Google changes Google logo for Dr Who 50th anniversary, in honour of Dr who Google has changed logo and added a Dr who game, more on this subject
Showing posts with label design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label design. Show all posts
Friday, 22 November 2013
Dr Who 50th anniversary
Google changes Google logo for Dr Who 50th anniversary, in honour of Dr who Google has changed logo and added a Dr who game, more on this subject
Wednesday, 4 March 2009
How do you implement an e-commerce strategy
How do you implement an e-commerce strategy?
What is e-commerce, what are Benefits and risks of having an e-commerce site?
e-commerce stands for electronic commerce and is a way you can sell goods or services over the Internet, e-commerce sites can be banks or shops
All you need to start an e-commerce company is at least one employee or your self but you don’t have to manage the shop all the time as you would a real or physical shop, you also only need the following equipment
Benefits
The benefit of having an e-commerce site is that it will help you in the economic terms of demand and supply.
Demand = People can buy your goods anywhere in the world and any where they are, for example customers who have laptops and a online connection or WAP/internet Compatible phones can buy goods from your website even when they are on a beach if they wish to.
Supply = You can sell your goods anywhere in the world, which means you can have an international market very easily, this will also mean your company will be a virtual worldwide company, as your company can be everywhere without really being there so you don’t have to spend money, on lots real estate in another country.
e-commerce makes it possible for people who work odd hours, people who have special needs and people who live in rural areas, to shop without leaving their homes or travelling a long way to shops and without feeling isolated.
If your company is in rural area you can still sell your goods without your customer coming to you in a remote area where people could not find otherwise.
If you are a manufacture you can sell your goods direct to your customer, this means you can cut out the middleman and make your goods more affordable to your customer and one such company who does this is Dell who only sells their computers online themselves.
e-commerce is very flexible if you move to a new country as a lot of people are doing you can still keep your company going without the need of closing your company and buying another company in your new country or starting a fresh again.
Risks
One risk of E-Commerce can be that customers sometimes are scared of putting their credit card numbers onto sites on the Internet because they don’t trust it, which is a entitled view to have, as you have to be careful who you give are credit card numbers to and that numbers can be easily intercepted.
The first cause why people don’t like using the Internet for shopping, you can do nothing about, as there will always be fraud on the Internet, the second cause why people don’t like using the Internet for shopping you can do something about by using secure 128bit encrypted channels to accept credit cards and stating that you use them.
The internet gives the customer more choice and the ability of searching for the cheapest prices all over the world which can easily become a risk to you as it will mean you have more competitors to contend with in highly saturated market, this means that not only do you have local competitors, you also now have international competitors though the internet offering cheaper products
The last problem can easily be over come by careful marketing and being on the internet yourself as if you are not on the internet you can not fairly compete with them, as being on the internet or not on the internet you will have the same problem. (Please see the marketing section for more information)
In the long run the benefits can out weigh the risks in the Internet market, as the Internet is getting more and more popular with people and you will get a bigger market than you would if you were not on the Internet.
Having said this you must think carefully about your e-commerce strategy because you can easily loss business by making silly mistakes, such as customers not being able to find you or not marketing your business properly.
But don’t let this worry you as these days if you don’t have an Internet presence and you are a business you are considered a “no body”, as not having Internet presence is considered commercial suicide, as you are not fulfilling your companies potential
Later in next parts of this section we will look at implementing an e-commerce strategy
Marketing
When starting a business you must understand the market you are in, this is true for any business on the internet or not, you must know your market to do this you must do research on it, read the Mintel report and ask people what they would like to see in it.
Find out if there are gaps in the market, in the book Internet Marking foundations and applications Carolyn Siegel says this:-
This means if you are going into one of these highly popular markets you have to except lots of competition and you need to except to spent lots of money on advertising and listings in Search Engines for top ranking.
