A couple of people asked me to explain my thoughts in a bit more detail, so here’s the series of Tweets with an explanation beneath each. It’s also a nice excuse to attempt to resurrect my personal blog which I have little time for these days…

Why do travel companies with really simple product use such complex reservation systems? Makes no sense, simple ones do exist

— Steve Evans (@steve_e) March 31, 2012

Now this is a real issue affecting many travel companies. They get sold a reservation system which has far too many features and too much complex functionality for their needs and then struggle to implement it and end up having to support it for years. I’ve seen this really impact companies bottom-line and I’ve seen reservation implementation projects that have taken seven or more years (to move from an old res system to a new one).

Not only can it be a tough migration, cost them a lot of money, mean they require more specialist staff, but in many cases the travel company ends up using just a fraction of what the system can offer them. The usual excuse will be that ‘we’ll grow with/into the new reservation system’ and yes that can happen, but generally it doesn’t and parts of it become redundant.

Simple reservation systems do exist! The amount of tour operators and small tour providers who are adopting or looking into really complex dynamic packaging systems is crazy right now. So many of them just don’t need something so complex and company-changing. So, the moral is; make sure you really do need all that fancy functionality before you commit to what can be years of pain.

The amount of money a travel company loses while adopting a new reservation system is directly proportionate to said systems complexity

— Steve Evans (@steve_e) March 31, 2012

This one’s a given. The more complex the system the harder it is to adopt it fully. Switching from one reservation system to another is like open heart surgery for a travel company. It needs the most highly skilled and experienced project managers and the business has to be ready for the changes that are coming. It impacts almost every department and is one of the biggest change projects a travel company can undertake. So, make sure you really need the ‘all singing, all dancing’ reservation system as the change is likely to cost you money unless it’s very well-managed (it needn’t cost you anything at all if the project is well scoped, managed and implemented).

The amount of money an online travel company makes is directly proportionate to how easy and intuitive their website is to use

— Steve Evans (@steve_e) March 31, 2012

And so we move to the online travel angle of all this complexity stuff. In my experience, the easier your website is for your customers to use the more money you will make. Of course, there are a lot of other factors that go into making money in online travel (product, marketing, technology, people, process etc), but the user experience (UX) of your website, and particularly the booking process or flow, is key to your financial success. Some asked why this Tweet was in this series, the reason is that so many online travel companies over complicate their website front-end purely because they have a super complex back-end reservation system…

How easy a travel companies website is to use is often inversely proportionate to how complex their reservation system is

— Steve Evans (@steve_e) March 31, 2012

Which leads nicely onto the next Tweet. Just because you have a million-and-one features in your reservation system doesn’t mean your customers want to see/use them all. Just because your internal staff love using the mega-advanced search feature in your reservation system doesn’t mean your users will. Expose just what is necessary to give your visitors a great, simple user experience and make it easy to find product, price it up, compare it and book it – that’s all your users want.

There are of course some reservation systems on the market which make it very difficult to hide complexity and some have an all or nothing approach to the front end via templates or an API. Just don’t buy one of these, there’s no excuse for this and when exposing reservation system booking functionality onto the user interface you should be able to expose just as much features as you feel your customers want/need (but please test what they might want/need!).

And so I tired and finished off with a few simple lessons to bear in mind when you’re in the business of selecting or implementing a travel reservation system which will be exposed on your website.

Lesson one: Just because your backend is complex it doesn’t mean your frontend has to be. Simplify, make easy to use = sell more

— Steve Evans (@steve_e) March 31, 2012

This is important, repeat five times a day if you’re in the middle of an online travel web project involving a reservation tool.

Lesson two: There are some travel reservation systems that should be avoided if you ever want to sell well online

— Steve Evans (@steve_e) March 31, 2012

I can’t and won’t name ones to avoid (it’s not my place). The lesson here is to make sure you use a robust process to choosing a travel reservation system and ensure you get the right people in the room (I’m always available to help) to quiz the potential suppliers. It’s not difficult to weed out the one’s that are overly complex or inflexible!

Lesson three: Keep it simple stupid. The end

— Steve Evans (@steve_e) March 31, 2012

Let this be your mantra.

