This month I’m going to be talking about User Journeys: what they are used for and how to do create them.

User journeys – what are they?
It’s not hard to imagine what a user journey might look like if you hadn’t seen one before. We’re talking about how people using your site travel through it: the pages they land on, the decisions they take once there and the impact of those decisions on what happens next.

We’ve all experienced good journeys and bad ones online: some make a complicated process easy and painless, allowing you to sail through to the end with barely a thought, whilst others are infuriating and force you to re-enter details, send you off down blind alleys or simply fail to get you to where you wanted to be no matter how hard you try.

The difference between the two can often be something very simple. It might be something to do with semantics: calling something that we’re used to seeing every day something else, just to be ‘cute’. Or it might be that the logic of every possible outcome hasn’t been thought through properly. Maybe we’re forcing people to give us more information than is necessary. Often, the order with which we ask people information can be enough to send them running to the hills. 

A user journey is a step-by-step diagram that shows each part of the process through the site, using visual sign-posts to group things together and identify the danger areas where particular attention needs to be paid.

If you’re creating a new service or a new product, it really is only by plotting user journeys, that you can be confident that you’ve thought of everything and that your solution is the simplest one you can come up with.

Seven considerations for plotting a user journey
1. Use your Personas

Last month I wrote about creating Personas. This is definitely a good place to start: even if it’s only to work out how existing and potential customers will have different goals. The likelihood is that your Personas will be more complicated than this, you may have a variety of stakeholders who need to achieve different things.

2. One diagram per outcome
We think it’s easier to create a different diagram for each key goal or expected outcome. Within that diagram there might be multiple routes that people take, but essentially you’re looking for a single final outcome. An example might be getting someone to sign up for a free trial of a product (as in the image above from our recently launched Schedule App).

3. Show each step of the journey
Don’t leave anything to chance – we want to try and think through everything that a user might do and what decisions he or she will take.

4. Logical grouping of steps
Deciding whether to go for a free trial or subscribe to a service straight away: they are two different steps, but they should be grouped together to give the people working on the site a shorthand reference that these things are linked. In a user journey with 20 steps, the more you can arrange things logically, the easier it will be to use.

5. Pain points
Pain points are something we talk about a lot when it comes to the user experience. There are some things that will be a joy: choosing which colour of shirt they want. But there are other things that will potentially turn them off: logging in when they’ve forgotten their username, or entering their credit card details. Where there is a pain point – make the box red or stick a big warning sign next to it. This will remind everyone that this needs special consideration and thought. 

If things aren’t working well with an existing site, the pain points are probably the areas that need to be looked at first as they are most likely causing  the problems. It’s much better to spend your time making your pain points as simple as possible than introducing whizzy new functionality, however tedious that might seem.

6. Notes
Finally, make notes across the journey: assumptions, other considerations or 3^rd party functionality that may have an impact on what the user experiences.

7. Workshop
If you’re plotting user journeys as part of a workshop with all the stakeholders inputting their ideas, they can be sketched out in a down and dirty way, the use of Post-It notes on a wall work well for allowing people to consider all the steps and iterate.

Ultimately, it is always good to reproduce that working into an electronic format so it can be referenced by the designers and developers throughout the project.

Once we get into user testing, it’s always good to reference it against the user journey to check that the assumptions we made were correct and things like pain points have been effectively overcome.

Google+... that’s been around a while now hasn’t it? It’s hardly taken off as a social network but recently it seems Google have their sights set much higher than that. They know that they can’t compete with Facebook, but then they don't need to. Google are still the most used search engine in the world, they have more traffic than Facebook anyway, so why shouldn’t their social network revolve around that aspect of their platform? Well, Google have slowly been revealing that it does, and I’m here to tell you that it’s a good thing for your business. 

Combined with Google+ Business Pages, the whole Google platform can deliver more for you. It only takes 5 minutes to create a page so there’s really no reason not to. But what exactly will you get out of it?

Be Found Instantly

Not only are Google+ Business Pages another great channel to broadcast your business through, they are also an instant access point for users to reach you as a brand. For example, since the business pages went online big brands like Pepsi, McDonalds and Lexus have all signed up to the service. Users who want information or the latest news from those companies merely have to type + and the name of the company into the Google search bar.

Try it out now and you’ll see that as you type instant search literally offers you the Google+ page of that business, giving users an extremely fast way to access your social stream.

Obviously, if you’ve got a page Google will find that anyway but the Google+ integration with the search engine is just so fast and slick. It’s a service only Google can truly offer within the confines of their own platform and as users become accustomed to this unique Google offering (as we have done with so many others) it could become a winning feature.

Increased Search Ranking

Perhaps the single most relevant thing that will attract those of you who still mostly think of Google as a search provider is the ability of Google+ to improve your search rankings. There’s a new system at work to integrate with Google+ and it works like this...

Say, for example, I +1 something, a page, a product, a business (the +1 system can be integrated all over the web just like a Facebook ‘like’) and then you do a search for it. Because we’re friends (hello!), on Google+ your search results will have my relevant +1’s displayed. This means that users of Google get advice from their friends without even having to ask for it. An absolutely crucial marketing tool if you have a loyal fan base, allowing it to grow by subconscious word of mouth.

Additionally a friend of codegent who knows the guys at Google rather well recently told us that your Google+ page will be (can we say artificially?) promoted up the search algorithm for searches against your brand name. Its a very easy way to boost your search position and dominance of the first page of results.