Find out where your market is, what country is your market in is it in the USA or Europe or is it international, if it this international your web site needs to be multilingual, in other words any person in the country you are selling goods to needs to understand you
You need to choose appropriate language for the counties you are selling to for example it is no good selling goods in Germany if the words on your website are in welsh people are not going to understand you and so you will loss business.
Decide what you are going to sell, bearing in mind what you cannot sell (please see the Ethics of E-commerce section)
Adverting and search ability of your site
The next thing you must decide is how you are going to advertise your site, you can advertise in a number of ways if you are selling local you can send flyers out, or you can advertise on other sites, using banner programs which are available all over the internet.
You must also register your site with more than one search engine, this is how people will know where your site is and will find you, you can register your site with search engines in a number of ways, and the first way is to pay a company to register your site.
The next way is you can use software to automate the register process, in some search engines you need to pay money for top listings.
Another way search engines can find your site is to use META Tags, which are pieces of code at the top of web pages, which some search engines use to find sites by looking at the contents of the web page or site this makes your site easier to find.
Image and branding
The next thing you need to do is choose a branding and an image for your site; this will help people to know whom the site belongs to.
You can do this in a number of ways the first way is to choose a meaningful domain name i.e. the name of your company, for example Pepsi’s company site domain name is www.pepsi.com this is good for branding your site because everyone knows this site belongs to Pepsi because its in the domain name, it is also easy to remember as a address should be easy to remember.
An address should be something that is easy to remember, not to long as people cannot remember long pieces of information and the name must be relevant for the website.
The next way is if your company has a livery, is to use the colours of your livery in your website for example the Harrods livery is green so they use a lots of green in their web site but please remember people who are colour blind can not see green or red so don’t use these two colours for words as people will not be able to read your site, also some colours do not look nice together.
The web site it self
Of course the next stage is to choose how you are going to build your website; you can do in a number of ways.
The first way is to built it yourself from scratch, please note you only choose this option if you know how to built website with built in Java or Visual basic.net programming language, which are hard to do if you don’t know Java or Visual basic.net programming language.
An e-commerce site works like this first you talk to the interface website by putting all the information needed for your purchase, this then sends this data to the control program who processes the information, the data is then stored in a database if needed, sent to the company by email and sent through a transaction/payment gateway to a bank to get the money paid into the companies account this gateway can be either belong to the bank or third party such as world pay, pay pal etc (note the gateway company also can send the customer a confirmation by email that the transaction has been successful and send the results back to the control software, if you choose to build this e-commerce system your self, you will have to arrange for this gateway to be provided and how your program can talk to it).
When the control program has finished processing the data it send the results back to the interface website, which can dependant on how it was set up, display a thank you/transaction has been successful message on the screen (all transfers of the data in and out of the system are encrypted so that it can not the intercepted, and the customer is not aware of the full system. all the customer sees is the interface)
An Alternative solution to building this your self would be to use one of the companies offering hosting and online store building facilities, which you can build standalone trading site, using the building blocks they provide, which puts together all the technical things of how it works for you so you don’t have to worry about it, you can also use these building blocks and put them into a website you already have, so you can turn a existing site into a e-commerce.
further reading
Second Annual Report and Strategic Recommendations
November 2002
Published by the broadband stakeholder group 2002
Cybermarketing By Pauline Bickerton, Matthew Bickerton and Upkar Pardesi
Published by Butterworth Heinemann in 1996
Internet Marketing Foundations and Applications By Carolyn Siegal
Published by Houghton Mifflin in 2004
What is e-commerce, what are Benefits and risks of having an e-commerce site?
e-commerce stands for electronic commerce and is a way you can sell goods or services over the Internet, e-commerce sites can be banks or shops
All you need to start an e-commerce company is at least one employee or your self but you don’t have to manage the shop all the time as you would a real or physical shop, you also only need the following equipment
- computer (with web page editing software if you are building your own site)
- Internet service provider
- Modem or board-band router (most board-band service providers can supply the board-band router in the package
- Website browser,
- Access to a telephone line, either a normal line if you are using dialup or ADSL if you are using board band (unless you are using cable
- Email software if you are using a Internet service provider that you have to download emails to read
- Stock to sell
- Host to keep your website on (we will looking into this later on in this report)
Benefits
The benefit of having an e-commerce site is that it will help you in the economic terms of demand and supply.
