eVŌC Newsletter Winter 2010

Welcome!
I hope you enjoyed the holiday season! During the last month of 2009, retailers pulled out all the stops to get consumers to spend - online, offline, and mobile! Many of us have been in web-related fields for many years now and I find it fascinating to reflect back on how different online shopping is today compared to 10 years ago. In our first article, Liz Webb writes on the Evolution of Online Shopping and who is changing with the times.

Heading into 2010, many marketers tell us that their biggest challenge is keeping the customers they have while acquiring new customers. In our second article, Stacey Crisler focuses the methodology spotlight on Competitive Research and talks about how to turn visitors into loyal customers and keep current customers invested with your company.

We hope that both of these articles are informative and are a help to you and your organization as you plan for the coming year! In addition to these articles, we also answer a very common question these days around mobile testing and research. What is your strategy? From all of us at eVŌC Insights - Best Wishes for 2010!

—Cheryl Jordan-Aguilera — Vice President, Business Development

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Featured Article: Evolution of Online Shopping

Faster, Better, Cheaper. This has been the mantra of the Internet since the late 1990s to save us time and money by shopping online versus in-store. And for over a decade, this mantra has held true. Consumers are hooked on online shopping. Despite the economic downturn in 2008, and leading into 2009, sales among the Top 500 online retailers continued to grow - increasing 11.7% - while total in-store retail sales only grew 1.4% according to Internet Retailer. In addition, among 41 of the 50 biggest retail chains, e-commerce revenue increased, while in-store revenue declined.

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Methodology Spotlight: Competitive Research

Competitive Research offers insights into how to turn new visitors into loyal customers and to keep your current customers invested in their relationship with you. It will provide an understanding of the current usability and appeal of your site in direct comparison to your leading competitor(s). By determining what your customers and potential customers think about you and your competition, you can position your site for success converting new visitors and retaining your loyal customers. In this article, we will describe two Competitive Research methodologies and provide examples of the types of insights that can be gained from this type of evaluation.

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Ask eVŌC

What are my options for testing mobile devices?

There's no doubt that mobile devices have become much more sophisticated in the past few years, so the need for a good user experience on a mobile device has grown just as quickly. Typical goals for testing mobile devices include the following:

• Identify potential roadblocks for customers accessing the site through their mobile device
• Evaluate the site's ease of use via mobile device
• Determine what tasks are most likely via mobile and how they may differ from the website

eV?C Insights recommends Mobile Device Usability testing to understand how your customers interact with your application on their mobile devices and determine what features need to be included in the mobile design to make it easier to use and increase adoption. Testing is possible on any type of hand-held product / mobile lab, and labs generally include the following set up:

• Two remotely controlled cameras that can be placed anywhere in a room
• Direct inputs from a respondent's PC (or device) at full VGA resolution
• Digital switching equipment to provide picture-in-picture display
• 32" LCD monitor in client viewing room
• DVD recording of all the sessions

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