Atlantic Business Technologies, Inc.

Category: User Experience

  • ABT Launches Quick Start Program for Cost-Effective Insight

    Data-driven insight. This phrase shows up so often in B2B content marketing that it’s nearly a clichĂŠ. The phrase inspire images of a massive enterprise having an army of analysts dig into huge masses of data and then present 90-slide powerpoint presentations about the state of the market. In short, data-driven insight seems complex, expensive, and time-consuming. 

    ABT aims to change that. Our new Quick Start programs make deep data-driven insight available to organizations of all sizes. From workshops to detailed reports, these 3-week programs give all our clients trustworthy and cost-effective digital insight at the right price for any company.

    “We designed our Quick Start program to adopt our in-depth discovery process—which we’ve used for large clients like NC.gov, Campbell University, and Global Knowledge—into a condensed and quick-to-execute format. It’s exciting to take our love of data analysis and make it more time- and cost-effective for all our clients.”
    –    Eileen Allen, ABT Chief Marketing Officer

    Here are previews of our first four Quick Start programs. Click each link for more information about how to begin.

    The First Four ABT Quick Start Programs

    Lean Website Discovery – Rapid insight to kickstart any digital project

    Our Lean Discovery program delivers data-driven answers to strategic technology questions questions. Our experts will deliver quick, cohesive analysis and documentation of the challenges and possibilities you face with any new website project. This helps prevent costly mistakes in implementation and sets up your site to be more successful and reliable over the long term.

    Application Portfolio Diagnostic – Deep report into your utilization of key business apps

    Our Application Portfolio Diagnostic helps you assess the health of your organization’s application portfolio. Using this structured, objective mechanism for collecting user feedback about your application suite, we analyze the effectiveness, criticality, and utilization of each application in your business.

    Digital Marketing Audit – Fast-action plan to analyze, execute, and evaluate digital campaigns

    Our Digital Marketing Audit reveals ways to improve your tactics, reduce waste, and increase your return on investment for customer outreach. Our proprietary, multidisciplinary approach examines your marketing program from the ground up—providing a 180-day action plan to improve your bottom line.

    eCommerce Launch on Shopify – Start your online store on an easy-to-manage platform

    Our eCommerce Launch on Shopify is a streamlined process that gets online stores set up and ready to sell on an easy-to-manage platform. In addition to launching your online store, this program offers a long-term analytics and marketing plan to maximize conversions over time.

    To keep in touch with our ongoing updates to the Quick Start program and other news from ABT, follow us on Twitter or sign up for our newsletter.

  • 5 Content Strategy Tactics for Higher Ed Sites

    Tips and Tech to Graduate Your Content to a Higher Level

    Your higher ed website is more than just text and images. Done right, your university site is a digital canvas that allows your users to find and enjoy the content and information they need. Done wrong, and your visitors will bounce from your school’s homepage immediately and just ask Google where the right content is hidden.

    Intro to Content Strategy is over. It’s time to advance your college website with user research, analytics, and technology that graduates your content to a higher plane:

    1. Study your higher ed audience(s).

    Great content strategy begins with user research. Google Surveys and Survey Monkey make it easy to gather feedback from the kinds of students and visitors you want. It’s also smart to run stakeholder interviews in and outside your university or school to learn more about potential improvements to your design and content.

    2. Higher ed users think, act, or learn differently, so give them options.

    Some skip the top-level navigation to click on images. Others lock onto your search function as soon as your homepage loads. You want to design an open content strategy so it’s easy for any higher ed user to find the right content no matter how they search for it.

    3. High-performers know the importance of testing their content.

    Even in an academic setting, nothing published online is meant to last forever. This makes it crucial to always measure the performance of your content so you know what to alter and improve. Even if you don’t run formal user testing, enable Google Analytics on your university sites to monitor how each page performs.

    4. Teach stakeholders to manage their own content—with governance.

    The more you empower each team in your college or organization to create, edit, and share their own content, the more you can think strategically about how to lead your organization’s outreach. This takes a flexible CMS with strong content governance and guidelines—for example, that’s why 7 of the top 10 universities in the world rely on Drupal.

    5. Design with search in mind.

    A huge portion of your users will arrive on your pages after Googling what they need. You want to make sure they find what they want by using accurate headings and subheadings based on a tested and approved taxonomy. Also, please don’t forget meta description text!