Access to Your Customers Zero Moment of Truth

There’s been a long standing phrase in the marketing world, “moment of truth”. Traditionally this was broken down into two parts; the First Moment of Truth, when a customer sees a product they like and begins to gravitate towards it and the Second Moment of Truth, when a customer attains said product and uses it, reinforcing their belief that the product was as good as they believed it to be.

This traditional concept of these two moments is 100% accurate and has been proven over billions of sales of products worldwide since the dawn of the modern advertising agency. However, thanks to the connected world we now live in Google has assessed that there is another, more important, Moment of Truth which occurs through social media and dictates a huge proportion of peoples’ spending habits. As we now do more shopping online than anywhere else this makes perfect sense, why would we go out to do research when we have the largest compendium of human knowledge just a mouse click away? Not only that, but the benefit of the experience of millions of other customers.

This, is the Zero Moment of Truth. Gone are the days when you had to get a product home and try it out or luckily come across a good tester model of it in a shop to find out it’s real value to you. Social media doesn’t just drive peoples’ lives socially, though the name may allude to that. In reality Social media drives peoples’ opinions of everything, from football matches, to movies, to physical products. So if I were to be torn between two equally popular products, between Samsung and LG for example, not knowing what to do I might look to their social media pages. If one were to have several million more fans than the other it would certainly seem that their customers had a reason for acting in such a way and alter my perception.

That’s a high level example, but it can be equally important on a small scale, for a single product or campaign behind that product. If you publish a post (and there are over a billion a day on Google+) related to your product and it catches the right eyes it will spread. Knowledge of your product will expand and the hits on both your Google+ business page and that products own page online will increase, potentially exponentially. Many users will be experiencing a Zero Moment of Truth, proof by a large body of their peers that the product is good, appreciated, interesting.

It’s impossible to emphasise the importance of this effect to you and your business but Google are helping with that one too. They’ve introduced a feature called Ripples, which allows business people, marketers and general speculators to view the effect a post had, a sort of butterfly effect on Google+. Your post flapped it’s wings here and then what? You can see where it spread, to which users, how it spread on from them and the impact it had on your site traffic.The ramifications of this type of awareness are astonishing, allowing marketers to tailor their posts to mimic their most effective campaigns.

The simplest way I can summarise is - get your business on Google+. There’s never any telling how a new service or product will pan out but Google+ has a lot to offer you right now and you shouldn’t miss out.

If you’d like to know more about the Zero Moment of Truth and how it really drives your customers then Google literally wrote the book on it, which is a free download in all the common eBook formats and can be found at www.zeromomentoftruth.com.

What is Recurring Billing?

Recurring billing is effectively subscription modelling for businesses transacting online. You automate charging customers for a product or service at a predefined cost and schedule. There are two key factors involved in planning recurring billing.

1. The time span between charges that affects how you retain and acquire custom.
2. The access model - usually different price plans, options and possibly a freemium service, which offsets the cost of giving away a limited but free service against the profits of more likely upgrades.

Why is recurring billing good for my business?

A business relying on one-off transactions may initially bring in more revenue but will most likely struggle to retain the customer over a long period of time. Recurring billing usually results in a higher Average Customer Lifecycle Value (ACLV), a predictable income stream (Monthly Recurring Revenue - MRR) due to a combination of customer inertia and commitment as the relationship shifts from a purchase to opt-out decision and has more potential for up and cross sell as you have good reason to be in regular contact with your users.

In terms of valuing a business these patterns of predictable recurring revenue are hugely attractive to investors and purchasers as they can see genuine opportunities to scale and mitigate risk.

What the potential pitfalls?

The two major areas of difficulty revolve around the security of the sensitive information you acquire and the technical systems you need to put in place to automate these processes.

Security
Storing sensitive financial data about your customers presents you with massive security risk and plenty of legislative red tape to boot. Your servers must be PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliant which is costly and complex to achieve.

In addition to that you may be more susceptible to direct fraud as criminals often use free trial offers to verify stolen credit information.

You might remember the Sony PlayStation scandal in April this year when its systems were breached and the personal data of 75 million customers including some credit information and passwords were compromised. It brought the network down for several weeks and caused a public relations furore. Their systems were not fully restored until June and the trust of their customers was severely damaged. The whole episode is believed to have cost Sony £105 million. A security breach is not something to be taken lightly.

Technology
Building a recursive billing system quickly mounts up to be a considerable technical challenge (and therefore requires time and investment). Here is a quick brain dump of functions you will need to deal with:

• Daily invoice generation and account management
• Sending emails and dealing with spam filters, bounce backs etc.
• Multiple prices plans
• Credit card fails and re-attempts to bill
• Discount coupons and free trials
• Upgrades and downgrades
• Expiring cards
• Different currencies (potentially)
• Tax implications of multiple geographic regions (potentially)

A complex system like this is inevitably going to have errors and bugs in it at launch. Every system does. Will your early adopters tolerate this whilst you fix the problems?

On top of that you will have a system running that needs to be continuously up, processing data, being maintained and scaling in order to keep the engine alive and up to date. And of course you need to make sure it is secure! For an engineer’s perspective check out this blog from Freshbooks.

What recursive business model should you adopt?

Broadly speaking the model splits into Annual or Monthly billing cycles with free trials or “freemium” no cost limited accounts as a popular extension.

Annual payments give you more cash upfront, guarantee customer retention for at least one year and reduce invoicing and collection costs. However monthly payments are less risky for the customer who may not be keen on such a long upfront commitment or high cost. Monthly therefore creates a lower barrier to entry so you could see an increase in customer acquisition. Your sales process should shorten, as the proposition is less risky and more cost effective.

