and with it the size of their online sales.

The ‘Mobile’ in Mobile Internet Becomes Redundant

By James Hirst, Project Director, from our London office

During 2012 we have seen that people are taking up mobile devices at an unprecedented rate.  Smartphone ownership is ubiquitous and tablet ownership doubled in 2012 alone.

So lots of shiny devices – but this is not a technical requirement that you need to build to – this is an indicator of how people live and work and should inform how your business operates.  These devices have sold in huge numbers because of what people want from the internet and business needs to respond:

Users want instantaneous access to information – I need to be able to take out my phone, quickly check the scoreline, timetable or diary appointment within seconds.  I no longer “go on the internet”, I’m always on the internet.

This means information and content should be made available through Apps, APIs and cross-platform adaptive websites.  Don’t think about how best to show your content on your website, think about all of the places your information might be useful and ensure it is available.

Users want contextual information – My devices know that I am sat in a car, in Yorkshire on a weekend.  So when I perform a search, start from the assumption that I might want localised results.  Consider that because I am in a car, make the info accessible to text to speech so I can hear the results not read them and as it’s the weekend, maybe screen my work emails (sorry team!).  My devices should know that I support Leeds Utd, so when I search for football results, how about prioritising their results, instead of making me search through 3 pages of different leagues and competitions.

For this to work, information needs to have context, it needs semantic organisation (consider OpenGraph) and that needs considering from the very start of any internet project.

Users want ubiquitous, seamless access – My devices know that I have many other devices.  I want my calendar, email and content synchronised across all my devices.  I want messages to find me at my desk, in my pocket, on my laptop and be available from all. If I change my preferences on one device, I want the same change across all devices.  If I email a company, I want the option for them to contact me back by phone, email or twitter  – with my devices and their preferences choosing the most appropriate way of contacting me.

For this to work, we need to better understand our users and give them the opportunity to manage their communications with us simply and easily. As this begins to happen, so the need to specify ‘mobile’ internet access will increasingly become redundant.

(Image of 2013 dog from Flickr, used under Creative Commons license. http://www.flickr.com/photos/mgewalden/8326634109/in/photostream)

The sixth rendition of the iPhone brings with it the biggest change to the external hardware in some time – a 4-inch retina display.

This new display means a number of things for developers and apps. The most obvious is that it means updates need to be made to accommodate the new viewport size; this in itself is fairly simple to do and requires only a small amount of time.

We now have more screen real estate – why waste it?

With the additional screen size, a number of apps have undergone clever  ‘re-thinks’ to maximize their impact.

The most common theme can be seen in Apple’s own new App Store, iTunes Store and iBookstore designs, where the eye candy is placed at the top and key information features at an easily reachable position towards the middle and bottom (while retaining the navigation at the bottom of the viewport).

By rethinking the screen real estate we can easily start to see the potential for apps to maximise the middle of the screen for calls to action, rather than always positioning them to the top. This approach is much more usable and avoids forcing the user to jump from one extreme of the device to the other.

Clever cross-promotion

On a less obvious note, iOS6 has brought with it ‘smart app advertising’. This means if you have an app that you would like users to know about and you can position a banner at the top of your site which directly links to your app in the App Store. This is a nice touch and just a taste of the refinements that have really been the theme of iOS6.

With these two elements in mind, it might be a good time think how you could re-think your app to make the most of this new 4 inch display and ‘smart app advertising’ banners.

First things first: the complexity of a tool is totally independent of how effective it is. Unfortunately, I often see people discuss the complexity of a new digital tool and its broad range of features or unique database structure as a proxy for how effective it is – or worse, as evidence of how effective it is.

This approach is natural, for us an agency and for project owners on the client side. Complex tools look impressive. They represent a lot of effort. And the more effort expended, the better the end result. Right? Furthermore, it also shields stakeholders from criticism – who is going to lay blame when KPIs aren’t met when ‘look at all the hard work and thought that went into this tool!’ If you’re going to fail, it looks better to fail while overdoing than underdoing.

There’s nothing wrong with putting in lots of effort. Effort is great as long as it’s applied correctly. And while over-developing can be harmless, occasionally the added complexity will actually reduce the effectiveness of the tool.