    Technology for Higher Ed Content

    At any stage in designing a higher ed site, there are a number of cloud-based tools available to make your strategy work easier. Content audit tools like Blaze can not only perform crawls of all your pages, but also make it simple for your entire team to share one view of any domain. This builds a powerful consensus on how to best optimize content across your site.

    And once you have the right content in place, you want to ensure it loads as quickly as possible. While you can’t control the bandwidth on your users’ Internet connections, setting up a good Content Delivery Network can cache your content and deliver better load times. We prefer Amazon Web Services CloudFront for our websites, but explore your options to find the right CDN for you.

    Finally, if you want stakeholders across your organization to contribute content, you need a platform that both facilitates publishing and enables flexible governance. GatherContent is our favorite example; this web application lets you rapidly produce new pages according to preferred templates, then define which users have editing and publishing privileges.

    If any of this inspires questions, our content strategists will be delighted to help you with advice. Just drop us a line and we’ll get right back to you.

  • How ABT Empowered Campbell.edu to Lead with Purpose

    How Can a Hidden Gem Become a Preeminent Private University?

    130 years after opening, Campbell University was an established presence in NC’s higher education landscape. The Baptist-affiliated private college had graduated generations of state leaders in business, medicine, and law. However, only 19% of American adults had even heard of Campbell University—and several of these incorrectly assumed the college was connected with the soup brand. If the university was going to attract elite students on a national scale, something needed to change. Campbell began this process by hiring a new president, J. Bradley Creed.

    [pull_quote]I have heard others describe Campbell as a hidden gem and the best kept-secret in North Carolina. They meant that as a compliment, but I want people all across North Carolina, the region, and the nation to know the Campbell name and to recognize Campbell as one of the preeminent private universities that prepares students to make a difference in the lives of others through work, service, and leadership. –J. Bradley Creed, President-Campbell University[/pull_quote]

    Because 97% of prospective students begin their college search by visiting that university’s website, Campbell needed its website to excite and engage students with a meaningful experience that captured the “feel” of Campbell’s campus and student life. It was also vital for the site to be easy to navigate across Campbell’s different programs as well as optimized for mobile users (mobile traffic to Campbell.edu had increased 1277% since 2011). This inspired the president’s new initiative: a major rebranding and new design for Campbell.edu to expand the university’s reputation across the country. The university chose Atlantic BT as their digital partner to handle the rebrand and site design. 

    [pull_quote]When we started our conversation with Campbell, what really helped ABT stand out was our proven process for tackling this kind of large scale initiative with multiple stakeholders. Our experience around user research was especially compelling. They had multiple stakeholders across their vast program offerings and alumni, and we wanted all of them to feel represented by the new site and brand. To make that happen, we designed digital surveys, brand workshops, interviews, and test groups to get a 360 view of Campbell’s identity. This in-depth research guided all of our design and brand work. –Eric Lloyd, Senior Business Development Manager -Atlantic BT[/pull_quote]

    Designing and Developing Campbell’s New Digital Ecosystem

    The scope of ABT’s redesign required a new navigation, search capabilities, and reimagined user experience (for both desktop and mobile). Our aim was to give Campbell.edu a new digital ecosystem that would help Campbell compete with leading universities. Key to this objective was the development of a strong content strategy—analyzing which pages, images, and videos would do the most to engage Campbell’s audience and organizing these assets accordingly. 

    [pull_quote]It all started with discovery. To create a content strategy for the new site, we worked with Campbell to identify and audit over 8,000+ unique web pages and construct a site architecture that satisfied the needs of the individual schools and their users. We put a lot of effort into streamlining the content, simplifying the navigation, and creating an experience that is logical and intuitive. –Tyler Slocum, Digital Marketing Strategist -Atlantic BT[/pull_quote]

    Throughout this process, it was essential for ABT to have a deep understanding of Campbell’s needs and regular communication with their stakeholders. Campbell’s internal marketing team visited the ABT office at least once a week throughout the project; we also used our Mavenlink project management tool to regularly share research results, user test findings, site mock ups, and other work-in-progress elements of the new Campbell.edu. 

    [pull_quote]Good communication and collaboration is the bread-and-butter of any large project, especially one as massive as the Campbell brand and site redesign. Our in-house work sessions with the Campbell marketing and communications team combined with the digital immediacy of Mavenlink did a lot to keep us on the same page. Thanks to our collaborative process, we completed the redesign and launch of the new Campbell.edu in less than eight months. –Townsley Minton, Director of Client Success -Atlantic BT[/pull_quote]

    Modernizing the Brand for an Established University

    Beyond the redesign of Campbell.edu, the university wanted to give its community a unified brand vision with a statement and symbol that would represent the essence of Campbell. ABT met this challenge with a variety of research methods mixed with a testing-driven creative approach. 

