Website Reviews 23 Aug

Volkswagon - The People's Reviewer
http://www.thepeoplesreviewer.com/

The People's Reviewer is a microsite developed by Volkswagon to show off it's new mini-SUV, the Tiguan. The microsite has an attractive home-made quality about it, though no doubt some designers spent a very long time achieving the 'under-designed' effect. The Tiguan microsite and subsequent landing zone on Volkswagon's UK site gives an enjoyable customer journey that is a nice addition to the UK automotive digital library. With a few exceptions, such as this Volkswagon site and the generally excellent Mini activity, this body of work takes itself a little too seriously and offers rather pedestrian customer experiences (see what I did there?).

So what's so special about The Tiguan activity? Well, it showcases the vehicle in mostly positive terms without resorting to the usual automotive cliches: sharpe angles, long twisty roads and heavy production. The Tiguan activity has taken a nice approach of putting the product in the hands of the people and letting them review it (hence the url). Armed with a new Tiguan and a digital movie camera, members of the great British public take an extended test drive and record their live experiences. These are then downloaded and the best one's shown on the website.

A voting mechanism is added to make it more interesting for site visitors, though this is my least favourite part of the experience. Whilst I enjoyed watching one video, and quite liked the second one, it all got a bit long for me. To revisit the site week after week voting on videos of several minutes is going to take up a rather larger part of the week than I am prepared to give up. Perhaps others feel differently but this seems to me to be asking too much of the audience. OK, there is a Win a Tiguan for three months competition, but that's not enough to get me playing all the videos and returning every week. What I'd have liked to see was a library of real people doing stuff with the car, like weekly shopping, picking up kids, changing the rear seat configuration, the car parking automatically (which features in some of the videos to great effect). Seeing how lots of real people enjoy (or otherwise) doing the stuff that I do every day would have been good. The site kind of offers that but it's organised to suit the competition rather than be organised to suit different uses.

No doubt Volkswagon know what they're doing and plenty of research drove (see, did it again!) their decision making in this direction.

When you click through to the main Volkswagon UK site, the Tiguan landing page opens nicely with the car driving into the frame and then parking itself. It's a really clever way to continue the customer journey and I particularly liked the vehicle going almost completely out of frame before reversing back into full view. So good. It nicely showcases the product and the killer feature (self park).

It remains to be seen whether this promotion captures the attention of suffcient numbers of target buyers and persuades them to try the car, however I think Volkswagon have done a lot right here. By using members of the public and providing a low-key video production, the statements made in favour of the vehicle by the test drivers achieve authenticity - very hard to do and extremely valuable.

Website Reviews 17 Aug

Fly Baboo
www.flybaboo.com

Baboo is an airline based in Geneva, Switzerland. They fly a couple of dozen routes, mainly south of Geneva. I noticed advertising for the airline whilst I was in Geneva airport last week. The thing which struck me first was the logo, shown here, which has neatly incorporated the Swiss national image (logo?) into the corporate logo. The 'B' of Baboo has been resolved with the cross of the Swiss flag in the cross of the first letter of the corporate name.

Some attempts at logos look contrived, particularly when a message is intended from the logo. Baboo, however have managed to neatly create an original logo whilst noting their relationship to Switzerland, without looking forced.

Having never flown with Baboo I can't report on their service quality, however looking at their website my impression is positive and I'm pretty sure this will carry through to their service delivery. The site is clean, neat and contains pretty well everything you need. One thing it does have that many more airlines could add is carbon offsetting in action. Baboo have added a 'baboo forest' section to their site which shows, in some detail, the levels they have gone to in offsetting emissions. In partnership with a site called Aquaverde they have arranged to plant around 7,000 trees (so far) in a designated area of the Amazon Rain Forest, in a concerted attempt at reforestation, working with local communities deep in the Amazon.

This is a nice touch and demonstrates tangible, proactive moves by the airline. Contrast this with the rather poor efforts of many (most?) other airlines. EasyJet, for example, it seems to me, are in denial about the impact of emissions and have filled their site with content about how little their planes pollute (compared to other fleets) and the contribution to global warming accounted for by air travel (small according to EasyJet). To me this rather misses the point and I'd far rather fly with an airline that was serious about doing something about emissions, rather than take the 'we're not as bad as some' approach. Is there anyone left who thinks another 1000kg of CO2 into the atmosphere is a good thing?

So, well done to Baboo, firstly for the emissions being front and centre, secondly for a nice site and thirdly for a great logo execution.

By the way, if you find yourself in Geneva airport, great food and drink can be had in the Montreux Jazz Cafe. That's 'Rob's Top Travel Tip' for today!

PS. At some point I will return to logo design and in particular 'Suisse' Design, as advocated by, among others, Josef Muller-Brockmann. In the meantime, here's a link to a top designer influenced by Suisse Design - Suisse Studio www.suissestudio.co.uk.