Think about Facebook and the myriad of functionality it has, some of which I still haven’t even used. Had it launched in its present form, I’m willing to bet that adoption would be a lot slower. At launch, it was a simple tool that addressed a core problem: people wanted to connect via online profiles, but MySpace and Windows Live offered terrible user experiences. It was the simplicity of Facebook initially – in both functionality and layout – that made it so ‘sticky,’ encouraging growth.

Part 2: Press Release First!

So what’s the answer? I’ve recently been drawn to the Amazon approach to product development, which is to reverse engineer the final tool from the position of the end-user. In this fantastic post on Quora, Amazon product manager (and Quora champion) Ian McAllister outlines how they do it: press release first.

Yes, that right. Write the press release for your new tool before you even start planning development (even if you won’t actually release it). Why? The press release allows you to focus on the pitch behind the tool. You can go to Quora for a full breakdown of their approach, but in summary: “describe the product and the benefit”, “describe the problem your product solves,” and “describe how elegantly your product solves the problem.” If you find yourself developing solutions to problems not outlined in the press release or coming up with extra “value-adding” feature, ,then pull back and ask why? If the answer remains compelling, then at least ask when? Does this need to be in the first release? Can it wait until later?

This ties in with the “always in beta” mind-set, which is a good way of looking at most digital projects. Don’t strive for perfection on launch. Strive to hit the minimum effective level required to address the core problem, and then iterate from there. It gets you live earlier, it eases your users into the tool, and it means that you’ll have data and feedback to inform subsequent development of those additional features on your wish-list.

This is an approach I’ve taken recently, although mostly just in my back-of-the-napkin sessions (if any client wants to give it a go on an actual project then get it touch – I’m keen to work with you on it. It will be fun!).

In Summary

The effectiveness of your website is basically how well it addresses business and user problems. If that is best achieved by a static 2-page microsite then so be it. If it’s best achieved by a bespoke crowd-sourcing and collaboration platform then that’s fine as well. It’s just important to remember at the outset that effectiveness is not how big or complex the final solution is, it’s how well it addresses the initial problem that prompted the project. Start with and stay focussed on the user and their problems and I guarantee the final result will be better than starting with a laundry list of functionality.

And then there are those of us who notice that the door handle looks like you can pull, but you have to push. That it doesn’t make sense to have to type in an amount in cents if the cash machine only dispenses $20 and $50 notes. That if you don’t know which number buses go your way, it’s really difficult to know when yours leaves. That a remote control with 30 identical buttons isn’t helping you control the telly.

If you found yourself nodding throughout the previous paragraph, chances are you’re a user experience geek.

The term user experience (UX) is no more than two decades old, but the discipline has been around since caveman first made a bow and arrow. Did the arrow feel nicely weighted? Did your hand rest well on the bow while drawing the string? It’s what made Ogg choose Ugh’s products over Oomph’s.

User experience design has been a deciding factor in the success and failure of businesses since the beginning of manufacturing, and it is what’s behind Facebook obliterating MySpace, Google taking out Yahoo, Amazon becoming the dominant player in online retail, and Apple turning into the most valuable company in history. All these organisations have put massive emphasis on and resources into improving the user experience of their products and services, and their success is the reward.

So it appears that if you are a UX geek, you can have a career doing what you love, get paid for it, and have fun doing it. Mind you, you don’t have to have UX on your business card. At Reading Room for instance, every last person is responsible for the user experience of the websites and apps we build. Whether you are a project manager, a visual designer, an interaction developer or a technical developer, user experience is in everything you do.

How can you feed your love for usability, then? A good start would be to go to the various meet-ups where you’ll get to exchange ideas (and usually have a drink) with other UX geeks. There are regular events in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth. If you’re in Canberra, why not start one? You could also attend a conference. The always excellent UX Australia is in Brisbane this year. This photo I took at the very first conference in Canberra in 2009 shows a panel in the hotel and what the attendees thought of it:

Are you feeling daunted by the idea of being surrounded by all these clever UX people? A really quick way to learn more about the practice is to read lots. Good starting points are Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug and A Project Guide to UX Design by Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler. Even better if you can discuss what you’ve read with like-minded people. Many cities host bi-monthly UX Book Clubs, including Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Perth and Brisbane.

If you’re more into service design, i.e. applying user experience thinking to the design of services and business models, there are get-togethers in Sydney and Canberra called Service Design Drinks.

So do you feel like you want to work in an environment were a lot of thought goes into what is being built? Don’t hesitate, get your UX geek on and talk to us about a job in one of our offices around the world.