    [pull_quote]For branding research, it is really important to be both quantitative and qualitative. For example, we designed several surveys measuring how many people across the state, region, and country had heard of Campbell University; among those who knew of the university, I measured what words they commonly associated with the school. This helped us understand existing perceptions of Campbell so we knew which qualities to emphasize and which needed adjusting at a brand level. –Natalie Iannello, Lead Digital Marketer -AtlanticBT [/pull_quote]

    The ABT marketing team worked with these research insights along with a series of interviews and collaborative sessions with the Campbell team to craft new messaging and a new icon for the university. Because the Campbell team wanted to balance their Christian identity with the desire to recruit elite students of all faith backgrounds, they needed a brand that would resonate with both kinds of audience. 

    [pull_quote]From our research into higher ed, we saw ‘leadership’ and ‘future leaders’ as familiar terms to describe the kinds of driven, elite students Campbell wanted to recruit. That said, integrating Campbell’s Christian element with respect and the right amount of distance was harder—we wanted to imply the service and selflessness of faith without alienating people who weren’t religious. Ultimately, we tried out different terms with Campbell stakeholders and landed on the word “purpose.” Purpose described the reason why people of faith lived as they did, but purpose wasn’t confined to religious people. Because this word resonated with both audiences without alienating them, it led to the tagline ‘Leading with Purpose.’ –Lorelei Canne, Content Editor -AtlanticBT[/pull_quote]

    On the visual side, the Campbell team requested a new icon with a more recognizable connection to the university. Their team wanted the new unified mark to better capture people’s attention with a symbol that was unique to Campbell and representative of their school’s history and tradition of academic excellence. 

    [pull_quote]We went through a lot of iterations with the Campbell team to help them develop the right icon. They needed a visual idea that would work for the goals of the Campbell marketing team and Campbell’s graduates, students, and community. After a lot of interviews and surveys, we landed on Campbell’s Kivett Hall as a landmark that really captured the university’s identity and history. After all, it’s the oldest building on their campus, and everyone at Campbell recognized it. Next, we helped their team produce and test out several different designs to find the icon that they ultimately landed on, which was modern and fresh-looking while being recognizable to the community. –Mark Riggan, Senior Full Stack Designer -AtlanticBT[/pull_quote]

    The New Icon – Kivett Hall

    KivettIcon1

    Partnering for the Future of Campbell

    Now that the new Campbell.edu and brand have launched, ABT and Campbell University will continue their partnership on Campbell’s digital properties. ABT’s team is currently at work auditing and providing insight for the university’s updates to its sites for the law school, divinity school, and adult & online education programs.

    In the meantime, check out the new Campbell.edu and read their introduction to the new brand and site design—let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

  • How ABT Transformed NC.gov to Bolster Engagement

    How Do You Design a Website for Every Citizen?

    10 million people. Some of them grew up with the Internet. Others were retired when Google became a commonplace verb. But these 10 million—the population of the state of North Carolina—all needed easy digital access to state government services on NC.gov.

    And the existing web interface wasn’t cutting it. The legacy NC.gov site offered an extensive catagory of links rather than mobile- and user-friendly navigation. While some citizens were able to find what they needed on NC.gov, the larger share of the population became frustrated with the legacy website. This led them to call the NC agency office directly rather than searching for the information online—taking up the valuable time of state workers and taxpayers.

    In short, the state of North Carolina needed a complete overhaul of their digital home on NC.gov. And Atlantic BT was the digital partner chosen to do the job.

    Designing and Developing the New NC.gov

    Creating the new NC.gov was a huge undertaking—Atlantic BT needed to analyze 75,000+ webpages across more than 10 different agency sites, then collate this content into a unified structure which was easy for citizens of all backgrounds to consume.

    This took persona workshops. This took content strategy.  This took UX design, iteration, testing, and development. By leading with content strategy and persona-based discovery, Atlantic BT crafted a mobile-optimized experience for NC.gov while empowering state employees to own and update content on their agencies’ sites.

    A New Site Design and a Lasting Partnership

    Thanks to NC.gov’s new Drupal-based content management, stakeholders across NC government can now update site content themselves to serve citizens faster and more effectively. The new NC.gov not only saw a 6% increase in page views across the site, but also improved site bounce rates by 38% for organic traffic.