Other things worth noting. Involve a user experience or usability expert/agency as early in the project or selection process as you can. I find it can help to show the reservation system supplier mock-ups of the UX you want to be able to support so they can see how flexible you need the system to be. Make sure the API is fully flexible and you can let your customers book their travel and holidays the way they want to, not the way the reservation system dictates.

Let me know your thoughts, I know there’s a lot of travel folk with strong opinions on these issues!

8. Ranking Manipulation
Do not manipulate ranking or relevancy using techniques like repetitive or misleading keywords or metadata.

Meanwhile the Google+ support pages say:

When you share something publicly, it may appear in search results.

So, some updates from Google+ can be fed into the organic search results and Google are nervous about how this will be used by the less reputable SEO’s out there and expecting it to get gamed (at least to begin with). It’s likely there will be some level of gaming going on as people try to take advantage of another way to dominate the first page of organic results and while Google work out how best to deal with this new feed into search.

It will be interesting to see how they fit into search results, whether Google puts them with the Twitter or Realtime results, or whether they are properly integrated. Personally, I hope they keep them separated slightly, at least to start with, while they get to grips with the way people use Google+.

The tweet sucked me in and so I read the blog post (great reading!).

It got me thinking:



Would it ever be possible to create a sentiment index capable of measuring the value or popularity of a web page based on multiple signal factors.

There are so many factors to consider. Not only are there Links (in the traditional sense) and Likes (in the Facebook sense) there’s also Tweets and Retweets, Diggs, bookmarks on Delicious or Diigo and semantic relevance (the actual relevance of the textual, or other, content) of course. Semantic relevance in fact is key and one of the problems with search and SEO in general is that relevance has been gamed to death by Links and black-hat SEO practices. When we’re trying to discover content relevance is possibly the most important signal, even more so (or at least as important) than how popular a web page is in a lot of cases.

If I’m really trying to discover the best content I can though there is another signal which can act as a really powerful sign of positive sentiment, actual user engagement with a piece of content. High engagement with a web page suggests people like it and find it interesting or useful, to me that’s a powerful signal that indicates I might want to read it or interact with it too.

If you could combine semantic relevance with Links with popularity (from Likes etc) with actual level of user engagement you could have a very powerful sentiment based approach to discovering content relevance. I love the way Steve Rubel says in his blog post that with Likes ‘this new network of signals allows content to find you, rather than you having to go find it’. That’s the key to good information discovery, reversing the trend from being the content hunter to being hunted by content that is relevant, popular and (in my opinion) has high levels of engagement.

Content which is Liked a lot isn’t necessarily relevant, linked to a lot or engaging…

How would you measure engagement across the whole web? I hear you say. Good question. Obviously most web pages and pieces of content have analytics which have data that suggests a level of engagement from its users, but that’s never going to be opened up to make it a useful signal for information discovery (or maybe Google could use Analytics data?). Could a company like Hitwise (provider of analysis and data on website usage), who has access to web users click stream data at the ISP level, use data on engagement to create a new form of signal to add to the mix? Unlikely as it’s not their business model and also privacy laws could get in the way.

I don’t know the answer but I have had fun thinking about it today. Love to hear your thoughts! Do you think we’re moving to a web of Likes (we may well be in the near term) or are we more likely to move to a web of Sentiment where multiple signals of relevance, usage, popularity and actual user engagement are key?

Photo by retinafunk on Flickr.

It pains me every time I meet a web designer or developer who has no appreciation of how their work can affect a sites SEO, or a marketer who has no appreciation of how important content is and how users like to consume content online or a content producer with no appreciation of how users like to search on Google and how content affects your ranking.

I’m not saying that your designers should be SEO experts, far from it, I just believe that your website would be more effective if the people in charge of certain disciplines had an appreciation and understanding of how that discpline affects and complements the others. This goes for agencies too; personally I wouldn’t hire an SEO agency who didn’t at least understand the relationship between SEO and content and code and how getting all of them right is (generally) going to deliver better results for the business than just getting one of them right (or performing all three activities in total isolation).