I think for most online businesses the monthly billing cycle is better for the reasons outlined above but also as it provides you with an opportunity to talk more frequently with your customers, make sure they are still using your service to it’s fullest potential, up or cross selling and reminding them you are here and happy to help.

With annual payments you run the risk that your customers may have completely forgotten who you are, or moved on from their jobs or decided to seek an alternative. There is also a legal implication (in the US at least) that if you bill on anything over 60 days you must send ample warning of the renewal, at least 30 days. This gives the customer more time to consider cancelling or shopping around. On a monthly billing cycle you can bill and email them the same day but as they should be used to receiving the emails this shouldn’t be too great a shock.

You could also consider a combo deal that has a monthly plan as well as a reduced annual option for those customers that know they will stick with your service and are happy to just to pay in one go and save some money. These customers are less likely to fall into the annual payment traps above.

A few golden rules for emailing your bill:

1. Always explain the charge. Remind them of the service they are getting and that it has been previously authorised. “You have been charged $XXX” does not cut it!
2. Don’t miss the opportunity to upsell or add value with marketing copy. A slight discount on the next product tier could be all it takes to bring more revenue in. Likewise a gift or a simple thank you could seriously impact your retention and reduce “bill shock”.
3. Make it super simple for the customer to access your customer service team. Preferably by simply replying to the email or with a clear phone number. This is really the point at which you want to be talking to them and cementing/saving your relationship.

What technology is out there to help me?

Over the last few years several companies have been launched to help alleviate the issues around recurring billing. These guys sit above payment providers such as Sagepay and do all the hard work so you don’t have to.

Chargify, CheddarGetter, Recurly, Spreedly and Zuora (more of an enterprise offering) are the major players in the space. Sadly most of them have quite poor UK payment gateway support so we plumped for Recurly for our apps who have been excellent. Spreedly also have good UK support and hopefully the others will catch up soon so you get a greater degree of choice.

Paypal have a recurring billing option but I would highly advise avoiding them despite the fact that getting setup is relatively painless. My reason? Poor support, random behaviour, tricky deep integration methods with a lack of features and customisation.

What you should be looking for in your billing partners, aside from price

• PCI-DSS Level 1 Compliant service - which makes verifying your own business’ compliance easy
• Support for your favoured currency(ies) and payment gateway
• “Grandfathering” of costs - a pledge to honour the deal you sign up to if costs change in the future
• Adherence for the Data Portability Standard to ensure you own your customer credit data
• A complimentary feature set or flexibility for custom elements to fit with how you want to run the accounts of your business
• Developer friendly tools such as well documented APIs and relevant code integration examples for your tech team’s preferred language

Phew, that was a longer article than I had planned! If you have any thoughts or questions on this please leave a comment below. Happy billing!

For the next few months I’m going to write a bit about User Experience. I firmly believe that User Experience shouldn’t be the dark art that some portray it as. There is no reason why good UX can’t be put into practice within a client company or by an agency (or both). Like most things, it comes down to common sense and an ability to think laterally – very laterally at times. Working with a professional UX expert can pay dividends, especially with a challenging content structure, and they will help you get to where you want to be quicker, but it's not impossible to get there yourself with a bit of time and thought.

The thing I love about UX projects is that it combines analytics with creativity. In many ways it is the bridge between the nerdy researcher and the wacky creative. Although in my experience, most successful agency people have a bit of both in them anyway.

One great way of focusing everyone’s attention on what they really need to  concern themselves about is the development of Personas. A persona is a (largely) fictional snapshot of a typical user. It can be based on research or, in the absence of research, instinct. It can be an ever-evolving tool that is updated as the project goes along and more insights and ideas are generated.

Of all the tools in the UX professional’s armoury, Personas are the least statistically valid, accurate or meaningful. So you might be forgiven for asking ‘why the hell should we waste time creating them?’. And in some cases there isn’t the need, the time or indeed the budget, to develop personas. However, in many cases it can be a great help.

What is a persona?
If you think about your business, you will be able to picture a typical user. That person might be your customer. But then, after a few moments you’ll think that actually you will have more than one typical user – what about returning customers? What about small customers vs large ones? What about suppliers, or potential employees, investors, or the press? What about customers who have radically different needs: maybe one needs some detailed product information but another just needs a phone number?

Personas help you get all these ideas into one, “at-a-glance” place. They are a visual shortcut that allows everyone to think about their range of different users without having to keep describing them.

A good place to start is to imagine each of your core audience types, give them a name, an age, a gender and a profession. It is counter-intuitive in our age of politically correct avoidance of stereotypes at all costs, but just run with it for a bit. In some cases, there may be some research data about users that can be employed, but if there isn’t you can still have an educated guess – remembering that this isn’t meant to be an accurate piece of data. 

Then consider how they consume digital media. Are they likely to be confident, need hand-holding, happy to explore or time poor? Are they going to be mobile? Do they like to interact using social media?  You should also consider what types of things they are going to be looking for from your site: do they just want to find something and move on, or do they want to be inspired or convinced?

Image courtesy of cxpartners.com

Bringing this altogether will give you a series of references that can be used at each stage of the UX process:

Developing user journeys: the personas act as a way of ensuring that the key user journeys have been considered

Task modeling: a way of understanding how users behave and reasons why they may drop out before they achieve their goal.

Content auditing: looking at the current/proposed content and checking it against each persona allows you to work out whether there are any gaps.

Design concepts: for the designer, having a sense (however artificial) of the different users provides a backdrop against which to pitch the creative.  