  • 5 Easy Ways to Create a Unique eCommerce Experience

    What do you expect at a standard brick and mortar store? Imagine it. You approach the building and see the logo clearly displayed. You can see the store hours and contact information on the door. An associate opens the door for you and greets you by name. Then, maybe he or she tells you promotions based on what you bought here before. You browse by going to clearly marked sections of the store. You can pick the products up and see the pieces at every angle. If you need to make a decision, you can pick both up and compare and contrast. If you need any help finding what you need, it’s easy to ask workers how to find it and what product will be best for you. Eventually you go up to the register, maybe take out a rewards program card, buy the product, and leave happy.

    There’s no reason someone can’t have that experience in your eCommerce platform. In the words of Bob Willet, former President of Best Buy International and CIO of Best Buy,

    “The sooner we drop the ‘e’ out of ‘eCommerce’ and just call it commerce, the better.”

    The customer service and customer experience you provide, whether in the digital or ‘in real life’ sphere, should follow the same standards. In fact, it should be better. According to Accenture’s 2014 Holiday Survey, 58% of customers expect a personalized experience when they shop online and 77% of customers expect consistent experiences across all channels. That means whether they’re using a smartphone, a tablet, a laptop, or a desktop, people are expecting the same experience. How can you provide that? Simple—use what tools your platform already gives you. Major eCommerce platforms like Magento come with a variety of custom features to create the kind of experiences people want from a brick and mortar, and much more. Here are 5 simple ways to use eCommerce tools to create that experience.

    1. Use Pre-Built Responsive Themes as Reference

    To have any chance at a good customer experience at all, an eCommerce site has to be usable on mobile devices. People should be able to easily buy your product whether they’re on a desktop, tablet or a smartphone. It should be as easy to buy products on a phone as it is to send a snarky tweet.

    Luckily, major eCommerce platforms usually have a variety of responsive themes and tools for you to use. For example, Magento offers a lot of different options in Magento Connect. Don’t lose what makes your website responsive, but feel free to adjust themes and plugins as you need to make your store uniquely you. The same Accentuate Holiday Survey found Smartphone users interact with their phones 150 times a day—that’s every 6 minutes. If one of those 150 times a customer finds you, they should be able to buy from you immediately. If they have to remind themselves to try your website again on a desktop, you’re going to be forgotten. Don’t let that happen: use the resources Magento and other platforms provide to create an experience customers don’t want to put down.

    2. Add 1-Click Ordering to Your Online Store

    In September, Amazon’s 20-year patent on 1-click ordering expired. This simple UX feature gave Amazon a significant edge by streamlining the checkout process for its repeat customers.

    While we could argue about whether or not this legal advantage should have been granted in the first place, it is more important today that your eCommerce store embrace 1-click functionality. Besides being a major improvement to your site’s user experience, 1-click ordering makes it easier and faster for your loyal customers to purchase from you. Bottom line: this means more sales.

    3. Enable Account Creation and Integrate More Payment Methods

    Beyond being responsive, one of the best things you can do is allow the creation of custom accounts. This makes it easier on you and your customers. With the information you get from account creation, you can add customers to your mailing list, setup reward programs, and even integrate suggestive selling. On the customer side, checking out becomes even easier with saved information and a customizable checkout flow. In addition, no matter where your customers are and what language they speak, they can buy from you.

    In addition, don’t forget to let people pay with their preferred method of payment. Major eCommerce platforms like Magento, Shopify, and WooCommerce have the power not only to accept traditional debit and credit cards but also payment services like PayPal, Google Wallet, and Apple Pay. Just make sure your platform is PA-DSS validated and PCI compliant to legally accept electronic payments. According to the Federal Reserve’s 2015 report on Consumers and Mobile financial services, here is how people paid on mobile last year:

    Most Commonly Reported Mobile Payments Services in 2015

    Paypal 43%
    Starbucks 11%
    Google Wallet 9%
    Apple Pay 5%

    The same report found that 39% percent of all mobile payments made a point-of-sale payment using their phone. By accepting more payments, you’re allowing more customers to pay in the method they want from whatever device they want to shop on.

    4. Use Social Media Tools

    With few exceptions, our lives are ruled by social media: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, Instagram, and more platforms every day. These social platforms determine what stories we see and what things we want to buy.

