Usability: Agile usability for rapid development

By Dr. Martin Hicks and
Erdeniz Hassan, lead
research consultants at fhios.
During an economic downturn, online vendors face tough decisions when allocating spending to website development projects and user experience research. With budget and resource constraints, creative and user experience agencies have had to be more competitive and cope with increasingly shorter project timescales, whereas the quality [...]

Turning Customers into Fans – the case for brand advocacy

By Jonathan Outlaw,
Business Development Executive
at fhios.

“I’m a Mac not a PC”….
Apple’s clever advertising campaign in 2007 showed one cool-looking bloke introducing himself as a Mac and an uncool bloke in a suit and a bad haircut introducing himself as a PC. Through a series of adverts, they discuss the shortcomings of the PC [...]

Measuring Usability: What to measure and how?

By Dr. Philip Rhodes,
Research Director
at fhios.
Historically speaking usability has focussed on the quantifiable aspects of the user experience, for example how long does it take a user to locate some content or complete a process, or which route do they use to complete an activity. Although these measures are useful, they do not capture the [...]

The future of online banking is going to be mobile so the banks better prepare for it

Anneli Olsen, MSc. MSc.,
Research Consultant at fhios.
About a third of the online UK population (10,9 million) is, according to comScore (http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2215449/online-banking-goes-mainstream), currently using online banking services. As online banking becomes increasingly popular, the number of people accessing the internet using their mobile phones also increases. In fact many mobile phones are increasingly being designed and [...]

Is learning better or worse when enabled by Online Learning Environments (OLEs)?

by Gurvinder Sandhu, BSc. (Hons), Research consultant at fhios.
fhios thrives by ensuring that online environments such as sites, intranets etc are useful, accessible, usable and engaging. The main technique to providing recommendations is to understand how individuals engage with these sites, and to determine who and why they use them and also any limitations that [...]

New generation of ‘recession shoppers’ turn to the internet

New generation of ‘recession shoppers’ turn to the internet – 81% of respondents to a recent survey into the shopping habits of recession-hit consumers say they now do online research ‘most of the time’ before they buy a product. Source Internetretailing.com 1 May 2009

Facial expressions and the new wave of usability research

By Jeremy Wyatt,
Senior Research Consultant
at fhios

If the eyes are the window to the soul, is the face the sky-light to the unconscious?
Computer programmes have become sufficiently reliable to accurately detect spontaneous facial expressions, and thereby infer emotional states. Could this be applied to commercial research? The answer most likely, is yes.
In the world [...]