Catch up, keep up and stay ahead are the three steps that Chris Averill, Managing Director of we are:london believes will keep you at the forefront of your digital strategy.
Firstly the subtitle above has been stolen from a client with whom we are leading a digital strategy project for, and I use it because it does summarise a very complex situation that is faced by most of our clients, most of the time.
The situation is one where you are never quite able to get your website in a state that allows you to plan ahead; in fact, it’s very common to be in permanent fix mode, patching up ever increasing holes in your site.
If this sounds familiar then don’t worry, firstly you’re in good company and secondly, success is achievable. A simple process change and good measure of nerve are all that is required.
Catching up
The first step in the process is to make sure you’re ready to move forward by having a few key elements in place. Don’t stop anything that’s currently under development, but do be prepared to radically change it once you are ready.
The key elements you need in place are:
- A clear long term plan for the site, 12 months will do
- KPI’s and measurements to prove success
- An understanding of basic agile methodologies (rapid planning, try it out, fail fast or launch quickly)
- A team who believe in the future of the site and business
- Once you are confident these are in place you can start to validate recent developments to your site and see if they have indeed been worthwhile, or if they have made little or no difference. With this knowledge you can then test a more agile approach, with all checks and measurements in place.
Keeping up
Keeping up is harder to do than one might imagine, just take a look at what saps most clients’ online budgets and time; usually either trying to fix problems or patch holes just to keep their site functioning at a basic level.
The key to successfully keeping up is to make sure you have a platform in place that is flexible and fit for purpose. You don’t need to start from scratch or upgrade your CMS, but plan to use tools and services that let you launch something very quickly and very cheaply, which could be used to build your future platform. This could be a micro site or linked section of your site built in Wordpress or refocusing your entire contact centre to work on Facebook, using familiar, real-time tools in an environment that your customers are used to.
Staying ahead
Once you have adopted a more agile approach to your digital communications, you’ll realise that you are almost there and almost certainly more effective than your competitors.
In a recent project that we ran for the leading mobile phone operator in the UK, we were able to prove the value of an agile user centred design approach in a real life situation.
Baseline failure
The first set of interfaces we designed for a touch screen device went through a standard process, which was basically a waterfall process:
- Client briefs brand and interaction agency
- Two agencies work in isolation in producing interface design
- Main stakeholders (often technology or marketing) sign off the designs in isolation
- Final interaction design is combined with brand design
- User testing takes place
- Interface design iterated
- Wider business stakeholders and technologist review final designs
- Multiple meetings and reviews to negotiate and ultimately compromise
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- For our touch screen project the end deliverables included a set of Visio wireframes with at least 140 pages, which were complex, unwieldy and lacked any sort of tangible feel that you would get from an interactive prototype.
Agile approach = success
For the next phase of the project, we proposed an agile, rapid prototype and test methodology, which basically followed these steps:
- We ran a collaborative discovery workshop, sketching ideas and capturing key success requirements
- Within five days we had developed an initial interactive prototype, hosted online
- The prototype was reviewed by a much wider business stakeholder audience via a conference call
- Two days later changes from the call had been implemented and we ran a face to face review, making changes on the fly to the prototype
- The process is re-run in five to seven day cycles until a final design has been created
- Usability research is run at a low fidelity wireframe stage and at a high fidelity branded stage, after all you already have a fully interactive prototype
The key differences between the two approaches are time, effectiveness and cost. Involving the wider team earlier on meant that key business decisions could be aired and understood before anything has been committed to build.
This involvement also ensured that everyone positively added to the project, the technical build team were able to challenge and understand certain design decisions, whilst the marketing team could start to show the prototype to the wider business, raising awareness and achieving positive buy-in where and when it counts.
The real success was very easily shown, a 50% decrease in the time from brief to final design, which directly equated to a 50% cost saving, and that’s without counting the savings made during build and post-launch bug fixes.
Our client, who took the risk in adopting a non-standard development process on a critical project, was impressed with the end result, stating:
“we are:london delivered a very impressive managed service that dramatically reduced the amount of time usually required ...We will be communicating this example, across our business, as a best practice approach for similar projects.”
What’s next?
The ultimate goal of any digital business should be to have a platform (tools and services) that lets you trial a wide range of new ideas without having to go through a standard project plan; no need for designers, developers or project managers.
Amazon, eBay, BetFair and many more leading digital businesses have managed to get their website into a position where they run A/B comparative testing, multivariate testing and behavioural targeting on a daily basis.
Forget the stories of a million different subtle colour changes on the buy button and think about what your business could do and learn, by trying something new, in real-time with real customers.
We have seen a 22% increases in conversions by simply changing pricing layout and focus, and that’s a 22% increase in people buying their product, which equates to tens of thousands of pounds profit within a few weeks, based on less than £15,000 invested.
But there is a price to pay and that is leaving your comfort zone firmly behind and embracing a process that on the face of it looks like a waste of money; plan it, build it, launch it and if it does not perform, scrap it. That’s a big leap for an industry that is struggling to measure the success of a website launch or change to a form layout and one that is far from comfortable for most CFOs, CTOs and MDs.
Chris Averill
Managing Director, we are:london