There is no denying that if you are in the business of providing an online product or service you need to be thinking about mobile. Encouragingly, even the big multinational clients I work with have quickly picked up on the trend and are thinking about it.

But how you think about mobile and to what degree you choose to invest in and develop for it is another question, and one that some of those clients are struggling with.

Ignoring gaming, which is a special case which doesn’t need to be considered by most organisations, the majority of online products and services fall into one of two categories: either they are web based applications (allowing users to create or manipulate data), or they are web based information portals (presenting data).

For both types of product there are three popular approaches you can take to supporting a mobile user base:

1. build your web application as a universally accessible web application (using techniques like responsive design and methodologies like designing for mobile first)
2. provide a mobile optimised (usually a cut down, less feature rich) version of your application along side your existing offering, and using clever redirection to filter mobile traffic to the mobile specific version of your application
3. build a native mobile app that compliments your existing offering.

Which of these options you choose needs to be dictated primarily by your user base, their content and functionality needs and their mobile usage.

But here’s the important bit; you don’t have to pick and stick to only one of these options. They are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I’d suggest that options 1 and / or 2 are compulsory, even if you are developing a native application as described in option 3.

Choosing option 1 as a minimum future-proofs your product: If (or rather when) a new device launches next year, as long as it has a browser, you already support it. After launch you can track and evaluate how many of your users adopt the device before rushing to support something natively that none of them end up using.

Even if you provide a native application (option 3), people will still try and access your site via their mobile browser and not supporting those users is a dangerous strategy. As more devices and variations of those devices emerge, supporting and adapting native applications for all possible versions becomes more challenging (and costly), a universally accessible version of your web application is a good baseline for supporting all visitors, whether they choose to visit via a bleeding edge device or not.

This baseline version of your product or service can then be complemented by a targeted mobile optimised version of your web application (option 2), or native apps (option 3) where your user base will benefit most from them. If for example you find that 90% of your mobile traffic is coming from iOS powered devices, and you feel that a native iOS app would enhance the experience for those users then making an iOS native app becomes a logical business investment. If, however, 90% of your mobile traffic is coming from Android users, the same iOS investment is not as desirable and your resources would be best spent on improving the experience for Android users.

When thinking about how to support mobile, instead of thinking about having to choose from one option or another, think about building your mobile strategy around a number of different degrees of support; with browser based access the bare minimum basic level, mobile optimised support as one level up and native applications as the ultimate, highest level of support possible.

What is not so great is that many organisations still seem to be of the opinion that designing their product’s user experience is something that they can do after they have built it. They confuse user experience design with the graphical bit of user interface design and incorrectly assume that both can be added at the end of a project build as the polish on top.

Both assumptions are wrong; user experience design and the graphical component of interface design are not one in the same. And neither should, or can successfully, just be added at the end of a product’s development as the “polish on top”.

The look and feel of a product’s interface plays a big part in the user experience of said product, but it is not the only thing to consider. There is also the product’s information architecture, interaction design, information design and navigation design to think about. The design of each of these elements should be driven by your content requirements and functional specification, which in turn should be guided by your user needs and product objectives. Once your product has been built it is too late to change all of these elements of its design.

You can’t add a great experience to a product that is already built to work in a specific way. A technology driven development process, where design is considered an optional extra to bolt on once you have built something is wrong. To create a great user experience for your customers, you need to be designing your product with them in mind from the start; for web based products that means you need to adopt a user driven approach to your development, designing your product’s interface, process flow and experience before developing the underlaying technology.

Jesse Jame Garrett was spot in his book The Elements of User Experience. To have a great final product with a great user experience you have to have been thinking about delivering that great user experience from day one of your project. You sow the seeds of success when you ask that first set of questions about what do the users of this product want and need? If you can’t tie every decision you make about what your product does and how it does it back to the answers of those simple questions, your user experience will not be a good as it could be, and no amount of polish will change that.

Every week I get at least ten new contacts getting in touch to see if I’m available for work, or to find out more about my skill set. While I’m actively looking for work these calls and emails are welcome, while I’m mid contract or otherwise engaged they are less so. Whether I’m busy or not, keeping track of who the recruiters are, who they’re recruiting for and what type of roles they tend to be involved in filling was starting to become difficult. But keeping track is something I wanted to do so I could keep tabs on which recruiters fell into the good, bad and terrible categories and so I could remember the next time I’m looking for new work who had good opportunities and who didn’t.