Functional idea generation: often having a persona will spark an idea along the lines of “you know what would be really cool?” It’s often only when you try and put yourself in someone else’s shoes that insights arise that you mightn’t have considered otherwise.

So it’s the third Thursday of November 2011, only 13 days from December and the undeniable “Christmas Season” that awaits us. Naturally in the world of the web agency it’s a very busy time of year. Several things are happening that contribute to this, firstly, every business that can make revenue from the Christmas season is attempting to fit in last minute updates to their digital presence. Secondly, most budgets will renew in January and eleventh hour ideas to use any remaining amount and capitalise on this year are being considered.

Which brings us to the subject of that big B word, Budget.

Many companies’ financial years are of course calendar years, which makes November and December months for planning - planning what to do with budget no one has actually got their hands on yet. Project briefs for whole new sites, web apps and major site overhauls fly around during this period and agencies are inundated with requests from both their long term customers and potential new business partners.

It seems like a period that should be conducive to synergy, ideas flow, budgets open up to accommodate them and deals can be struck. However this isn’t always the case as there’s a paradigm within this industry that needs to be stepped away from, the paradigm of the classic agency mindset. You see, people who work for agencies are generally very creative and therefore want to produce incredible work, something impressive, new, within the realms of “never been tried before”.

Clients on the other hand have a clear idea of what their web site/app needs to achieve and want creative ideas to surround that. It can be easy to slip into the mindset of competing on these fronts if not careful and it’s a big mistake, a throwback to a time when web agencies were “special”, when companies weren’t so technically minded and the agencies were needed.

Generally this classic idea of an agency lead to clients coming up with what they needed and agencies giving them a “big idea”, striving to reach the limits of their creativity and knowing they could command whatever budget they demanded.

This is a reality that could not last, it’s not the way Codegent operates and we’d like to hope we’re ahead of the game due to this, because there is an alternative. In fact there’s much chatter in our industry of late about adjusting the way in which we work with our clients, how agencies simply have to adapt nowadays to a new way of operating. Glue Isobar made this point very well at an agency conference recently, publishing an article hinting that there’s an emergence of a new operating system for agencies.

It boils down to the sentiment I’m alluding to here. Customers don’t always want a big idea, (some do, granted) but mostly they want you to listen to their needs. Most sites serve a particular purpose; ecommerce, social interaction, generating business and if you get hung up on the big ideas you can lose the core purpose of the requests being made of you as an agency. Clients will be living with the site you deliver them for the foreseeable future, they need it to be worth it’s cost, a long term revenue stream. Agencies want the short term revenue from completing that project and also the potential to flex their creative muscles. These two agendas are of course at odds with one another so how do you combat this problem as an agency?

The way to work in synergy with clients is simple, listen.

Understand the needs of your client's business, as well as the site they are asking for. If you understand their business you’ll understand why they have that brief, why they think they need those things. It may mean that you end up poking holes in the brief, pointing out what they really need and why it makes better sense for their business, but that’s the whole point. As an agency the goal should be to work  collaboratively with a client, act as their advocate and understand their needs, the desired journey and the end goal. If an agency can do this then the relationship will only blossom, the customer will trust the agency and vice versa.

There’s the classic trifecta on any project which works on a principle that’s basically 100% true. You have cost, speed and quality. If you focus on two of these you will make a sacrifice on the other but the way to minimise the impact of these is by knowing one another. Clients who have no idea what work is involved in production often focus on speed and they don’t understand why the length of the process is so great. As an agency who’s attempting to work alongside your clients rather than against them why not educate them in this process? Don’t belittle their lack of knowledge, increase it and you’ll work much better together, with even more of the trust mentioned previously.

I don’t want to blow our own trumpet too much, there are several agencies out there who work this way, taking time to understand each client and forming a lasting partnership on their projects. In fact the Glue Isobar article I mentioned earlier speaks to much of this understanding of the client. Representing them in their digital endeavours, rather than battling them for more creative “fun” stuff to work on. Most needs are simple and every now and again those big, fun, highly creative projects come along, but trying to turn every project into one of those is a huge mistake and will mean missing the mark more often than not. Listen to clients, really know what they want, then understand why they want it, after that you’re on their side and it can only deliver the right result.

In August I flew north to Chiang Mai to attend Barcamp, a geeky gathering held once or twice per year. Looking out of the window of the plane shortly after takeoff I was shocked to see an inland sea. As far as the eye could see, sunlight reflected back off the surface of the water, roads were submerged, small villages and temples had become islands.

Prior to this flight I had seen news reports on TV, but only when witnessed from the air did the extent and magnitude of the flooding hit home. On the flight back I kept a close eye on the water and followed it right up to the northern edge of Bangkok. Over the following weeks slowly but surely the water progressed south, swallowing industrial estates, university campuses, and whole neighbourhoods in it's wake.

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/11/thailands-disastrous-slow-moving-flood/100188/

By late October it became clear that those in power had little or no clue what they were doing. In scenes reminiscent of Monty Python, hundreds of boats were strung together and used to push the water down the river and out to sea. Daily there were assertions of "confidence" and reassurances inner Bangkok would be "100% safe". Once you have been in Thailand a while you learn that an assertion of confidence by someone in power means exactly the opposite. It was time to prepare for the inevitable. Bangkok was going to flood, and it wasn't going to be over in a few days.

We made a list.. sand bags, plastic sheeting, duct tape, boards, silicone sealant. I had nightmares about power cuts, or worse, losing internet connectivity! We sourced a generator, stored up water, and mentally prepared for the worst.