    Whether you’re solely an eCommerce business or have a storefront in addition to brick-and-mortar stores, you need to have a social media campaign. It’s just good business. According to the Business Insider, “Facebook accounts for 50% of total social referrals and 64% of total social revenue.” In addition, despite having a user base 6.5x smaller than Twitter, Pinterest drives 16% of traffic to eCommerce sites. There are many tools and add-ons you can use to connect to social media accounts and manage posting. Make sure to integrate those tools to drive more engagement with your site.

    5. Have Great Content

    It’s easy to forget about content, but beyond images, design, and payment, people need to like what they’re reading. Your style and tone is essential to your brand and engaging your customer base. When you think about the content in your platform, remember the three S’s via Magento U:

    • Searchable— Make sure if a customer is searching for a product, they will find yours. That means the title and description of the product should be relevant to what people are searching for.
    • Snackable— This term refers to users multitasking and finding small pieces of content and consuming it while they do other things. Whether these content pieces are ads, tweets or facebook posts from your company, you need to have content that can be consumed in small amounts in order to draw in new customers.
    • Shareable— The more people who share your content on social media the better. People sharing actually improves your Google search rank (not to mention having more people find you is a good thing). This in mind, be sure to make your content worth sharing.

    For extra credit, the content that most people want to see is video content. According to Ooyala’s recent report, more people are watching video content than ever. In fact, using only the data from the video Ooyala hosts, mobile video “made up of 48% of all video views in the quarter, up 14% from a year ago and up 129% from 2014”. Video is a rapidly growing source of content which can only get you more eyes on your site.  

    Whether you use compelling videos, keyword rich blog posts, or stunning images, great content will bring more eyes and more sales.

    If you do these things for your eCommerce platform, you can create a customer experience beyond what they can get at a brick and mortar. These are only some of the things you can do with eCommerce. For more help in creating great experiences for your store, contact us to get started.

  • Mobile eCommerce by the Numbers

    Is your eCommerce platform optimized for mobile? It better be. With more smartphones in the hands of consumers, more people are finding and shopping from businesses on mobile browsers. Skeptical? Take a look at the numbers.

    Who Uses Smartphones?

    • 66% of Americans own a smartphone.
    • 15% of Americans say they have a limited ways to get online other than their mobile phone.
    • 10% of Americans do not have any other form of high-speed Internet access beyond a smartphone.

    What Are Mobile Users Doing on Their Devices?

    89% of time spent on smartphones is to access the Internet. So you know mobile users are most likely online when they’re on their smartphones.

    What Do People Do When They’re on the Internet?

    64% of all Internet usage is spent on making online purchases, and 86% of all Internet usage is spent doing general searches and browsing. What’s more, people expect responsive and high-speed websites on mobile: 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less, and 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. 

    search

    It’s easy to be skeptical about loading speed—after all, how much difference does a few seconds really make? Think of it like this: Imagine you’re making $100,000 per day on your eCommerce site— a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year.

    On Black Friday in 2015:

    36%

     57.2%

    Online Sales From Mobile Shopping Online Shopping-Related Traffic from Smartphones and Tablets

    Overall, smartphones were used 2x more this year on mobile shopping. In addition, people are also using smartphones to research and make purchases all year long. The lesson? Commerce happens everywhere and so should your business. Make sure you include mobile in your Magento eCommerce plans.

    What Can You Do to Engage Mobile Shoppers?

    To cater to mobile devices, follow these 3 simple steps:

    1) Check Your Analytics

    Make sure your site performs well on browsers for desktop and mobile. You can see that by looking at how long people are staying on your website and what they’re doing.

    2) Get a Responsive Theme

    Most major eCommerce platforms have a variety of responsive themes you can use for your store. If you’re personalizing a theme for your brand, make sure you keep the elements that make it responsive.

    3) Utilize Mobile Marketing

    So many people use their phones to find businesses near them. So for mobile, it’s necessary to to do local-based ads and make sure your address is registered with Google.

    shoping

    If you have questions or ideas on mobile eCommerce, feel free to share them in the comments section below and we’ll be quick to respond.

    Sources:

    https://www.looka.com/blog/website-design-trends/ (2023 update)

    http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/01/us-smartphone-use-in-2015/

    http://www.smartinsights.com/marketplace-analysis/customer-analysis/digital-communications-use-statistics-2014/

    http://www.newsweek.com/smartphones-save-black-friday-sale-2015-400058