Demand = People can buy your goods anywhere in the world and any where they are, for example customers who have laptops and a online connection or WAP/internet Compatible phones can buy goods from your website even when they are on a beach if they wish to.
Supply = You can sell your goods anywhere in the world, which means you can have an international market very easily, this will also mean your company will be a virtual worldwide company, as your company can be everywhere without really being there so you don’t have to spend money, on lots real estate in another country.
e-commerce makes it possible for people who work odd hours, people who have special needs and people who live in rural areas, to shop without leaving their homes or travelling a long way to shops and without feeling isolated.
If your company is in rural area you can still sell your goods without your customer coming to you in a remote area where people could not find otherwise.
If you are a manufacture you can sell your goods direct to your customer, this means you can cut out the middleman and make your goods more affordable to your customer and one such company who does this is Dell who only sells their computers online themselves.
- e-commerce makes it possible for your customers to access you 24 hours a day, all year long.
- e-commerce is also very cheap to run as we have already said all you need is a computer, internet access and some stock.
e-commerce is very flexible if you move to a new country as a lot of people are doing you can still keep your company going without the need of closing your company and buying another company in your new country or starting a fresh again.
Risks
One risk of E-Commerce can be that customers sometimes are scared of putting their credit card numbers onto sites on the Internet because they don’t trust it, which is a entitled view to have, as you have to be careful who you give are credit card numbers to and that numbers can be easily intercepted.
The first cause why people don’t like using the Internet for shopping, you can do nothing about, as there will always be fraud on the Internet, the second cause why people don’t like using the Internet for shopping you can do something about by using secure 128bit encrypted channels to accept credit cards and stating that you use them.
The internet gives the customer more choice and the ability of searching for the cheapest prices all over the world which can easily become a risk to you as it will mean you have more competitors to contend with in highly saturated market, this means that not only do you have local competitors, you also now have international competitors though the internet offering cheaper products
The last problem can easily be over come by careful marketing and being on the internet yourself as if you are not on the internet you can not fairly compete with them, as being on the internet or not on the internet you will have the same problem. (Please see the marketing section for more information)
In the long run the benefits can out weigh the risks in the Internet market, as the Internet is getting more and more popular with people and you will get a bigger market than you would if you were not on the Internet.
Having said this you must think carefully about your e-commerce strategy because you can easily loss business by making silly mistakes, such as customers not being able to find you or not marketing your business properly.
But don’t let this worry you as these days if you don’t have an Internet presence and you are a business you are considered a “no body”, as not having Internet presence is considered commercial suicide, as you are not fulfilling your companies potential
Later in next parts of this section we will look at implementing an e-commerce strategy
Marketing
When starting a business you must understand the market you are in, this is true for any business on the internet or not, you must know your market to do this you must do research on it, read the Mintel report and ask people what they would like to see in it.
Find out if there are gaps in the market, in the book Internet Marking foundations and applications Carolyn Siegel says this:-
“The most desirable international markets are also the most highly competitive practically in north America and western Europe”
This means if you are going into one of these highly popular markets you have to except lots of competition and you need to except to spent lots of money on advertising and listings in Search Engines for top ranking.
Find out where your market is, what country is your market in is it in the USA or Europe or is it international, if it this international your web site needs to be multilingual, in other words any person in the country you are selling goods to needs to understand you
You need to choose appropriate language for the counties you are selling to for example it is no good selling goods in Germany if the words on your website are in welsh people are not going to understand you and so you will loss business.
Decide what you are going to sell, bearing in mind what you cannot sell (please see the Ethics of E-commerce section)
Adverting and search ability of your site
The next thing you must decide is how you are going to advertise your site, you can advertise in a number of ways if you are selling local you can send flyers out, or you can advertise on other sites, using banner programs which are available all over the internet.
