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  Ouch! Received an email this morning stating that playful design has no place in a business context!   For the last 3 weeks a small team of us have been working on an Enterprise Search application and we finally have something to show for our hard endeavours.  Our Microsoft Surface Enterprise Search demo rears it's pretty ...

Before the festive holiday kicked in I intended to design a Microsoft Surface Card Sorting application but time ran out without me getting much further than a brief conversation over a cuppa with some user experience colleagues and a few very rough and barely legible sketches of the application interface. To make sure I don’t ...

Friday 28th November saw the first of the Virgin Atlantic VJAM workshops to brainstorm ways to improve the travel experience for customers.  Conchango took the Microsoft Surface unit along and I played guardian and host of this device for most of the day.  The attendees included travel professionals, experts in social media and ...

The report on the top 50 UK retailers customer services proposition is still in progress.  By progress I mean that all the criteria for evaluating their proposition has been recorded and I now need to review the findings to make some sense of it.   In the meantime as a light aperitif here's a preamble around the all-important Customer ...

I walked in to an electrical store this weekend to purchase a Cambridge Audio Azur Receiver but couldn’t find what I was looking for.  There were no sales staff around whatsoever to ask whether they had the item in stock, although a sign read ‘leave us a message and we will try to get back to you within 48 hours’. Sounds strange! ...

Am I one of the rare breed of eBay virgins who has resisted the allure of this auction site for over a decade?  If so, the clan is one man less as I was deflowered this weekend after years of resistance.  I finally succumbed to the charm of eBay as a seller tempted me with a delicious and extremely rare compilation CD (limited to ...

According to a new report by the Get Safe Online Campaign, one in ten online shoppers has been the victim of online fraud, each losing an average of £875.  Read the full report at http://www.getsafeonline.org/   We live in a shredding culture where we are continuously being warned of online fraud and ...

Poor online experiences impact conversion rates.  The conversion rate is a measure of the number of visitors who make a purchase directly as a percentage of total visitors. Clients generally regard this as the most important measurable metric so a common question I get asked is what are my top recommendations for rejuvenating flagging ...

 In a recent Design Review a client remarked that Search functionality should be positioned on the right hand side.  Their reasoning is that this is what other ecommerce sites do.      Search will succeed on either side providing the page is well-designed, so this remark gave me an interesting insight in to the ...