Enter Highrise. I now log all calls and emails in a Highrise account and log all interactions between me and each recruiter in one easy to update place. This has let me build up a good picture of which recruiters know what they are talking about, which have good opportunities, which are well organised and which don’t talk to their colleagues.

I have been able, for example, to check when the last time a recruiter has been in touch and what we talked about, whether I have already told them when I’m next due to be available for work or whether I’ve told one of their colleagues. Searching through a timeline of contact in Highrise is a lot easier than trawling through broken email chains and includes notes about phone conversations that I’d otherwise not be able to easily track.

I’m not sure exactly where the idea started, but over the past few years it has become more and more popular to talk about aiming to fail fast when starting an online product or service. Don’t. Don’t aim to fail. That’s just dumb. I understand why some people say that and what they mean by it, but I worry that too many people will read the headline and focus on aiming to fail, rather than aiming to test an idea and understand what’s wrong with it quickly. Aiming to fail seems to me like a very negative way of approaching business and product or service development.

Instead, the message should be to concentrate on launching your product or service, seeing how it works, testing it and getting feedback on it as fast as possible. Then adapting. Learn what people want and more importantly need from your product or service and how they would like it to work and then move with your audience. Don’t aim to fail, aim to test, learn and improve. Aim to iterate fast not to fail fast.

When I found out that the flat I moved into in the middle of April was in a VirginMedia 50M broadband zone I got very excited.

When we finally had an engineer round to install said broadband (it took over a month) I got even more excited.

When I woke up one morning to find that we had no connectivity to the Internet and a dead telephone line I was very much not excited.

I went through the normal procedure of turning everything off and rebooting the router with no luck. I checked the phone line and plugged in different phones to make sure it wasn’t a dead phone causing the problem, still no luck.

I used my MIFI to get my laptop online so I could check for known issues. I found the Virgin broadband status page and was told there were no known issues. So, as a last resort, I phoned the customer support number (from my mobile – expensive – as the Virgin telephone line wasn’t working) and reported the problem.

The very helpful customer services person on the other end of the line confirmed that there were no known issues in my area (after checking that I’d run through the standard turning off / on routine) and booked in an engineer for the following day to come round to my flat and test my connections.

End of story until the next day. I went out in search of a proper broadband connection (thanks Starbucks) and got on with my day.

A few hours later I get a text message from Virgin (good customer service, keeping me informed) letting me know that a fault had been identified in my area and that an engineer had been sent to fix it. The engineer who had been booked to come round to my flat the following day had been cancelled as the “known fault” escalated the problem and meant it wasn’t a fault with my connection or equipment. Great.

I carry on with my day assuming that wheels are turning and things are in motion to get the problem fixed.

Later that afternoon I return home to find a working telephone line, but no broadband. Hooking up my MIFI again, I figure I will check the official status page again for an update. Only, the official status page had no update. It still showed no known issues in my area. I guessed that they were so busy fixing the known fault, it hadn’t been updated yet.

Later that evening my telephone (the one plugged into the Virgin phone line, with a Virgin provided number) rings and I answer to Virgin customer services checking if my phone is now working. Which it is. As they proved by talking to me on it. Great. Still no broadband though, which seemed to surprise the Virgin worker, “oh, well we have an engineer out fixing it and it should be working again within the next 5 hours. In the mean time just reboot your super hub every now and then to see if it’s working.”

For the rest of the evening I reboot my super hub every now and then and still have no connection.

The following morning we still had no connectivity. Still very much not excited. I hook up my MIFI again to get an update, but the official status page still insists there are no known issues in my area. Frustrated, I call the support number (free this time as the Virgin phone line is working) to see if I can get an update.

I explain the problem, the customer services person checks their system… “There are no known faults in your area, I will arrange for an engineer to come round to your flat tomorrow for you.”

“Hold on,” I interject, “that’s what I was told yesterday…” I explain the story and the “unknown” known fault.

“Okay sir, in that case there is a known fault in your area and it will be fixed soon.” I’m now confused.

It turns out that in the World of VirginMedia not all faults are created equal. Some faults are special faults that are only reported to people who don’t answer the phone to customers, and are certainly not reported publicly on the official live status page of the VirginMedia website.

Which (finally, to your great relief I’m sure) leads to my point: As a service sector company, communicating with your customers when things go wrong is hugely important. If like VirginMedia you have a status page on your website that suggests that your customers can find up to date, live service status information on it then it needs to show exactly that. Anything less is raising your customer’s expectations and then failing to meet them. A combination that results in very upset and angry customers and provides a really bad customer (and by extension user) experience.