You must also register your site with more than one search engine, this is how people will know where your site is and will find you, you can register your site with search engines in a number of ways, and the first way is to pay a company to register your site.
The next way is you can use software to automate the register process, in some search engines you need to pay money for top listings.
Another way search engines can find your site is to use META Tags, which are pieces of code at the top of web pages, which some search engines use to find sites by looking at the contents of the web page or site this makes your site easier to find.
Image and branding
The next thing you need to do is choose a branding and an image for your site; this will help people to know whom the site belongs to.
You can do this in a number of ways the first way is to choose a meaningful domain name i.e. the name of your company, for example Pepsi’s company site domain name is www.pepsi.com this is good for branding your site because everyone knows this site belongs to Pepsi because its in the domain name, it is also easy to remember as a address should be easy to remember.
An address should be something that is easy to remember, not to long as people cannot remember long pieces of information and the name must be relevant for the website.
The next way is if your company has a livery, is to use the colours of your livery in your website for example the Harrods livery is green so they use a lots of green in their web site but please remember people who are colour blind can not see green or red so don’t use these two colours for words as people will not be able to read your site, also some colours do not look nice together.
The web site it self
Of course the next stage is to choose how you are going to build your website; you can do in a number of ways.
The first way is to built it yourself from scratch, please note you only choose this option if you know how to built website with built in Java or Visual basic.net programming language, which are hard to do if you don’t know Java or Visual basic.net programming language.
An e-commerce site works like this first you talk to the interface website by putting all the information needed for your purchase, this then sends this data to the control program who processes the information, the data is then stored in a database if needed, sent to the company by email and sent through a transaction/payment gateway to a bank to get the money paid into the companies account this gateway can be either belong to the bank or third party such as world pay, pay pal etc (note the gateway company also can send the customer a confirmation by email that the transaction has been successful and send the results back to the control software, if you choose to build this e-commerce system your self, you will have to arrange for this gateway to be provided and how your program can talk to it).
When the control program has finished processing the data it send the results back to the interface website, which can dependant on how it was set up, display a thank you/transaction has been successful message on the screen (all transfers of the data in and out of the system are encrypted so that it can not the intercepted, and the customer is not aware of the full system. all the customer sees is the interface)
An Alternative solution to building this your self would be to use one of the companies offering hosting and online store building facilities, which you can build standalone trading site, using the building blocks they provide, which puts together all the technical things of how it works for you so you don’t have to worry about it, you can also use these building blocks and put them into a website you already have, so you can turn a existing site into a e-commerce.
further reading
Second Annual Report and Strategic Recommendations
November 2002
Published by the broadband stakeholder group 2002
Cybermarketing By Pauline Bickerton, Matthew Bickerton and Upkar Pardesi
Published by Butterworth Heinemann in 1996
Internet Marketing Foundations and Applications By Carolyn Siegal
Published by Houghton Mifflin in 2004
Blogged with the Flock Browser
Saturday, 14 February 2009
human computer interaction
HCI (Human Computer interaction)
Human computer interaction is important when it comes to program design, system designers need to keep the user in mind when designing a system.
There are two approaches to designing a system:-
* System approach – design the system and get the user to adapt to the system this is wrong as it causes stress to the user, and can be seen as unethical approach to system design, as you are not thinking about the user as a person, you are only thinking about the technology aspect as the design
This method is a bad idea, as the system wrongly designed may make people ill, two many bright colours can give someone a headache
* User approach – design the system with the user in mind and adapt the system to the user, as the user has to use the system after all.
The latter approach is the right way to design a system, a big buzz word when it comes to HCI is usability, can the user use the system or website you have designed.
