ASA gains new powers to police online marketing

The UK Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) has been given an extended remit to regulate online marketing in the same way that they do for TV and print advertising.

From 1st March 2011, the ASA will be able to demand the withdrawal of marketing messages that it deems inappropriate or misleading. The remit includes marketing messages on websites, as well as those published through advertising such as Google Adwords and Facebook Ads.

The ASA will even have the power to post advertisements of their own to 'out' companies that refuse or neglect to comply with orders to remove misleading or inappropriate marketing messages.

Famous examples of the intervention of the ASA in the past include:

"So what's so great about 3G? It's what helps you get the news, really fast. Find your way, really fast. And download pretty much anything, really fast. The new iPhone 3G. The internet, you guessed it, really fast." - Apple iPhone 3G ad, August 2008.

After a number of complaints, the ASA agreed that the iPhone 3G wasn't really quite that fast, and the ad campaign was misleading customers into believing the Internet on the iPhone 3G was as fast as that shown in the advert. That was the end of that.

In August 2010, BT Infinity claimed in their ad campaign promised "instant Internet" Claims later from BT suggested they throught consumers would understand that instant in this example didn't mean instant as defined in the dictionary, but more like the "instant" in instant coffee!

Amazing Fashion Shoot on iPhone

What we're enjoying in the office today... Just another spectacular use of our favourite mobile toy. Budding photographers will enjoy especially. Cheers for the spot, Roger!

Storm ID achieves Google AdWords Certified Partner status

We're pleased to announce that having passed a series of exams, Storm ID is now a Google AdWords Certified Partner.

So why is this good news for our clients? Well, for starters, it demonstrates that we're ahead of our competition when it comes to Paid Search. Google AdWords has recently introduced a more robust measurement of the knowledge required for an agency to be AdWords qualified. This requires members of the agency involved in PPC (Pay Per Click) to take two separate exams: 'Google AdWords Fundamentals' and 'Google AdWords Advanced'.

We’re delighted to say that we’ve passed both with flying colours to achieve Google AdWords Certified Partner status! If you’re looking to work with an agency with a proven ability in Paid Search, the Google AdWords Certified Partner badge is a great place to start.

Get in touch for an informal chat about Paid Search, and take a look at our Paid Search services in more depth.

Charlotte joins the Storm ID Digital Marketing Team

Charlotte Fox has joined the Storm ID Digital Marketing team as an Account Manager with responsibility for Digital Planning and Buying across all clients.

Charlotte was previously the main Digital Planner for a large Media Buying Agency in Edinburgh and brings considerable experience across many sectors to the team at Storm ID and we are delighted to have her!

GoodPractice User Experience: Design

We're cross-posting a series of blog articles by Owen Ferguson at GoodPractice, who has taken the time to give an excellent overview of the processes we've gone through together in redeveloping the user experience for the company's website and toolkits for managers and leaders. See the original article.

Following on from the planning and requirements phase of our project to re-invent the GoodPractice user experience, the design phase was where it all started to come together and a clearer picture emerged of how the finished product will look. There were two work-streams in our design phase:

• Information architecture review
• Prototyping

Both of these terms, I think, are deliberately constructed to give an impression of mystery behind the process. Information architecture is simply the way that content is organised, most often into various levels of categories. The prototyping process is a series of activities aimed at producing a mock-up of how the finished product will look.

We spent quite a bit of time in the design phase making sure that we were getting things right before embarking on the technical development work. This was especially important to us since the end result is a departure from our previous toolkit designs.

Redefining the information architecture

GoodPractice have been in business for almost ten years now and during that time we’ve gone from having a single product, aimed at HR and learning professionals, to a range of different client solutions aimed at a range of different audiences with different needs. Over that time we’ve learned some interesting lessons about how certain ways of categorising our content can lead to a better user experience.

This time around, we decided to get two reviews of our content. One by an expert information designer from our partners at Storm ID, and another by the users themselves in a card sorting exercise.

Card sorting is used by content providers all the time to find new and better ways of presenting their offering to their users. From Amazon categorising its products, to the major news sites categorising their features and articles, it’s a well established method of getting a valuable insight into how users think about content and look for it.

From these two exercises we got a few very clear recommendations for reorganising our content:

• clearer, more direct labelling
• smaller chunks
• better ways of filtering the content
• easier ways to find similar content

Since then, our Editorial team have reviewed every single piece of content we have and restructured our products  to accommodate the feedback we received. Even after we introduce our new look toolkits, we’ll be constantly reviewing the feedback we receive to improve on this vital part of our users’ experience.

Low fidelity prototyping

My favourite phrase of the whole process: low-fidelity prototyping. Which was just Craig and Shelagh’s (our wonderful designers from Storm ID) fancy way of saying drawing pictures on flip charts.

We knew what features and functions we wanted, but we now needed to get a clearer idea of how these would work. Craig and Shelagh drew pictures. Lots and lots of pictures.

Following the low fidelity prototypes, we very quickly settled on a design that seemed to work best from all our user personas’ perspectives. We could see Algie, Harry and Bertha all using the site in ways that suited their own personal internet habits. Craig and Shelagh then worked up the sketches into wireframes, basic visual guides to the whole interface design of the product.

The wireframe is a very basic conceptualisation of the finished product. Its main purpose is to check that all the navigation and supplementary elements of the page are in the right place and named properly. No images are used, and no colour is present so that designers can get an idea of how colour needs to be used to draw the users’ eye. As an example, our wireframe for the homepage looked like this:

The next step was to find out exactly what our users would think about the new designs.