Virgin eventually fixed my broadband connection later that second day. And, in fairness to them, called me back several times to give me updates. Over the few months we’ve been a customer of theirs that has been the only prolonged down time we’ve experienced, and I’m pretty happy with the speed and service that we get.

But on that day, when they failed to deliver their promised service, to be told that their status page only shows some faults made me question how much longer I would be a customer. It felt like I was being lied to, and it hugely lowered my opinion of their ability to deliver a service.

If you want your customers to trust you and, more importantly, stick with you when times are tough you must be open, honest and responsive when things go wrong. And you must also never raise expectations beyond what can be delivered.

Figure 1 The new JMCQUARRIE.co.uk homepage design

Those of you who follow me on twitter (@jmcquarrie) will know that I revealed a new design here at jmcquarrie.co.uk this week.

The update was much needed and incorporates a number of changes that I’ve been meaning to make since I launched the last version of the site just over a year ago.

The previous design was done while I was still very new to the world of freelancing and when I wasn’t entirely sure who the audience for the site was or what message I was trying to get across. As a result the old design didn’t hold together as well as I would have liked and, as I learnt more about myself, my craft and my offering, became less and less relevant.

As a direct result of not being 100% sure of what I wanted to say with the old site the overall page structure of the site was left fairly open with a strong mast and footer, but with a weak layout for the actual content. This redesign aims to address this.

The overall goal of the redesign was to tighten up the look and feel, giving each page more structure and a better visual hierarchy. I also wanted to hone the message and bring my portfolio and blog up to date.

Understanding my audience

Last year’s design process started, as I always do for a new project, by me looking at the audience for the site. The problem was, as mentioned above, I wasn’t entirely sure who the audience for this site was. Was it potential clients? Was it recruitment consultants? Was it my peer group? Was it web agencies? The truth was that it was all of these, but at the time I couldn’t see that or decide which group to focus on. For this redesign, I’ve focused on the potential client and recruitment audiences as my primary concern with the other groups acknowledged, but given less relevance.

For my target groups the site serves as an introduction to me, what I do, what I can offer them and gives them an overview of what work I’ve done in the past. To meet with their content requirements, I’ve striped back the homepage, and the overall Information Architecture of the site.

The homepage is now fairly sparse, designed to achieve three things:

1. sell me in one sentence
2. give those who are interested an easy way (with clear calls to action) of discovering more about me and my experience
3. make it very easy for people to contact me (again with a very clear call to action).

My blog, despite my best intentions, is not updated as regularly as I would like and so has not been highlighted as a call to action on the homepage and the previously present “recent articles” section has been stripped out as they only serve to distract from the above three things. My blog can still easily be accessed via the global navigation, but I’ve made the decision to let it take a back seat as far as the homepage is concerned.

While thinking through the homepage design, and having analysed my Google Analytics stats I was conscious that not everyone arriving at the site does so from the same place, or with the same prior knowledge of who I am. Which meant that I needed to cater for their different expectations. But, I also wanted to keep the homepage design minimal and focused. So, instead of cluttering up the homepage with content for all, I focused in on my three main traffic sources; organic / direct traffic, twitter traffic and Linkedin traffic and for each group of visitors I have created a landing page that (I hope) gives a slightly tweaked, more relevant introduction to me, my work and the site for each group.

Whether these traffic source specific landing pages will work or not, I’m not sure, but I like the idea that they may, and will be keeping my eye on how they are used and what impact they have.

You can see the three versions of the landing page at:

• standard homepage for organic / direct traffic with a generic all round introduction: jmcquarrie.co.uk
• twitter traffic for those who click through from my twitter profile and who know a bit about me already: jmcquarrie.co.uk/welcome-twitter
• Linkedin traffic for those who click through from my Linkedin profile and who should have a stronger idea of what I do before arriving here: jmcquarrie.co.uk/welcome-linkedin

Figure 2 An example of my new portfolio pages

Updating my portfolio – focusing on the process as well as the outcome

The portfolio section of my previous design was a bit of a haphazard affair. Each project page was designed differently, with different numbers of differently sized screenshots and varying levels of explanation about the work that I’d done relating to them.

Having now gone through the interview process for a number of freelance and contracting roles, I have a much better understanding of what my portfolio needs to show off. The end product is useful to see, but as a User Experience / Information Architect it’s the process that I used to arrive at the end product that most people want to know about. My portfolio now reflects this a little better, and will be seeing more improvements as I update each project page with more of the artefacts from my work and add more details of the processes that I follow to arrive at the final deliverable for each project.