Below are some quotes about usability:-
Janice (Ginny) Redish and Joseph Dumas, A Practical Guide to Usability Testing, 1999, p. 4
Using the 5Es to Understand Users by Whitney Quesenbery
http://www.wqusability.com/articles/getting-started.html
Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think, 2000, p. 5
Jakob Nielsen, Usability Engineering, 1993, p. 26
HCI and Usability was though about a lot in the design of the system here are some of the things that was used in the systems design
Navigation is important; the user must know where they are going in the system a good way of doing this is by Visual cues for example if you want your user to print something use a picture of a printer etc
In a report called “an interpretive study of visual cues in advertising” the author Professor Sandra Moriarty says this about visual cues, the context here is in advertising but it can easily apply to computer interface design, this report can be found at http://spot.colorado.edu/~moriarts/viscueing.html
The link between the signified and its signifiers is established through the process of cueing, but how meaning is signalled and the role of cueing in semiotic interpretation is less well understood. One of the early theorists, Charles S. Pierce, categorizes the type of signification as iconic, symbolic, or indexical and these categories are useful in framing a discussion of cueing. An iconic sign, for example, looks like what it represents--a picture of a rose, for example, has visual patterns and details that resemble a real life rose. Iconic signs are literal and representational. An indexical sign, in contrast, is a clue that links or connects things that occur simultaneously in nature. Wilted leaves, for example, may signal that a flower needs watering; smoke signals a fire.
A symbol, however, is more complex in terms of its cueing processes. A symbol is something that represents something else by convention or by association.
A cue, the signal that stimulates the production of meaning in a receiver's mind, is particularly important in understanding symbolic meaning. At the symbolic level, the cue is more than just a simple representation because it elicits a complex structure of meaning based on previously encountered networks of associations”.
The system you are designing should also use the idea of memory cues such as all the back buttons are in the same place on all the screens so you know where they are to go back to the menu screen.
In the book Usability Engineering by Jakob Nielsen the author talks about computer systems having the sense of have memorability built into them in other words when you use a computer system you should able to remember where things are in the system because they are in the same place throughout the system.
Another thing to think about when it comes to HCI is what colours to use for example it would not be a good idea to use red or green as text colour otherwise people with colour blindness would not be able to see it, so green text on a red background is not a good idea, also on large screens it is a good idea to use a blue colour
Here’s what Christine Faulkner writes about the subject in the essence of human computer interaction
“At the periphery of colour vision, the eyes is lest sensitive to red, green and yellow light and most sensitive to blue light, for this reason, blue makes a good background colour, especially where the screen is large”
Reference
Professor Sandra Moriarty, An interpretive study of visual cues in advertising
[www] http://spot.colorado.edu/~moriarts/viscueing.html
Whitney Quesenbery, Using the 5Es to Understand Users
[www] http://www.wqusability.com/articles/getting-started.html
Janice (Ginny) Redish and Joseph Dumas, A Practical Guide to Usability Testing, 1999
Steve Krug (2000) Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. New Riders
Jakob Nielsen (1993) Usability Engineering (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies. Academic Press
Christine Faulkner (1998) The essence of human computer interaction, prentice hall
Human computer interaction is important when it comes to program design, system designers need to keep the user in mind when designing a system.
There are two approaches to designing a system:-
* System approach – design the system and get the user to adapt to the system this is wrong as it causes stress to the user, and can be seen as unethical approach to system design, as you are not thinking about the user as a person, you are only thinking about the technology aspect as the design
This method is a bad idea, as the system wrongly designed may make people ill, two many bright colours can give someone a headache
* User approach – design the system with the user in mind and adapt the system to the user, as the user has to use the system after all.
The latter approach is the right way to design a system, a big buzz word when it comes to HCI is usability, can the user use the system or website you have designed.
Below are some quotes about usability:-
Janice (Ginny) Redish and Joseph Dumas, A Practical Guide to Usability Testing, 1999, p. 4
“Usability means that the people who use the product can do so quickly and easily to accomplish their own tasks. This definition rests on four points: (1) Usability means focusing on users; (2) people use products to be productive; (3) users are busy people trying to accomplish tasks; and (4) users decide when a product is easy to use.”
