Process and Project Management

Ryanair gives its homepage a makeover

Ryanair was, and is, famous for many reasons; cheap flights, luggage restrictions, perceived sexism, a crazy boss, a refreshing approach to PR, and the list goes on.

But perhaps Ryanair was most famous as the poster child for the upsell, and the doyen of poor UX.

All this might sound harsh, but it is thankfully all changing. Michael O’Leary has been all over Twitter recently talking about forthcoming improvements, particularly to the web, and luggage restrictions, too.

And today, via its Twitter account, Ryanair announced the first stage of its website rebuild, the homepage, is now live.

agile innovation

The agile innovation imperative: agile grows up

Just about every marketer in every company wants to be more agile and more innovative.

The accelerated rate of change in markets, technology development and associated consumer behaviours is challenging every business to reinvent how they originate, commercialise and scale ideas.

In reaction to the growing demand for insight into how organisations are responding to this challenge, Econsultancy has conducted research into how companies are deploying agile thinking, processes and techniques in the service of continuous innovation and the rapid development of new products and services.

The result, our new Digital Transformation: Agility and Innovation Best Practice Guide, sheds new light on what is perhaps nothing less than a watershed moment.  

It looks at how companies are beginning to more broadly adopt agile principles beyond real-time marketing and agile development processes within technology teams, and starting to transform the fundamental way in which they work.

Six principles of psychology which affect analytics and decision making

The success of analytics within a business is not just about numbers, technology and processes, it’s about how we integrate between analysts and marketers. 

This was the thrust of a fascinating presentation by Suniel Curtis, Head of Web Analytics and Insight at Hays, formerly of lastminute.com.

Speaking at our Crunch event at the Truman Brewery, he set out six principles of psychology which affect analytics and decision making…

Cloggs responsive redesign: mega gallery

With 2013 the first year tablet shipments are expected to exceed that of PCs and also a year in which smartphone penetration reaches 64% in the US (Nielsen), responsive design is rightly this year’s hot topic.

Despite this, it seems a lot of big brands are playing catch up, with new research from Venda showing just one of the UK’s top 50 most visited retail sites (Curry’s) currently hosts a responsive website.

A quarter of websites analysed don’t have a mobile optimised site, and many retailers host their mobile site under a different URL structure to their existing website, which could be negatively impacting their SEO and affecting their efforts with analytics. 

As comScore estimates a third of all UK page views now come from smartphones and tablets, delivering a slick customer experience across all devices has become a massive competitive advantage for retailers.

To that end, I’ve been looking at the new responsive Cloggs website. 

The top three benefits of qualitative research in UX

Qualitative research ensures customer validation, clarity and a process when producing the products of tomorrow. It is possible to use qualitative techniques via a user centred design process to truly innovate whilst remaining agile.

The time and cost of qualitative research is often very small in the ‘grand scheme’ of product development.

Yet it is able to answer the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of which products should be created as opposed to just ‘how much’ attained from quantitative data, therefore yielding highly creative outcomes. 

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Seven reasons why .uk domains are a bad idea

The new .uk domains seem to be unstoppable, despite the many potential drawbacks for UK businesses and consumers. Here are a few reasons why I, and others, think this is a bad idea… There is no real demand for it The .co.uk domain works perfectly well for the country’s online businesses, and there is no […]

Six signs your project will fail

Project ‘failure’ is political. It’s about power. People with power get to define budgets and deadlines, to approve specifications, to assign teams. Thus they define the boundary between success and failure. Go outside the boundary, and your project fails.

The problem with politics is that it fuzzes our vision. We tend to see what we want to see rather than what’s really going on. That means we miss the early signs of failure.

And that, of course, increases the risk of catastrophic failure. If you spot the early warning signs, you have time to fix things before they become critical, before problems propagate. Miss those signs, and you sail blithely across the boundary of failure, never to return.

So it’d be nice to have some clear indicators that my project is heading into trouble. I can’t give you a magic formula, but here are some of the signs that make me nervous:

A step-by-step guide to RLSA and dynamic remarketing

The practice of remarketing has become increasingly common over the last couple of years, and a number of leading display marketing companies have developed some pretty advanced, highly tailored solutions for their customers.  

These are already helping many businesses achieve prolonged engagement with users who have shown intent on a given site.

Over the past few weeks Google has released some extremely useful new tools which help get closer to the competition’s offering, and open up sophisticated features to advertisers, no matter what the budget size.

The benefits and challenges of remote teams

Remote working is becoming an industry standard, especially among digital workers. However, many organisations are afraid of this departure from traditional working practices and are unsure how to manage it effectively.

Not too long ago Marissa Mayer CEO and President of Yahoo! surprised the digital community by ending Yahoo’s long running policy of remote working. 

This caused much controversy as remote working has become standard practice among many digital workers.

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