By now some of our team members homes were flooded or at grave risk of flooding. The water was putrid and they were forced to leave and stay with relatives. Our work continued without too much interruption thanks to distributed source control and a wide choice of communication options ranging from Skype chat rooms to Google hangouts.

Then one night it hit me. We didn't have to stay, we could do our best to protect the house then move our office. Once the decision was made we just had to work out on when to leave. I looked at satellite images of the flooding overlaid with elevation data and expert predictions. Based on my unscientific estimates it looked like we had about a week.

We booked flights and I found a few large houses in Chiang Mai and a reserve in the mountains. If you have to evacuate you might as well do it in style. Luckily I think we booked a few days before the main exodus started. As people left, Bangkok was transformed, the traffic jams evaporated and highways were lined for miles with parked cars seeking higher ground.

Moving our office isn't that hard. Everyone on the team has a Macbook and can live without hefty desktop computers. We packed a box with our office essentials:

• Mac Mini - This acts as our dropbox server for file sync with London
• Diskstation - Used for internal file share and backups
• Apple Airport - So we don't have to deal with unreliable or unencrypted wifi
• Android Phone - In case ADSL connection is unavailable we can fall back to 3G or EDGE
• Power strips with surge protection - You never know how many sockets will be available
• WDTVLive - Allows us to connect any old TV to our network
• Spare Macbook power adapters - More the better
• Network cables - A few short ones and a long one

Before leaving I setup some webcams and installed tracking software on the computers left in the office. If someone was to break in and make off with them we might as well have some fun tracking them.

The day the evacuation came was not without minor drama. Over night water had overflowed the canal and was within 500 metres of our house. In times of flooding a friend with a pickup truck is a friend indeed. Luckily our designer Nor had such a vehicle and that day was a saint coming through the floods to transport our family, luggage, and french bulldog to the airport.

Upon arrival I discovered my beloved laptop had been left outside the house! If you are a geek you will understand the terror this caused. Nor rushed back and thanks to the lack of traffic on the roads was able to return to the airport before our flight left. Phew!

Later that day she made yet more trips to the airport, collecting Jirasak from his flooded neighbourhood with his two cats and getting them out safely. We are all grateful for her help.

Once we arrived at the rented house in Chiang Mai we plugged in our network and settled right back into work. We spent a week working out of a house in the suburbs then moved to an amazing reserve in the mountains where we were reunited with the rest of the team.

We have been here for a week so far and its the best office I've ever had. The internet connection is a bit lacking but the view more than makes up for it. I grew up in Snowdonia,North Wales and so feel a certain connection to mountains. Waking up in the morning and watching mist roll over mountains while drinking your coffee beats commuting through busy city traffic any day.

I feel this break from our routine has been productive. We mix activities with long quiet periods of sustained focus. Fresh air, walks down country lanes, and wood fire under stars provides the perfect setting to discuss what really matters to us and has helped us define our strategy for the year ahead.

Next year be there floods or not I think we will return here. Arthur C Clark described a future in which knowledge workers have the privilege of working from anywhere. We are lucky to live in the future and yet we seldom get up from behind our screens to make the most of it. Just because we work as a team doesn't mean we have to be stuck in an office. If your team is small and your systems are lean you can work different.

We have one more week in Chiang Mai before we are scheduled to fly back to Bangkok. When we left I felt a little guilty leaving friends to face the floods but in retrospect escaping the mental stress and relocating the team was the right thing to do. The flood waters will recede and Thailand will rebound as it has done many times in the past. No amount of water can wash away the character, resilience, and pure ingenuity of the Thai people.

It seems the phrase "in the cloud" is used with great enthusiasm nowadays by just about every technology company around. Obviously the thinking is that people will respond with as much excitement at the idea. However, working in the tech industry it's become clear to me that only others in my line of work fully understand "the cloud" what working in the cloud means and what it can do for you.

So I'm going to take it upon myself this month to give a brief overview of cloud services, what they are, what they can do and what ones might be useful to you at home or work for everyday purposes.

So what is the cloud?

Honestly, it's tough to say exactly what the cloud is as the term is bandied around so much now and with various meanings. Boiling it down to the basic idea, "working in the cloud" is the facility to work online, with the item you're working on never really existing on the local machine but instead safely stored elsewhere. This gives you the useful ability to access your files from any computer as the machine you're working on is irrelevant as long as you're connected to the web.

As a quick aside I just want to point out that true "cloud computing" rather than "working in the cloud" means that a computer elsewhere does the brunt of the work for you, releiving the load on your machine. On an ongoing basis cloud computing like this is continuing to grow and will mean even low-end machines can run CPU and GPU intensive applications because all that power is coming from another machine, somewhere else in the world. Perhaps you'll even be able to get simple and cheap set-top boxes for your HDTV to allow tasks like this, much like the new service onlive does for gaming.

What services are out there and how can they help me? Overall there are loads, so I'm just going to cover a few of the big ones which are hugely popular and have practical everyday uses.

General Office Work

We all know what this means, documents, spreadsheets, the daily neccesities. There are two major cloud services that allow you to do all of this and luckily they're both free!

First off let's start with the market standard for editing your office documents, Microsoft Office, which has a really fantastic cloud based version called Office Live. Now Microsoft weren't the first to offer a cloud based Office alternative, they somehow let Google beat them to it but I'll get to that later. What they do have now though is a truly viable alternative to the full Microsoft Office Suite for desktop systems, which runs right in your browser. How do you get it? Go to www.live.com and sign in, it's likely you already have an account anyway as they have so many other online services. If you've been tolive.com before you may not have even noticed Office Live but hold your mouse over Skydrive and you'll get the option to start a new word, excel or powerpoint document. You can also click on your documents folder and view any documents you already have. I wont go into the specifics of what you can do with Word, Excel and Powerpoint as you probably already know, what you get here is a basic level of functionality which is instantly recognisable and usable.