Using the 5Es to Understand Users by Whitney Quesenbery
http://www.wqusability.com/articles/getting-started.html
“Usability starts with a philosophy - a belief in designing to meet user needs and to focus on creating an excellent user experience - but it is the specific process and methodology that produce the real goal of usability. A new usability process starts by looking at who uses a product, understanding their goals and needs, and selecting the right techniques to answer the question, "How well does this product meet the usability requirements of our users?"
Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think, 2000, p. 5
“After all, usability really just means that making sure that something works well: that a person of average (or even below average) ability and experience can use the thing - whether it's a Web site, a fighter jet, or a revolving door - for its intended purpose without getting hopelessly frustrated.”
Jakob Nielsen, Usability Engineering, 1993, p. 26
“It is important to realize that usability is not a single, one-dimensional property of a user interface. Usability has multiple components and is traditionally associated with these five usability attributes: learn ability, efficiency, memo ability, errors, satisfaction.”
HCI and Usability was though about a lot in the design of the system here are some of the things that was used in the systems design
Navigation is important; the user must know where they are going in the system a good way of doing this is by Visual cues for example if you want your user to print something use a picture of a printer etc
In a report called “an interpretive study of visual cues in advertising” the author Professor Sandra Moriarty says this about visual cues, the context here is in advertising but it can easily apply to computer interface design, this report can be found at http://spot.colorado.edu/~moriarts/viscueing.html
“In order to understand how visuals signal meaning, we need to understand how symbolic meaning is produced.
The link between the signified and its signifiers is established through the process of cueing, but how meaning is signalled and the role of cueing in semiotic interpretation is less well understood. One of the early theorists, Charles S. Pierce, categorizes the type of signification as iconic, symbolic, or indexical and these categories are useful in framing a discussion of cueing. An iconic sign, for example, looks like what it represents--a picture of a rose, for example, has visual patterns and details that resemble a real life rose. Iconic signs are literal and representational. An indexical sign, in contrast, is a clue that links or connects things that occur simultaneously in nature. Wilted leaves, for example, may signal that a flower needs watering; smoke signals a fire.
A symbol, however, is more complex in terms of its cueing processes. A symbol is something that represents something else by convention or by association.
A cue, the signal that stimulates the production of meaning in a receiver's mind, is particularly important in understanding symbolic meaning. At the symbolic level, the cue is more than just a simple representation because it elicits a complex structure of meaning based on previously encountered networks of associations”.
The system you are designing should also use the idea of memory cues such as all the back buttons are in the same place on all the screens so you know where they are to go back to the menu screen.
In the book Usability Engineering by Jakob Nielsen the author talks about computer systems having the sense of have memorability built into them in other words when you use a computer system you should able to remember where things are in the system because they are in the same place throughout the system.
Another thing to think about when it comes to HCI is what colours to use for example it would not be a good idea to use red or green as text colour otherwise people with colour blindness would not be able to see it, so green text on a red background is not a good idea, also on large screens it is a good idea to use a blue colour
Here’s what Christine Faulkner writes about the subject in the essence of human computer interaction
“At the periphery of colour vision, the eyes is lest sensitive to red, green and yellow light and most sensitive to blue light, for this reason, blue makes a good background colour, especially where the screen is large”
Reference
Professor Sandra Moriarty, An interpretive study of visual cues in advertising
[www] http://spot.colorado.edu/~moriarts/viscueing.html
Whitney Quesenbery, Using the 5Es to Understand Users
[www] http://www.wqusability.com/articles/getting-started.html
Janice (Ginny) Redish and Joseph Dumas, A Practical Guide to Usability Testing, 1999
Steve Krug (2000) Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. New Riders
Jakob Nielsen (1993) Usability Engineering (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies. Academic Press
Christine Faulkner (1998) The essence of human computer interaction, prentice hall
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