In my experience, brands with internal web teams benefit more if there is a mutual understanding of what each area does and how they can impact each other. This can foster better relationships, improve personal development opportunities for staff and result in better results and ROI from all of your web activities. Let your teams share knowledge, present to each other what it is they do and why they need help and understanding from other disciplines and try to encourage a passion for the wider web and digital world in general (believe me, enthused staff are happy and productive staff).

Once you foster a culture of learning and sharing in your organisation you will soon begin to see the benefits. Nothing is more pleasing than seeing developer staff get up from their seats and head down to marketing because they have an idea that will improve a social media campaign landing page or for a content writer to go and talk to your search staff before writing copy for some new pages.

Building and managing websites requires ongoing input and understanding from all disciplines otherwise your website will never perform as well as it could have.

I could only find two decent shots which were both taken over Siberia en route to Japan (on separate trips). That could be something to do with the amazing scenery and frozen landscape but more likely it’s because I get incredibly bored on longhaul flights. Enjoy!

The Siberian landscape is incredible particularly the snaking, winding frozen rivers

Guess the airline?

So, how a user experiences your brand online can have positive or negative bearings on how they feel about you. This is going on even if you don’t have a website, don’t do social media or don’t actively do any online PR or advertising. Your potential customers are still having experiences that are linked to your brand in their own conversations and online journey whether you are actively involved or not. Wouldn’t it be better to establish your own presence so you can increase the positive sentiment and work to address the negative?

Now the above is a powerful chart! If 97% of web users could have their purchase decisions positively (or negatively) influenced by your online presence doesn’t that make it something worth investing in?

Again, the above is hugely powerful. If an online experience can turn someone into a new customer then why aren’t you working your digital assets to your advantage?

As I said I aim this at those industries and brands who seem to lag behind the adoption curve when it comes to the web (I’m thinking of a lot of the financial services industry, a surprising amount of the FMCG sector and some service industries). The general message here is that you have a lot to gain by improving your presence on the internet, making it easy to interact with, useful to those you’re trying to attract and engaging so people want to interact.

Suggest you read the report which is available online here.

Financial services companies such as banks, analysts, brokers, traders and insurers all have a duty under various laws to keep copies of all communications with clients, customers and counterparties (particularly when it comes to discussions giving advice). This paper trail is required to ensure there’s no bias, insider dealing, dodgy advice or plain lying going on. The problem is, social networks like Twitter and Facebook don’t allow these companies to archive and store their communications making it very difficult for them to become meaningfully involved in actual two-way conversations.

This is a recognised issue now in the industry and even regulators recognise the potential benefits of being able to properly engage online. FINRA (the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) in the U.S. has set up a Social Networking Task Force (discussed at their annual meeting recently) to explore how regulation can embrace these of technological advancements rather than hinder their adoption.

Now, while I can understand the need for due diligence, archiving, transparency and regulation around financial services, surely the industry needs to grow up and realise it’s time to ease these shackles and allow the conversation to flow. The conversation is happening anyway; in phone calls, cafes, restaurants and bars financial industry execs meet with clients, colleagues and competitors and discuss exactly the kind of issues that generally should be on the record (this has been happening for ever). At least if these types of conversations happen online they will be archived by Google if nothing else. Surely the regulators need to accept that their industry will be dragged kicking and screaming into the sociable world of online media whether they like it or not? Time to adapt in order to adopt modern methods of social business communication! The benefits of allowing the conversation to happen far outweigh the negatives.

Of course the other way this could play out is that Twitter and Facebook provide a way for these types of companies to engage through special accounts which allow for archiving and provide regulatory compliance. Personally I don’t think that would be a good thing as it would place restrictions on their interactions and mould financial services use of social media rather than letting it grow and adapt organically. I’ve had many conversations with people from financial services on just this topic and they agree, they don’t want to be restricted and want to use social media as any other business would.

Wrong I’m afraid. This article from the Guardian demonstrates just how broken the news industries approach to the online experience is. It seems that news websites are guilty of something the big portals used to suffer from (going back 7 or 8 years here and thinking of Yahoo, Excite and Lycos in particular), linkitis (an overwhelming urge to shoe-horn as many self-referencing links as possible into your homepage). News sites average 450 links on their homepage and some have as many as 5,447 words (The Daily Mail) on a single page. The worst offender it seems in the Mirror which has 94% of the total words on its homepage (1,182) as part of a link. That’s utterly ridiculous!