User Testing and Eye Tracking

The ultimate test of a new design is to put it in front of the people that use your products and find out what they think. Our web designer, Rob, had created an online, interactive version of the designs that Craig and Shelagh produced. It wasn’t a fully functioning prototype, but it was a functioning website with some content placed inside example toolkits. The idea was to get a feel for what people thought about the new look, how they used the site, and whether the new information architecture made sense.

We carried out usability testing with 10 people: some were regular users of our toolkits, while others had never seen them before; some were ‘Algie’ type users, while some were ‘Harry’ type users. They were greeted by an independent consultant and given a series of tasks on the prototype website. We got their feedback through their comments but also through eye-tracking so we could tell exactly what they were looking at.

The results were fascinating and we were certainly glad that we carried out the testing. Despite it being a regular feature of many sites, we found that having any navigation on the right hand side of the screen was almost completely ignored by our users. We also got great feedback about some of the language used on the site for certain features, especially where it was ambiguous or overly ‘web 2.0′. Finally, and most importantly, we got some very useful insights into how to best use colour on the sites to highlight certain navigation and search elements which we will now be able to pass onto our clients when designing their sites.

The Polishing

With all the feedback we had, Craig and Shelagh were able to polish up the designs with choices of colour, typography, icons and other graphical and UI devices. When they were finished, we had something that looked like this.

All that had to be done now was turn the design into a fully functioning web application

For the rest of the series on the GoodPractice Blog, follow the links below:

1: Re-inventing the GoodPractice User Experience

2: User Experience: Planning and Requirements

We've got a live one... Introducing Eden Tree

 Eden Tree goes live.

We've worked with Good Practice, the UK's leader in toolkits for Leaders and Managers in business for over five years. Regular readers of the blog may have followed Owen Ferguson's posts on the redevelopment of their site's User Experience, a project we completed earlier this month.

Eden Tree is a product ten years in the making. While Good Practice's established toolkits cater to Leaders and Managers, Eden Tree is a new concept, making it easy for Learning and Development professionals to access toolkits quickly and cost-effectively. The target audience includes a wealth of Human Resources professionals who are tasked with employee development, but need a centralised destination with all the relevant resources.

The website's design and build is informed by our previous work on Good Practice's marketing site, and has developed from our consultation and well-established business understanding. The features we've delivered include extensive search functionality, rating tools and a range of 'off the shelf' workshops.

Well done to the project team for all your hard work!

Chrome's Developer Tools vs Firefox's Firebug Part II

Back in June 09 I wrote a post about which tool was better Chrome’s Developer Tools or Firefox’s Firebug. You can read that post here.
In that post I concluded that Firebug was still at the number one spot, but one year on, is that still the case?

Firebug

At the time of my last post by version of Firebug was at 1.4.0b2, at the time of writing this post I’m now using 1.5.4
 
Firebug version 1.5.4
So has much changed in Firebug? Well not much really! There has been some improvements, like better XHR support and stability improvements. My thought process is that Firebug has been a polished product for some time now and how many more “features” can you really add. Hats off to the guys who put Firebug together!
Now, there may be some of you out there that are currently screaming at your screens as you read this saying things like “There as been loads of changes: There’s this and that and what about this…”. This may be true, but the reason I have not noticed any changes is, quite frankly, I haven’t been using Firebug!
“What did you just say? You don’t use Firebug?”
Nope, I don’t use Firebug and that is because Chrome’s developer tools has become my number one website developer tool.

Chrome/Webkit

Well there is no surprise that the version numbers have increased on Google Chrome; Google are renowned for fast development and Chrome is no different. Last year I was using version 3.0.190.4, now I’m using 6.0.437.1
The first benefit is that the developer tools are built right in to the browser; no added extension to install.

Features

I can finally dock the tools into the main browser window! I know this seems strange but when the tools first came out there was always a button that said “Dock into Window”, however It never did anything.
 
Chrome Developer Tools docked in main window
Elements

Just like Firebug I can explore the DOM and manipulate the elements, change CSS.
Resources

I can explore all my resources and see if there are any errors. I can also see the Headers for each resource on the page.
Scripts

No developer tools would be complete without a good JavaScript debugging tool…life saver!
Timeline

Can’t say that I’ve used this much, but still very useful none the less. You can see a timeline of what the browser is doing as well as seeing the memory consumption. This would be very useful if you had a AJAX heavy application.
 
Memory timeline
Profiles

You can record the CPU Profiles for your site. This is good for your inner geek! If anyone has found a good use for this please leave a comment, and I'll see if I can fit it in to my workflow!
Storage

This allows you to view any local storage that the site may be using. Viewing your Cookies is very useful, but what is most impressive feature, and something that Firebug does not have (yet), is being able to view your HTML5 Local Web SQL Database.
What is even cooler is that you can run SQL Script against your database and the “editor” even has auto-complete on your statements.

Web SQL
Audits

Audits gives you recommendations on optimizing your website.
Console

Just like Firebug the Console outputs any Errors or XHR calls etc.

Added Bonus

What is also very cool is that you can install Firebug Lite as an extension for Google Chrome, so if you just can’t do without Firebug you can download the extension here.

Firebug & Chrome Developer Tools running in/on the same website

Who Wins Now?

Well, a year ago I said, and quote: “Firebug! ….Maybe Chrome will win in the end!”
The “end” is now!
Chrome has come a long way and I love it as a browser and now it’s a Web Developers best friend. I no longer open Firefox (It’s not my job to test for cross browser compatibility).
Is Chrome perfect? No, and I still want better XML viewing support, but gone are the days of heavy sluggish browsers…. what’s that you say? You’re viewing this post in IE? What IE6? ;)
Roger Chapman

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