by Hema Thiagarajah

One of the things I love about my job is field research—the part that involves contextual enquiries, ethnographic studies, one-on-one interviews, usability testing, card sorting—not just because it involves interacting with users, but also because it appeals to my fascination with human behaviour. As designers who often start out with the hint of an idea and a heavy dose of intuition, field research becomes the guiding light that validates our approach. And it is a gold mine of insights on how people think and behave—and if you dig deeper—into the human psyche itself.

We recently did a comparative test of two airlines in Asia, MalaysiaAirlines.com and SingaporeAirlines.com, to understand the flight search and booking behaviour of travellers. We recruited participants aged between 25 – 40 to find, compare and book a trip using these two websites at the XM Consumer Experience Lab using a think aloud protocol. We used our shiny Tobii eye tracker to measure user attention, and also gathered qualitative feedback on the booking experience at the end of the session.

Banner blindness prevails on the homepage

Jakob Nielsen has tested and written much about banner blindness in the past, but what stood out very clearly with both the sites we tested was that users don’t just ignore ads; they have learnt over time, to ignore anything that looks like an advertisement.

The majority of the users we tested focused predominantly on content surrounding the key visual areas on both homepages, ignoring the large, very visual image that was featured in a prominent position. This was true for users, regardless of how familiar or unfamiliar they were with the two websites. Even an animated image carousel on the Malaysia Airlines homepage didn’t do much to engage these users.

The heatmaps below show concentration of participants’ attention as an average. Areas in red indicate areas that are the most looked at by users.

At left is the home page for Singapore Airlines and at right the home page for Malaysia Airlines. The key visual areas on the home pages of both Web sites go unnoticed by the majority of users due, we theorize, to a form of banner blindness.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Ernest Kim

Campaign, Campaign Brief and Marketing magazine broke the news on this yesterday, but we’re so excited about this new launch that we wanted to share a bit more of the story behind the story.

In brief, XM Asia has created an online platform and social media strategy that’s helping power the Audi Fashion Festival (AFF), which is Singapore’s premier annual fashion event, attracting top local and global designers, as well as international top models. Taking place from 15 – 19 May, this year marks the festival’s fifth anniversary and will be its first at a new, bigger location at Marina Promenade.

But we’re not just the AFF’s agency, XM Asia is also the official interactive partner for the festival.

“We are incredibly proud that we were appointed both the agency and the Official Interactive Partner for the show. It gives us tremendous ownership over the project and makes us feel even more connected in our thinking and strategy,” said Paul Soon, XM Asia Pacific CEO. “Our staffers would kill to work on a fashion brand. With the Asia Fashion Exchange’s Audi Fashion Festival, we get to work on all of them.”

A key consideration in developing this new interactive platform for AFF was to not simply promote the festival, but, as Campaign Brief observed, to “connect Singapore fashion fans with the show’s headline designers, including Carolina Herrera, Collette Dinnigan and Hussein Chalayan.”

Central to achieving this connection was the creation of an engine for “instafashion feeds” that consolidate all online conversations by the AFF and its headline designers into one dynamic stream of social content. This will enable Singapore’s super-wired fashion fans to easily keep up with the festival’s ongoing and upcoming events, ensuring that they don’t miss a beat. Read the rest of this entry »

by WeeKoon Poh

We started Project X, an incubator programme for students who want a head start in advertising. Here’s a very honest look at what it means, how it almost failed and why it might be your best shot at greatness.

It’s not every day that you get to do something new. Chances are the moment you do, the tides of time and the currents of life will take so much of it away before it is even near completion.

Pessimistic? Maybe. But it is also a reality that I’ve learnt as I transited from school to work. The cost of failure becomes all too real, and they tend to stare at you with an unflinching intensity that is almost impossible to defy.

It might have been the remnants of my youthful idealism speaking when I suggested doing an internship programme for students. For a very simple reason, I found this crucial—I felt that I had found a gem at the place I work and I wanted to share that with others. Everything I wanted as a student was all here at XM; smart people, a daring management, a culture of innovation and (gasp) work-life balance.

I felt I was standing at the brink of greatness, and I wanted more people here. Read the rest of this entry »

As reported by Campaign and Marketing, we’re thrilled to announce that, after an open tender exercise described by Sophia Ng, assistant chief executive of the marketing group for the Singapore Tourism Board, as “thorough and fruitful,” XM Asia Pacific has retained digital duties for STB.

We’re incredibly proud to have earned this renewed vote of confidence from STB and, as XM Asia Pacific CEO Paul Soon noted after receiving word of the win, “We have learnt that where there is unity, there is always victory.”

Here’s the official release…

SINGAPORE, April 24, 2013— XM Asia Pacific, which has served as digital agency of record for the Singapore Tourism Board since 2009, retained the business after a highly-competitive pitch.

This is the first time the Singapore Tourism Board has retained any digital or traditional agency for more than four years, underscoring the strength of XM’s innovative offering and the depth of its relationship with this key client, which is one of Singapore’s largest advertisers. Read the rest of this entry »

by Ernest Kim

We’re very proud to announce the launch of our latest project, the completely re-concepted, re-architected, re-engineered and re-designed Maxis.com.my—the online home for Maxis Berhad, Malaysia’s only integrated communications service provider.

Maxis has a clear vision: To bring the future to its customers’ lives and businesses, in a manner that’s simple, personalized and enriching. And the company has worked tirelessly to bring this vision to life, having launched Malaysia’s first high-speed network in 2005, Malaysia’s first 4G LTE network earlier this year and, today, offering the nation’s largest high-speed network.

But Maxis recognized that its Web site was no longer delivering on this commitment, so the company partnered with XM Asia Pacific to conceptualize and implement an entirely new online experience.

Built from the ground up around responsive Web design principles by the XM Asia team, the new Maxis site renders beautifully across the range of devices in use today, from phones to tablets to traditional PCs.

“Maxis wanted to break away from the typical telco Web experience,” recalled Hema Thiagarajah, Consumer Experience Director at XM Asia Pacific. “The norm for the industry is to list products and services based on an internal org chart, and to sell using telco-speak that most consumers find perplexing. But Maxis felt it was crucial to connect with their customers and reach them in a way that would be familiar and useful … to have a conversation.” Read the rest of this entry »

by Ernest Kim

Please be forewarned: Much interface design geekery ahead. If the acronyms HCI and UX mean nothing to you, or the word skeuomorphism brings to mind an alien flick, it’s probably best to move along … these aren’t the droids you’re looking for.

For the few who are left, you’re almost certainly familiar with the rage expressed by much of the digerati towards Apple’s broad use of skeuomorphism, or the simulation of the physical world in their digital interfaces. An oft cited example is the Find My Friends app for iOS, which, for no discernible reason, features an interface swathed in leather textures and stitching. Another example is Apple’s iBooks app, which displays the reader’s collection on a set of wooden bookshelves and requires her to flow through content by mimicking the act of turning pages in a physical book (a continuous scrolling option was added in a recent update, but the book metaphor remains the default user experience).

The leatherific interface of Apple’s Find My Friends app for iOS, widely cited as among the most egregious applications of skeuomorphism in modern interface design. Still, I would argue that those criticizing Apple’s approach are missing the UX forest for the UI trees (<–proof that tortured metaphors can come in all forms).

The spread of these real world metaphors across both Mac OS X and iOS has driven even Apple die-hards, such as the writers at the popular Apple fan blog, Cult of Mac, to conclude that “Microsoft’s operating systems have ‘more taste’ than Apple’s.” This is a reference to Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Windows Phone OSes, which share a very different sort of interface. Read the rest of this entry »