Figure 3 The new about James page

Saying a little more about me

The biggest change to the design of the site has been to the About James page. Gone is the generic “Hi I’m a London based UX person who enjoys cooking and the outdoors” and in comes three things:

1. an explanation of what I do and offer potential clients
2. a breakdown of my skills and what I can and can’t do
3. the background story of how I got into the UX game and how my approach has been influenced and developed over the years

The idea was for the page to act as a more of a bio than a formal CV that potential clients or recruitment folk could read to get a feel for who I am and how I approach my work.

For the background story bit of that page I wanted to give readers a sense of how long I’ve been working in the web and UX space and hope that by including key web and tech events interspersed amongst my own experiences I can help people frame how my career has progressed in context of how the industry has developed over the last 10 years or so. When I started out UX wasn’t a buzz word, iPods iPhones and iPads didn’t exist and most people had barely got to grips with email let alone the web.

Summing up

Ultimately this update isn’t a huge revolution of a redesign, but more of an evolution. A reflection of a better understanding of the site’s purpose and how I should use it. It will no doubt continue to evolve, but for the moment I see that near term evolution being on a much smaller scale and in smaller increments.

As it turns out, ASDA (owned by Walmart) have taken the first step to doing exactly that. Their latest TV spot (embedded below for your viewing pleasure) promotes a new website that they have set up with the price comparision folk at mySupermaket.co.uk called ASDA Price Guarantee. If you visit the site you can either enter details from your latest ASDA shopping receipt or you can log into your ASDA online shopping account and start comparing prices of the last things you bought with other leading supermarkets.

I’d be interested to know how successful the site is, and how many people will either continue to shop with ASDA as a result of saving money or convert to being ASDA shoppers based on a test trip to the store as shown in the advert.

If the idea is successful I hope that we’ll see more and more integration between our online and offline experiences of supermarkets and wider adoption throughout the industry.

It’s been months in the making as Mike and I have been trying to design, build and develop the site while we both were also working on our own full time projects for clients, but we have found the time here and there and are really pleased with the result.

We will be getting leading industry experts to write about their experiences in the world of consultancy on the site. They will be sharing their insights, lessons learnt and hints and tips about consulting so you and our readers can benefit from their knowledge and get ahead in your own consulting career.

If you’re looking to get into the consulting industry, or you already recently have and are looking for tips about where to start, or even if you have been a consultant for some time but would like to read about how to advance your career we have something for you.

We plan to publish articles once a week initially and see how we get on with running an online publication.

We are on the lookout for authors right now, so if you have been involved in the consulting industry in any way, as a consultant yourself or as a client of one, and have something to share about your experiences we’d love to hear from you. You can find out more about becoming an author on the write for us page on the Consultive Magazine site.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the site, what we’re trying to do and on our initial launch articles, so feel free to get in touch, comment here or on the articles themselves and let us know what you think.

But they have not been exploited enough. As a Clubcard holder I know that there is a goldmine of untapped data that Tesco hold in relation to me. They know how often I visit their stores. They know which stores I go to. They know what I buy, how much I spend, which day, month, year I spend the most. They know more about my buying habits than I am consciously aware of.

Yet, this information is not used nearly as fully as it could be. Yes, they send me vouchers for things I like to buy, and what appear to be personalised special offers and promotions, but they could do so much more.

Imagine if at Tesco.com you had a reporting function that allowed you as a customer to view detailed reports of your own spending habits.

Which foods do I buy the most of? Which foods cost me the most? How much did I spend on alcohol in the last month? How much have I saved by shopping with Tesco over the last three months? As a consumer there are a whole host of benefits that these reports could give you. A break down of the type of food that you buy could highlight that you’re consuming twice as many snack foods as fruit and vegetables. It may highlight that you are going through more wine than you thought, or that you’re visiting the store far more often then you thought, or buying your lunch 4 days a week at a cost of £40 per week. People are generally unaware of their spending habits, because the effort of tracking and analysing them is just too much.

Simple, easy to understand spend analysis can be a fun, interesting and behaviour changing tool for consumers. In a World where it has become more and more difficult to differentiate your business from your competitors, any way that you can add value for your customers is a good thing. In a World where everyone is feeling the pinch of tough economic times and is looking to save money where ever they can, being able to help your customers make smarter, more informed buying decisions is a great way of adding value and creating brand loyalty.

Why should supermarkets want to help us make better buying decisions? Well, I could play the corporate responsibility card here, and suggest that the big supermarkets owe it to society to help us eat healthier and spend our money more wisely, but while a valid point its unlikely to persuade most.

