- Quinnie
Decoding Digital Trends
After 4 weeks late hours and weekends' hard work, I have finally finished this project. I have wanted to do this long time ago. I started taking screenshots, videos and photos of good designs I have seen in daily life since 2013. Now seems to be a good timing to finish this work when my headspace is conveniently in digital research. Since my day job is a consultant in a financial institution, this research has themes more oriented towards finance industry.
After a broad search, review, and analyse 550 items, and further slice and dice, I have summarised the findings in 12 themes, with 37 companies covered across 9 industries.
Here is a bit of teaser of what the 12 themes look like, with 1 example under each theme preview here. If you'd like to know the whole research findings, please contact me directly.
Theme 1: Customer needs centric sites: I put this as 1st theme because I believe an enjoyable digital experience should come with good intention for customers first.
Theme 2: Inclusive and accessible design. Accessibility is usually overlooked and patched up at later stage. I personally am guilty of not knowing accessibility well enough too, so I dedicated a theme just for this topic.
Theme 3: Navigation. Once you designed an experience with customers need in mind, and accessibility embedded, how would you make it easy for people to navigate through your site?
Theme 4: Compare information. A lot of our decisions are based on comparison, so making this experience easy is vital for customers to stay with you.
Theme 5: Content flow. How information flow between pages is important to reduce confusion.
Theme 6: Calculators. Money is a big part of our life, and calculators help us to sift through those numbers. But what really do we want out of those numbers? A good calculator would go beyond just a number's game.
Theme 7: Call to actions. How would you convince people to do something online? Nicely designed call to actions can help people make up their minds quicker.
Theme 8: Shopping cart. We are not unfamiliar with shopping cart concept, especially for online consumers. When the items you put into your shopping cart are more of a service than product, how is that experience like?
Theme 9: live chat. We all crave some personal assistance and customer care in our shopping experience, at some point of time. So how different companies use live chat online? Has it been done properly to achieve its goal?
Theme 10: Forms. No one likes to fill out a form but we often do it for one reason or another. So what is a good form experience like? and what are the tips to make it a better experience?
Theme 11: Innovative applications. There are more than what I can cover here, but here is a small collection of innovative applications that makes a difference to life and are able to generate sustainable growth.
Theme 12: Co-design with your customers. What steps and efforts would you take to enhance your customers' experience, by working with them?
There are more topics than I could have covered here, and I am sure you have seen some brilliant examples under these themes else where. Please reach out to me if you want find out the whole research findings, or if you want to share your stories, or propose any research topic and ideas.