So how does Office Live work seamlessly in the cloud? Well if you're on any computer at all you can browse to the site and use it. Your document is saved to the skydrive so you can log in somewhere else and carry on later. If you've got office 2010 then you can hook it up to your windows live account and work directly on documents stored on the skydrive too but with full desktop fuctionality. Lastly, if you have a Windows Phone then Office mobile on that also syncs to the skydrive and lets you work on those documents in the cloud too, so however you work and from whatever machine you can use Office Live.

Now onto the biggest competitor and the guys who very much got a head start in this arena, Google, with their offering of Google Docs. Google docs is over 5 years old now and like almost every other Google service is wildly popular. It offers much the same suite of services as Office Live, with a couple of differences.

How do you get it? Simple, go to www.google.com and sign in with your Google account. Then click Documents in the Google menu bar at the top of your browsing area. From here you're taken to a view which allows you to see all the documents you already have and arrange them by last viewed, date, etc. There's a handily big create button which allows you to select a kind of document to create and start from scratch, similar to Office Live you've got Document, Spreadsheet and Presentation types, which have nice basic functionalities much like Microsoft's offering. With Google docs you can also create forms and drawings too, which is a nice addition, they're pretty basic too but very useful, the drawing tool for example allows you to create basic sketches in 2D or 3D environments.

So how does Google Docs work seamlessly in the cloud? Just like Office live you can browse to the site and use it from any computer at all. You're document is saved with basically every edit you make, almost per letter in fact. So you can just close your browser and carry on when logging in elsewhere later. There's not a downloadable app for Google Docs, Google don't try to compete with Microsoft on the desktop Office software front. Google docs is entirely cloud based for home computers, so it's browser only. On your mobile handset it's also easy to access through the browser and works great on Android mobiles and tablets or iOS phones and pads. If you're on and Android device there is of course a docs app, making it even easier.

One final difference between Office Live and Google Docs is Office Live's inclusion of OneNote, Microsoft's handy alternative to opening a full office doc when all you want are a few notes. In the browser you can click to create a new notebook. You can then do this every time or open an existing notebook and just add new pages of notes, Windows Phone syncs this too, in fact it is the note taking app for that smartphone platform, so any notes you take on your phone always exist in the cloud. Finally Office 2010's desktop version sits OneNote in your system tray so you can call it up, jot a note and then hide it again quickly, syncing to the skydrive the whole time of course.

So why did I leave OneNote's cloud feature's last to mention? Because I'm about to talk about another great note taking app which is a good alternative if you don't need full office functionality but rather just cloud based brain dumps. It's simpler than Office Live or Google Docs but that's the point, some people will prefer simplicity, so here it is... Evernote!

Evernote has been around a few years now and there's a version of the app for all the major smart phone platforms as well as Mac and Windows. There's also a browser based "web clipper" as they call it. Evernote isn't comprehensive like the other two offerings, it aims to be a cloud based memory for you basically and it does it very well.

So how do you get it? Go to www.evernote.com and sign up for an account basically. From there you can start using the web clipper straigh away to jot notes that are saved in your account or add a whole webpage you want to read later to a note. Then, when you're out and about download the version for your smart phone too and you can do a lot more stuff like snap a photo which will sync to your Evernote account or add a document like a travel itinerary or map as a note. Best of all, the basic functions of evernote are free, you can get a premium version with more online space, note revision histories and a few more extras but the basic functionality will be enough for most private or business users.

So, onto another type of cloud service...

Basic, (no nonsense) Cloud Storage

The premise of this category is online storage for all your files, of any kind, so not just documents but whatever you want really. Ideally this should happen seamlessly and without your knowledge so you can just rely on it and get your files from anywhere, whenever you like. There are loads of these kind of services out there really but I'm just going to cover two which are widely considered the best.

Firstly Dropbox is probably the best known of the bunch and is just really smooth and simple, even for the novice user. So where do you get it?www.dropbox.com of course. Once you've created your dropbox account then download the client. You can get it for Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS and Blackberry OS and the install process is simple all round. After install sign in using the client and it will ask you to choose a folder on the local machine to be your dropbox folder, from this point on anything you add to this folder will be synced online.

What this fundamentally means is that if you install the client on each computer you use there will be a folder on all your computers which is always the same, all your documents on all your computers, handy right? So what if you're on a computer you shouldn't really be installing things on? Don't worry, you can log into your account on the website too and download any of your synced files and folders directly onto that computer, then when you're done with them upload via the website to update the files again. It's not as seamless but really does give you everywhere access to your stuff. Dropbox gives you 2Gb of online space for files but you can get an extra 250Mb by referring someone, up to a total of 8Gb for free. There's also premium options so you can pay for more space in staggered amounts or a get a huge, business size Dropbox.

Okay, so what's the alternative I mentioned earlier? Well it's another Microsoft product called Windows Live Mesh. Noticing the Windows Live theme among their products? Microsoft have been terrible at unifying their products in the past but in the last few years the Windows Live brand has been pretty well integrated if not marketed. As such this service ties in with the Office Live service I mentioned earlier, using the same account.