Both are wrong.

QR codes have unfairly been derided in the comms world. They were conceived by a Toyota subsidiary for industrial inventory management and have been successfully used to track automobile parts for over a decade. QR codes are neither innovative or useless in their original context, nor are they inherently innovative or useless in a marketing context.

The failure of QR codes in the comms world is the fault of marketers, not the technology. A QR code is not a compelling innovation. It’s not an innovation innately suited to advertising strategy. It’s certainly not an innovation likely to generate excitement in and by itself.

It’s a barcode.

There are some great examples of QR codes being effectively implemented and improving the user experience, such as Tesco’s virtual subway store and the Wealie app. What connects these examples is that the QR codes have been implemented in situations where users are not required to change their behaviour. In South Korea, Tesco has a fake supermarket “shelf and product” interface for mobile shopping, with QR codes attached for the scanning of products to be added to carts. Wealie takes the usual ‘loyalty’ card system and removes the annoying stamp and card system. In these contexts, QR codes actually represent a valuable proposition. Most importantly, the QR code is essentially a mechanism for streamlining an existing behaviour, and not the strategy that underpins the experience itself.

Putting a QR code on outdoor and print ads asks users to change their behaviour. People aren’t used to stopping at a magazine ad, pulling out their phones, scanning a barcode etc. That’s a both an effort and a cognitive behavioural barrier to overcome – and the payoff is unfortunately all too rarely worth it. Early adopters, under the pretense that including QR codes would improve perceptions of brands as “innovative,” regularly usethem simple to link through Youtube videos in lieu of any compelling reason to actually include a  QR code.

Providing access to a website or video isn’t exciting – URLs can do that, and there’s been no significant demand by consumers for a new technology to replace URLs.

What can QR do? Take an existing experience and make it better by leveraging benefits that QR can offer – better tracking, more portable, ability to store (lots of) and improve access to information etc.

Unfortunately, QR codes now have the stigma of being a low value proposition. They’re a joke, best summarised by this tumblr. Even a useful, innovative QR campaign has the deck stacked against it thanks to the ghosts of hundreds or poorly conceived earlier QR campaigns. If your campaign does succeed it will be because of the value it adds for the user – not because of the novelty in using QR. And if doesn’t, don’t blame the technology. Or the user.

A 1 or 2% engagement rate on Facebook is seen as a great result – that means only 98% of your audience is unengaged with the content you carefully prepare and publish. A 30% email open rate is likely to elicit hi-fives around the office and beers for all but 70% of your target audience, an audience which has given you permission to speak to it, has said ‘thanks, but no thanks’ – they haven’t even bothered to open the email!

Now of course if you’re Coca Cola and you have a Facebook page with 42 million followers a 0.5% engagement rate means that 2,100,000 people interacted with your content. That’s pretty impressive as an absolute number of eyeballs. But most brands will never achieve anywhere near this reach so most of the time they are speaking to no one but a hardcore follower – the 0.5%

The reason for this stunning lack of engagement (even though we like to think of 1% as a ‘success’) is the lack of relevance to the end user. Brands such as Amazon are able to achieve significantly higher response rates to its marketing initiatives because it has the most valuable thing a brand can have about its customers: data – and shedloads of it.

Data is the new black. Data is what will make a digital marketing campaign a real success rather than an imagined success. It’s the difference between a 50% email open rate and a 25% one, a Facebook community with a real level of engagement rather than a passive audience and a display campaign which is not ignored by 99.8% of the people who see it.

The smart use of data by marketers and product & service managers will transform not only the digital marketing landscape but also the services that companies will offer their customers. Using data to tailor communications and services to customers will lead to greater levels of engagement and conversion and most importantly of all, loyalty.

There will always be a place for mass-market campaigns designed to raise awareness of a product, service or brand – the latest Commbank Can’t campaign being a good example of this. But to achieve conversion and loyalty means targeting people in a relevant way that speaks to their lives, their lifestyles and their needs. Collecting data on your audience is the smartest way to get this insight. Target in the US is a great example of how data is used to create conversations and engagement with the consumer that is likely to lead to a purchase.

Most brands and organisations collect gigabytes of data but more often than just leave it untouched in the very expensive CRM system they bought– after all why bother using this when you can achieve a success of 0.5% with a traditional digital marketing campaign? Data needs to be used and used smartly if its true potential is to be achieved. That’s the major challenge on the road ahead for any organisation or brand wishing to truly engage with their audience online.