A more persuasive argument for the supermarkets would be that providing such a service would encourage repeat buying and increase their web offering’s “stickiness”. Once your shopping habits are being displayed to you in a fun, meaningful way you’ll not want to dilute the value of your data by shopping elsewhere. If you pop into Asda for this week’s shop your spend data won’t be complete. If Tesco could tie in offers and their reward points to your spending reports, you’d be doubly encouraged to be more loyal.

As anyone who has access to a Google Analytics account, or follows the stats on their twitter stream, web site performance, Facebook updates, etc will know it can become addictive. Getting your customers hooked to their data feed and having them coming back week after week to view the updates presents the perfect ready made audience for targeting with related services, offers and promotions.

Supermarkets aren’t the only ones who could offer such a service either; your bank could give you a monthly debit or credit card report. Your phone provider could make much better use of your call history, department stores, book shops, even coffee shops that all offer loyalty cards could also offer spend reports.

As more and more companies seek to engage with their customers across multi-channels they need to start thinking about how to tie in our physical actions and the data stream that results from them with our online World.

Having spent many years designing and developing enterprise applications I can tell you that there are many people who build enterprise applications that truly care about creating great user experiences, and there are many clients who list it as a requirement when purchasing their systems. So why is it that using so many enterprise applications is such a bad experience?

I would suggest that there are three primary reasons;

1. The people who buy the software are not the end users

The first problem lies with the buyers, and it may well be the biggest problem of all. I have never been in any sales meeting where a potential customer has brought along one of the people that will actually use the application to help evaluate it. Never. I’ve given plenty of demonstrations to and had plenty of feedback from managers, team leaders and senior executives, but never from someone whose day job will involve using the application. Managers need to learn that they are not the audience for the application. They need to understand that their opinion of the interface is not an evaluation of the user experience and they need to understand that the interface (however pretty it is) is not the user experience.

2. Software designed to do everything for everyone will not be very good at any one thing

The second problem lies with the software vendors. Many vendors will do two things to compete: add more features to their products and make their products infinitely configurable. Both are aimed at making the products appeal to the widest audience possible, but both strategies result in products that are either too confusing to use or don’t quite do what you need them too. Imagine a car that was designed to win a formula 1 race, fit a family of 5 in the back, go off road, be driven on water, be driven in cities and replace tractors on farms. It wouldn’t work right? Well software designed to do everything rarely does either. (A note to buyers: just because a feature is listed as present in an application does not mean that it will work how you expect it to, or how your organisation needs it to.)

3. It is really hard to define a great user experience, or prove that a system offers one

The final problem is that it’s almost impossible to define what makes a great user experience. What works for one person will not for the next. In most sales situations that I’ve seen there is a technical buyer, a business buyer and someone with the authority to spend money. For the technical buyer benchmarking the system is easy; they ask about infrastructure, redundancy, back up routines, disaster recovery and service up-time history. For the business buyer the questions revolve around feature lists; “does it do this, that or the other?” “Can we use it to do these 4 key things?” “What reports will the system generate?” For the money folk the questions are about pricing, return on investment, service levels and contract length. All of these questions can be easily answered with fact based, well evidenced answers.

Ask if the system offers a good user experience and how would someone prove that it does? How would a buyer benchmark it against competitors? It’s easier just to ignore the question and focus on evaluating the more tangible aspects of the product. No vendor is ever going to claim that their product offers a bad user experience are they?

How can we combat these problems?

So how can we deal with these problems and start forcing enterprise application designers to build better user experiences?

Buyers: Test, test, test and then test again

Organisations looking to buy enterprise software need to start testing applications as they will be used in their organisation and they need to be conducting this testing with the actual people that will be using it day after day. In a World where money talks, and customers are king, the only way that vendors will focus more on creating fantastic user experiences is if their customers ask for it. That’s why consumer software, as a rule, offers a better experience; we as consumers demand it.

Vendors: Focus on what works for your target audience

Enterprise vendors then need to stop trying to out do each other with more and more features in their products, and start focusing on delivering simple, easy to use tools that do less but get the job done. Make one version per market segment if need be, but make sure that your products stay true to your intended audience and don’t become so generic that they don’t work for anyone.

The rest of us: Work on defining great experiences

The challenge to the rest of us is to help define what makes a great user experience and help both buyers and vendors understand how to test products in meaningful ways to ensure that they are as great as they can be. No small challenge, but then small challenges aren’t as much fun are they?