So how do you get it? Well there are versions available for Windows and Mac which you can download by logging into your account on www.live.comholding your cursor over the windows live logo and selecting the downloads option. Like hiding stuff don't they! Set up is easy, it's the standard Microsoft Live installer and will appear in your start menu or applications folder after that. The first time you run it you select a folder to sync and after that it does exactly that, syncs whatever you put in that folder to your skydrive and to whatever other computers have Live Mesh installed, Live Mesh can actually sync multiple folders which gives you pretty good felxibility. It's completely seamless like Dropbox, occuring in the background so all your files are always there, whatever computer you're on. If you're on a computer that doesn't have Live Mesh installed then you can also access your files through the www.live.com site in your browser by looking through your Skydrive page and downloading them and uploading files there. This merges well with Office Live as I mentioned before as if any of the files are spreadsheets, documents or presentations you can start editing them right there in the browser.

So there you have it, a few options to get you into the world of working in the cloud. As cloud computing is a huge growth market at the moment there are plenty more options out there but hopefully these productivity options ideal for personal and business use will get you started.

As a creative in a medium-sized digital agency, I often find myself juggling five different projects at a time. It demands concentration, finesse and a great playlist (I recommend Yuksek). I appreciate these moments, they create adrenaline and are hugely motivating.

When a big wave of work passes, and all the designs have been sent, it's suddenly a lot calmer at my desk. I call it the “waiting for feedback” period, or the “in between” stage. It can be great, but as someone who thrives on pressure, I don’t like sitting there with nothing to do. So I’ve come up with a list of things I do, that you may find useful.

You'll thank yourself later

Your personal library
When it’s hectic, you need things quick: photos, icons, buttons. Looking for them on a website, designing them, or picking them from another file costs precious time that you could be using more productively. So I bring them all together on the same PSD. Having everything together in the same place means no mucking around. Organise it like a pro and name all the layers. Doing this from the offset means you won't have to re-name each one of them on your final design... and we all know that’s a pain.

Be consistent with guidelines
Having all sorts of raspberry shaded colours for your links, or 5 different sized fonts, all fighting for their supremacy within your design, is always going to start looking like a dog’s dinner in no time. Templaters will be pulling their hair out on the development side if you present them with something inconsistent. So I create guidelines. A base on a photoshop file with the HTML colour codes, the font used, and the size for title, subtitle and content. Being as precise as possible, I use it for each of my projects instead of creating a new one. Then all I have to do is pick up elements as and when I need them.

Look forward

Wave your “availability flag”
When I’m not 100% work mad and I’ve finished my projects, I happily let my mind wander. This is the time to go for a walk around the office, wave your availability flag and be nosy. Designer mates might need help. Project managers may bring some new insight on future projects; or your boss might have some news on upcoming pitches.

Discover what's going on around you
Being up to date with what’s going on in the agency isn’t everything, it’s also really important to know what's happening outside the office in the fields of design, gadgets and informatics. Everything evolves so quickly in the digital world and technology is developing constantly. It's important to know what you are talking about and what is, and isn’t possible.

If I get any down time, I go hunting through my “Must read this!” bookmarks. Mashable, Smashing, and many other art/digital magazines are on the list. Igoogle normally has some tasty news. Thinking about what’s going on outside your immediate environment can pay dividends, Tmobile did this brilliantly with their adaptation of the Royal Wedding (around 23 million views) http://www.youtube.com/user/lifesforsharing?ob=5.

Hang around on your favourite design blogs and refresh your mind. Check out your competitors’ websites. And my personal favourite: awards websites. I'm always amazed by some ideas and it helps me think deeper and forget about boundaries. I am the design eyes of the agency; so if I find something great, I like to share it.

Open your mind, observe and learn

Watch out for great exhibitions
Plan your weekend. I am a pro when it comes to last minute planned weekends. Time Out London, Spoonfed and other websites are packed full of arty days outs. British people, you don't know how lucky you are being able to step in a museum for free. I had to pay a fortune back in France to access Beaubourg, le Louvres and le Musée de l'Orangerie, even with my Art student card! So now I visit exhibitions as often as I can: pop into galleries and practice street photography with my old Olympus. It teaches me to think about my shots and act with my mind rather than my finger. There is always a book shop on the way treasuring interesting books about Design, Art and Digital. Things you've seen, photos you’ve taken, people you've talked to, places you've discovered will all inspire you.

Ask Techies
I’ve never understood the distinction between designers and techies: after all we all do both, it’s just that my specialism is in the look and feel and theirs is in the build. Designers have to be technically aware and techies need to be creative - or at least they do in the world of digital. So, if I have an idea, however outlandish… I find picking a developer’s brain can pay dividends.

Back on the bench
In design, you need to be proficient in several softwares: Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, After Effects... and their versions evolves all the time. There are always new shortcuts, new actions, new filters... if watching tutorials is not enough it's time for a course. Constructively use some of your free time to look out for interesting courses to improve your current skills, or help develop new ones. Photography is great for being able to master all sides of a photo shoot. Yoga or strategy courses to calm yourself, focus, and inspire your inner temple. Anything that helps you discover the unknown, gives you added value and helps you enjoy life.

Projects immersion
Finally, one of my multimedia professors told us once to be passionate about your projects. That was one of his main criticisms, you must be able to understand the subject fully and you must produce a piece of design in complete symbiosis with its purpose, respecting its target. To illustrate his point he told us about a salsa website he was working on that made him end up in a ... salsa class (if you saw him you’d find that hard to believe). Anyway, I’m waiting for a luxury spa project.

So, immerse yourself in your project, become the target, read books and magazines around a subject, think about it all the time, become a geek.

Or... write an article and enjoy your downtime, however fleeting it may be.

The way we browse the Web has changed. People no longer only use desktops or laptop computers: they consume the Web through a multitude of mobile devices, sporting all kinds of screen shapes and resolutions.