Website Reviews 31 Jul

Mini USA Motoring Citations
www.miniusa.com

Despite strong attempts to engage digitally, motoring sites have a sameness about them (a few notable exceptions - current VW activity in the UK seems particularly good). Sites share common attributes: high quality photograpy (from offline activity), 'build your vehicle' and get it priced, specifications and dealer finders, etc. A large number of sites also try to inject a sense of fun into their digital engagement strategies. Trying to be fun is hard, however, particularly if this is not an attribute generally associated with the brand. If 'fun' is a digital-only stance, it likely misses the target.

Mini succeeds digitally with 'fun' because fun is wrapped round the entire brand. For Mini, it's not an add-on to be cool online, it's part of the everyday presentation of the product portfolio.

The Mini USA site is very attractively designed and engaging. There are plenty of fun expressions of the brand and products, one of which particularly caught my eye - the Motoring Citation. This is a download-and-print-out pdf to place on other motorists vehicles. Designed to look like an official citation (of some motoring wrong doing) the citation in this example is actually a positive one. Commending the driver on good parking, smart wheels, real mud on a 4x4, etc. It's a bit of fun and nicely engages visitors and not a vehicle specification in sight. Even if one doesn't use the citation, it does, at least to my mind, secure in the visitor's mind the fun positioning of the brand.

It's hard to generate separation for products online, but this type of activity is a nice way to try.

Website Reviews 30 Jul

67 Days
www.orlandoinfo.com/67days

67 days is an idea thought up by Orlando Info, to promote the range of fun activities Orlando has to offer. They calculated that 67 days is how long you need to try everything entertainment-wise that Orlando has to offer. The competition is to find two people to spend 67 consecutive days entertaining themselves in Orlando. The lucky winners are required to visit the parks, stand in lines, ride the rides, see the shows, etc. and blog and tweet about their experiences. The lucky pair will start their visits on 27th August, under the rather cheesy title, "67 Days of Smiles in Orlando"

Presumably, the shine will come off Orlando even for the most enthusiastic visitors after something less than 67 days and it will be interesting to see how their spirit changes as the weeks go by. You can follow the activities via Facebook, for example, and see if their smiles remain fixed for the full 67 days.

The construction of the promotion is interesting as it taps into two great themes for online success - social media and online pr. The idea of two people blogging and tweeting their days away may not hold universal appeal but it will create an interesting body of content which hopefully achieves an authentic air - 'authentic' being one of the key attributes of social media in order to engage. At the same time, the promotion execution and the winners experiences are hugely pr-able. Instead of reading some dreary facts in a brochure about 117 roller-coasters in Orlando, you can read (and watch?) the winners as they experience roller-coaster 24 of 117, etc. This type of content and approach to publishing should generate plenty of links and consequently traffic. Plus there are signs of participation initiatives to keep followers engaged. As the promotion goes live, expect more options to get involved with the winning couple - from simply posting comments to (perhaps) building wish lists, ticking off places already visited, taking part in competitions, etc. These, if executed well, should ensure online success.

For the winners, it's a fantastic shop-window for a future career in travel journalism - 'have you any experience writing about travel destinations?', well, yes, 67 days of it, actually, generating 27 kajillion page views. It's a great launch pad for the lucky winners, if they decide to pursue this line.

Overall, a great promotion and smart use of online media. Doesn't take a big budget to execute but likely generates significant coverage.

Website Reviews 07 May

Lavish & Lime
www.lavishandlime.com

Lavish & Lime is a Canadian online retailer with a simple online catalogue. The design is fresh and easy to navigate. What makes Lavish & Lime particularly noteworthy is that they have become an early signer-upper of a "Name Your Price" service provided by a firm called Price Whispers. On the right hand side of the screenshot, the new service is right under the "Add to Cart" action button.

This is a neat idea to give consumers another purchase route. By letting a retailer know at what price a consumer would be prepared to make a purchase, the retailer gains some new information. How they act on that information would depend on a number of factors - item popularity, stock availability, discount implied, margin, etc but it is a new way of looking at pricing. As a launch retailer, Lavish & Lime probably gain some positive PR and attract some new customers, but beyond that, only time will tell if it works for the retailer. What criteria might be used to assess the scheme - rate of sale, average basket size, profile per customer, are some that come to mind, but perhaps other benefits will accrue such as higher email sign-up rates (or fewer opt-outs), less reliance on obvious deep discounting (which is generally communicated to all customers) and perhaps less reliance on couponing. So, overall, tactical discounting could net some nice gains to the bottom line.