1. Me! Me! Me!
After reading the first half-sentence, your mind starts to wander. Why is it the content can’t hold your attention for more than 5 seconds? Often it is because the organisation has written every title and every paragraph from their own point of view. They talk about their programs, products, services and activities in their own terms and through their own eyes. While this is completely understandable and natural, it has the tendency to lose visitors very quickly. They come to your website to have their problem solved. Unless your homepage gives them an immediate sense that it can do that for them, they will go elsewhere.

2. What is it again you do?
While it sounds like the opposite of the previous point, it is actually the logical consequence of it. Websites often neglect to tell their visitors what it is the organisation actually does. The remedy is of course not to start talking about Me! Me! Me! again, but to think about how little a first-time visitor may know about you and – in very simple terms – explain to them what you do.

3. Last update: June 2009
Very often, homepages are misused as nothing more than glorified navigation menus, merely illustrating the choices of the primary navigation. This is a missed opportunity to use this most prominent piece of digital real estate to its full potential. A homepage can convey how much is happening at your organisation. It can feature prominently the kind of content visitors love and search engines rank highly. Whether it be a news module, a blog or upcoming events, think about what kinds of interesting content your business or agency can generate on an ongoing basis.

4. That face looks familiar
We’ve all learned that photos are inherently attractive to people, and most prominently photos of other people. Many website developers thus go to any of the dozens of stock photography vendors and pick a few photos of generic models posing as business people. The worst clichés include the round-table business meeting, the female-in-a-suit pointing out something on a clipboard to the male-in-a-suit and of course everyone’s favourite, the business handshake. Ditch this tired imagery and replace it with photos that actually have something to do with your organisation. Invest in getting a photographer to create imagery that truly represents you, hire an illustrator or – if you must use stock imagery – go for quirky and unusual.

5. Lost in a sea of text
This may come as a shock to you, but people do not read on the web. Full stop. The chance of someone actually reading an entire webpage you present is about as big as that of someone reading the entire End User Licence Agreement before clicking Accept. When users visit a website, what they do is scan. And what they scan is, in descending order:

- images
- headings
- hyperlinks
- the first 2-4 words of each paragraph

This is why writing for the web is so fundamentally different from writing for any other media (and why Reading Room has been conducting dozens of “Writing for the Web” workshops around the globe). You need to convey what you are trying to say in as few words as possible, and it needs to be said in the language and from the point of view of your visitor (see point 1 above).

So what can we do about it?
The best recipe against committing these all-too-frequent web fauxpas’ is to apply a thorough, user-centred design approach to developing your website’s architecture, design, functionality and content. Find out who your users are. Get to know them intimately. Ask them about their interaction with you. Design and deliver your website to satisfy their scenarios.

Today, the distinctions between the two are blurring. All thanks to advancement in technologies such as mobile internet, social media, location based services, QR code, the internet of things, image recognition, and augmented reality. It bridges the gap between online and offline, making experiences more contextual, more personalized, and more engaging.

It changes shopping experience
eBay, well known for its online business, opened pop up retail shops in New York and London. To make a purchase, customers can scan a product’s QR code using a smartphone, which will in turn direct them to the payment section in the eBay website.

Tesco Homeplus in South Korea, traditionally an offline supermarket business, created a Virtual Subway Store where travellers can shop by scanning the QR code using their mobile phones while waiting for the train to arrive. It is practically combining real window shopping and online buying at the same time.

It enriches learning experience
The J. Paul Getty Museum enables visitors using mobile application to have immediate access to information about paintings in the museum’s collection. Visitors have the opportunity to listen to audio, get biographical information about the artist and learn about and locate other works by the artist.

and not to forget, games!
The new Cars game from Disney allows a player to put a real-life toy car on the iPad screen and drive around a virtual world which moves beneath it. It really blurs the boundaries between on screen digital gaming and a physical toy.

And how awesome is that when your favourite gaming app Angry Birds goes to life? In Barcelona, a telco campaign allows people to use a smartphone to play a life-size version of the cult Angry Birds game, complete with real shooting birds and exploding pigs, and a street band playing a jazzy version of the game’s theme song in the background.

These are just the beginning of the journey to marry the online and offline experiences. The possibilities are endless. And the impacts for brand experiences can be tremendous. What are you waiting for?