The traditional fixed-width layout doesn't really cut it anymore. People expect to be able to view sites on their phones just like they do on their desktop computer. Sites need to adapt to these different browsers and screen resolutions. But what's the right way to do it?

The common response has been for sites to provide a mobile version as a nice little "extra". That's good, but it doesn't always mean the site will display nicely on an iPad or non-iOS mobile devices. This also often means developers will have to maintain two distinct websites, with their own sets of content.

Unfortunately, this doesn't scale well, and it restricts access to the content to only a few selected devices.

The better way to do it is with what we call Responsive Web Design.

The idea behind Responsive Web Design is that the websites' layout and design should adapt to fit any device that chooses to display it.

As Ethan Marcotte explains, "Rather than tailoring disconnected designs to each of an ever-increasing number of web devices, we can treat them as facets of the same experience. We can design for an optimal viewing experience, but embed standards-based technologies into our designs to make them not only more flexible, but more adaptive to the media that renders them."

This is why last week, codegent released a revamped, responsive and mobile-friendly website for our Learn Apps. The site is still a work in progress (there's a few things that need to be ironed out), but we think it's good enough to take a little tour today!

Learn Apps homepage as seen on a desktop browser

The homepage adapting to smaller resolutions

Here's the effect in video

The Learn Thai page adapting to various resolutions

Some small details that make the difference:

• One website "code", working on a wide range of desktop as well as mobile browsers (including Safari Mobile, Firefox Mobile, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini)
• The header "Our Apps" dropdown is automatically replaced by a Select dropdown for ease of use on mobile devices (ie. works with touch screens devices as well as non-touch screens devices).
• The iPhone and iPod will see an iPhone 4 capture of the apps, while Android handsets should see captures from a Nexus S
• The Contact form uses the JavaScript library called "Chosen" to make it easier for users to find and select apps/devices, by replacing the default Select dropdown with a custom dropdown with auto-complete search (on desktop browsers)

We invite you to go through the website yourself: www.codegent.com/learnapps and have a play!

We are quite pleased with the results so far, and are thrilled to offer more "responsiveness" in future projects! Let us know what you think in the comments.

The worlds of TV and the internet were once quite separate but now seem increasingly converged. We can easily watch TV on our computers using tools like iPlayer and 4OD and even stream TV live to your mobile phone using services such as Slingbox. And you can send content from your computer to your TV through AppleTV or just plug your computer into one of the inputs of your TV and use your remote to flick between the TV and your computer.

But this is really only the start. This is the convergence equivalent to humans inventing the wheel. 

We see the future of TV convergence being more than TVs having an Ethernet port on their back so they can plug straight into the internet. We see convergence as meaning platforms become nothing to do with the kind of content that you can get, but more about the use case for accessing content on that device.

So everyone will watch TV on their TV sets, their computers, their tablets and their mobiles. But your reasons for watching content on a TV might be different to why you would watch on a mobile: TV might be about getting a high quality experience that you possibly share with friends or family, whilst a mobile might be for getting quick bites of information whilst on the move.

In effect, the TV screen that sits in the living room will just be the best quality output in the house but will have the same functionality as a computer in that you will be able to access apps, browse the internet and send messages. 

So what does this actually mean? 
Well, we think that TV programming won’t be thought of as something that is only broadcast to a passive audience. Having a TV show that isn’t intrinsically linked with a variety of online services will be like showing a movie with no sound. 

Examples might be that you are watching the main TV screen in your living room and the presenter mentions a Tweet that someone has written. You click on the link that appears on the screen and it opens the hashtag for that subject in Twitter. But you don’t want Twitter to obscure the main screen, so you ‘flick’ Twitter to your tablet and watch it there. Someone references a historical incident and a Wikipedia reference appears, you decide to pause the show and read the wiki entry they recommend. This is really interesting so you pull up a couple of YouTube videos and watch those. 

Your wife moans at you:
“Can you just watch the programme or watch YouTube and stop surfing, you’re doing my head in”. So you flick the YouTube stuff over to your tablet and save it to watch later.  

The TV presenter introduces a chef who is going to make a dish. You’ve always wanted to be able to cook this so you add the ingredients to your shopping basket via your Tesco app that sits in your TV tray and it reminds you that you’ve run out of beer so you quickly scan the barcode of the bottle of beer you finished earlier with your phone and that adds beer to the same shopping basket.  The programme finishes and in the break, one of the adverts is playing a tune you really like so you scan it and add it to your Spotify playlist. 

How far away are we from this Utopian world?  
Well, services like YouView are scheduled to launch next year. YouView is a tie up between BBC, ITV and Channel4, but also BT and TalkTalk. The plan is that they will offer broadband integrated digital TV with on-demand anb catch-up TV services, but will also open content out to new providers who will be able to create their own content portals. Plus application developers will be encouraged to create games, tools and other services (I’m guessing like the iPhone has done).  So you can see, we are tantalizingly close.

Is there anything we need to start thinking about now then?
The answer of course is ‘depends’. But like anything that is new, there will probably be some benefit in being an early adopter. Nobody quite knows what this will look like, even the likes of the BBC and Channel 4 who are reaching out to digital agencies for content ideas instead of just sticking to traditional TV production companies. We will all have to start thinking more about our brands in terms of richer content. But also understanding that convergence actually means many more potential touch points. 

When we talk to brands today it is so rarely that they just want a microsite to support a single campaign: now it’s so much more about trying to find a clear roadmap through the many ways in which digital will support their objectives.