When constructing a digital strategy, there are so many components to consider - channels to the customer, segmenting and targeing customers, managing propositions, managing campaigns, and so on. This potentially adds another variant to the mix. Keeping communications clear whilst engaging customers, turning browsers into buyers and improving overal marketing ROI are challenging. Only time will tell if this development makes that task easier or more difficult.

Website Reviews 16 Apr

National Lottery
http://www.national-lottery.co.uk/

Searching for Reasons to be Cheerful, with a nod of appreciation to the late, great Ian Dury, I fix on the impressive technological innovation that goes into display monitors. Until quite recently moving to high display resolutions on large screen monitors was prohibitively expensive for most people. However the relentless march of technology has led to large screens for all except those on the most modest of budgets. Imagine having a monitor big enough to display a full browser session and a spreadsheet side by side. It's great if you have had to (and I have) laboriously transcribe data from the browser window into the spreadsheet. Tasks like this are easier with more screen real estate.

Viewing the National Lottery site recently, it struck me that the designers must have had large monitors and high resolutions in mind when they set about the task of refreshing this site. Laptop users, particularly those with the new ultra-portable ones, are poorly served by many sites and the National Lottery site is a prime example. There are some sites, newspaper sites, for instance where vertical scrolling goes with the territory, so an hour spent on guardian.co.uk or timesonline.co.uk is an hour spent scrolling. That's fine - if you want to read the content, you have to scroll. The amount you scroll is related to the size of your monitor / resolution combo. There are other sites, however, where vertical scrolling is not part of the expected usage of the site - sites that perform a function and require a visitor to move between many different screens in order to complete a transaction. In these cases, excessive scrolling is a great inconvenience and largely unnecessary.

The National Lottery refresh is attractive in a corporate-take-no-chances sort of way, however it is very wasteful of vertical space. This causes repeated vertical scrolling as you are going through a transaction. Try topping up an account on this site, then buy a ticket. Observe how far down the screen the action button consistently appears. Move from screen to screen and the action button appears below the fold. If you're viewing it on a laptop with a couple of toolbars in your browser, forget trying to see the action buttons.

Generally, any unnecessary step you force on a user risks disengagement and that's not smart. When every visitor is precious, it seems odd that a major brand would create an experience so negative for a large part of their base. Of particular annoyance is when a field appears below the fold next to an action button: complete the field (say, number of weeks you wish to play) and before you can say "stop scrolling" the screen has scrolled up and you need to scroll back down to find the action button. I mean, really. It's because of a recaclulation, but there are better ways to deal with this.

I know that I can F11 and zap the browser headers but I shouldn't need 900 pixels of screen depth to fit in a "next" button, for heavens sake. Some sites, e.g. Amazon put action buttons above and below the critical content in the checkout process. On a recent visit to the National Lottery site I had to vertically scroll on all bar two pages through my transaction. Yet, the top of the screen is largely wasted. For the top third of the visible screen, there is virtually no content. What a Waste, as Ian Dury wrote.

Website Reviews 30 Mar

Gawker
www.gawker.com

When does a trend become a bandwagon? When does a scoop become old news? Answer: in the time it takes the average person to type 140 characters.

Yes, back on planet Twitter it's been a busy old week (and it's only Monday). It seems that Twitter has exploded and it's no longer a novelty to tweet (or twit as someone mistweeted themselves recently, to coin a phrase). Twitter is everywhere. Follow me on Twitter is this years must have accessory for all discerning websites.

Crossing over into mass media is no bad thing - it speaks to the utility value of the medium and the passion people have for it. Like text messaging, I predict this will run and run. It's unlike Mobile TV or Video Calling which are still clunky and expensive and never going to be mass market services, certainly not this year or next. Twitter is the new thing and here to stay. Let me tell you some highlights about my day on Twitter:

• An ex-colleague tweeted a link to a picture of himself following several hours spent in the icy hills over the weekend - not pretty.


• Another ex-colleague posted the following link with the comment - OMFG. I'll leave it to you to work it out, but the picture will give you a clue: London Underground Map (on a shirt). What were they thinking?


• The ever funny Mr Fry posted a picture of himself in a sarong about to enter a temple and a further pic showing sign next to the temple in wonderful Engrish stating the rules for entering the temple.


• There are endless celebrities Twittering and some have been shown to be less online than others, with stories of Tweet-by-proxy, whereby an assistant tweets the details of the star. Gawker on related topics is funny.


• And finally, again from Gawker, the home of all that is bitchy and clever, comes the story of Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team who was fined for slagging referees through Twitter and then used Twitter to post his further thoughts on the matter. I love one of the comments on Gawker: Mark Cuban is the guy I'd most like to punch in the mouth.

I really do love Gawker (and the twin publication Deasdspin) for their persistent pursuit of celebrity car smashes and the crazy members of the public in thrall to the cult of celebrity. But most of all, I love Twitter for bringing all of this stuff directly into my world. What does tomorrow bring?