That’s an astounding amount of linkage. I have no idea how humans are supposed to comprehend or make use of that level of information overload. Visually it looks a mess, hierarchically it makes little sense and usability wise it’s plain madness. How on earth is a user supposed to find what they are looking for in that maze of links and references? Perhaps they’re not. Maybe the people who run these websites believe that by populating pages with self-referential (internal) links they are helping entice (trick) users into clicking just one more page and thus increasing the chances of getting more ad revenue. The value to a user of some of these links is questionable.

Roll on engagement ads. The sooner we get away from page-view and click metrics and start to make publishers accept being paid on engagement (or at least more meaningful metrics) the sooner these sites will have to address their user experience and stop practices such as this. Swamping a page with links helps nobody. It lowers engagement in your site, dilutes traffic down routes you maybe don’t even really want them to go, cheapens your content and destroys the user experience. Stop eating yourself news and start thinking about your users and what they might actually want! Otherwise you’re going to end up losing more of those valuable eyeballs as your users increasingly prefer consuming news through other methods (readers, desktop apps, social networks).

Anyway, this is a work in progress so liable to change and will end up on my ‘about’ page soon.

1. I will engage
   On Twitter, my blogs, by commenting on other blogs, on Facebook (although not that often anymore), on forums and anywhere else I feel the need, I will engage and converse with those I find interesting, I choose to engage with, who want to listen and want to converse with me.
2. I will share
   On Delicious, Flickr, Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Dopplr (where I am at least as fast as a duck) and many more places. I like to share stuff I find interesting and would love it if you share your interesting stuff with me too. Discovering other peoples interesting content is really important and a great way to find new information.
3. I will tell the truth
   Everything you read/hear from me will be the truth, at least it will be the truth to me at the time I say it, should it become less true as facts emerge please don’t blame me I was only acting on the information at hand. At times I may say something that isn’t strictly true; usually, and if you are so skilled, you will be able to spot this as sarcasm or an attempt at humour.
4. I will not feed the trolls
   Spam, troll comments, purveyors of hate and negativity; I will ignore and most likely delete you where possible.
5. It’s my opinion
   No one elses. Not my clients, my employers, nor my friends, nor my families. This is me, and you get the option to take me or leave me. If at any time I do broadcast someone else’s opinion I will be sure to let you know.
6. I will debate
   At times I may disagree with you. That’s healthy, don’t be upset, I expect you’ll agree or disagree with something I write at some point too. Discussion and debate is good!
7. I might follow you
   If I find you particularly interesting I might elect to follow you around, subscribe to your feeds, check out the stuff you share or connect with you on professional networks. Don’t panic, I’m not a stalker it’s a compliment!
8. If you follow me
   Please play nicely. I welcome all to follow me but please try to ensure we have at least something in common, it could be pretty futile trying to converse with me otherwise. This point goes mainly to brands and sales people; don’t spam me its a conversation I’m looking for not a barrage of brand heavy waffle or a sales pitch.
9. I might unfollow you
   Don’t get offended. Chances are that you either haven’t got enough in common with my interests or that I can’t take the volume of content you produce. If you think neither of these is the case and you don’t spot something in number 8 that sets alarm bells ringing then try talking to me, perhaps I missed something or you never tried to really connect…
10. I may bore you
    I reserve the right to be boring and mundane at times and there’s a good possibility that sometimes you might not like the content I produce or share. That’s fine, just move along, I won’t take offence.

I get really unhappy with business people who want me to help them deliver business goals with no regard for the UX! I’ve come across this in almost every business I’ve worked in, often from the product owners (which is why this slide get’s dusted off every now and then and I talk them through the benefits of UX).

It’s also a great way to get clients or the business to understand that taking a UX centered approach and delivering a top user experience doesn’t have to compromise their business objectives and is often the best way to deliver them!

Of course, everyone’s approach is different and their aim may differ from mine, so what does your UX end game look like?