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Over four years ago I posted ‘Buy Cheap, Pay Later’, which warned of the perils of purchasing from discount retailers that sell cheap and support their low profit margin by a ‘sod you’ customer services policy. After 4 years of mostly positive online shopping experiences, it’s easy to get complacent and start drifting away from those online ...

I’m taking a respite from my recent glut of multi-touch posts and jumping back in to the web paradigm with one of my favorite ecommerce topics – the online checkout process.  An online retailer has asked me to solve the mystery of why a high number of shoppers are going AWOL during their checkout process. My concern is that I am ...

On multi-touch devices like Microsoft Surface and the SMART table multiple users interact with digital content concurrently.  These digital social experiences extend beyond a poke and a tweet as users interact face-to-face.  The success of these multi-user social platforms depends on the familiarity of the users, a cocktail of ...

Having read an article on how to increase one's productivity it got me thinking whether there is something missing from our design strategies. We want users to achieve their mental peak when using an application but what are we doing to encourage this?  Where is the Mental Strategy?  Research shows that mental performance is improved ...

  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 ...

At the Tesco wine fair the Microsoft Surface table turns from a bar in to a rich immersive experience for the wine enthusiasts to explore content though touch and natural gestures. The punters had their own take on the five Ss in tasting wine.  So as spit became swallow and their hand-eye coordination slowly declined over the day, you ...

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 ...

Momentum is building for self-service technologies in the real world.  Consumers are adopting these self-service interactions and interacting less with in-store customer services.  Online it's a different story as online shoppers want someone to talk to. In Future Now's 2007 Retail Customer Experience Survey, they recommend ...