AHRI: Helping Us, Help You!

Thomas T — Wed, 19 May 2010 01:56:59 +0000

webqem are proud to be a member of the Australian Human Resources Institute, the national association for human resource and people management professionals. AHRI has more than 60 years experience in providing specialist education, professional development and training.

This membership gives us access to the latest people management knowledge, and comprehensive, current and relevant HR expertise. Combined with our experience and in depth knowledge of digital media, this helps us stay on top of our game and help you to find your online solution.

We are looking forward to further relations with AHRI.

Kids Go True Green

Andrew M — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 04:29:15 +0000

Congratulations to Kim McKay and Jenny Bonnin of True Green for the release of True Green Kids, their third True Green book launched this week in Sydney by Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, AM MP.

webqem worked with Kim and Jenny to produce the True Green @ Work E-Learning Program, creating it with a number of Adobe products including Adobe Flash and Adobe Presenter.

Visit the True Green site to read more http://www.betruegreen.com/

A new approach to usability and user testing

Steve W — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 02:16:18 +0000

There’s a new Usability Consultancy in town (and by ‘town’ we really mean ‘the planet’!).

After many months of planning, well-known usability dude and all-round good guy James Breeze has resurfaced, launching Objective Digital.

“Oh, another usability outfit” we hear you say. And that’s kind of what we thought until we took a closer look at what James is promising. As well as the usual services you might expect from a Usability Consultancy, Objective Digital is offering cutting edge remote testing. A first for Australia. As James puts it:

‘If the product you’re creating is online, don’t gather your requirements, design it or test it in a lab; do it on the Internet’. James Breeze, Objective Digital’s founder.

… What this means in practice is that instead of your testing being tied to a relatively small sample of users in a testing lab at a particular time – it’s all done online. They recruit online, research online, report online and you can observe online. Essentially – they can test anyone anywhere, globally.

We think that’s pretty radical… and should give new (and very real) meaning to the term rapid roll-out.

Rich Internet Applications take flight

Larry A — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 04:15:24 +0000

“Flying Around” Rich Internet Application wins the Macromedia MAX 2005 Award for Government Experience.

Airservices Australia is a government-owned corporation that provides air traffic control management and related airside services to the aviation industry.

They recently won a Macromedia Max Award in the US and we think the application is a great demonstration of how Flash can be used to provide a superior user experience.

The organization delivers services for air traffic control, air traffic management, aviation rescue and fire fighting, and engineering to the general aviation industry in Australia. Airservices Australia manages over 11% of the world

Paycorp: making payments online easy

Larry A — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 23:35:56 +0000

Paycorp is a specialist payments processing facilitator whose solutions enable merchants to receive electronic payment for their goods and services through multiple payment channels.

Paycorp specialise in the design and delivery of robust electronic payment solutions for large corporations, government departments and small businesses.

Headquartered in North Sydney, Paycorp has steadily grown since 1999 to the point where it now facilitates secure merchant transactions in excess of one billion dollars per annum through the Australian and New Zealand banking networks.

Paycorp currently facilitates merchant payments via the majority of Australasian financial institutions including:

Supported Banks	Payment Types	Currencies	Notes
ANZ Bank	Credit Card Direct Debit	AUD
BankWest	Credit Card	Major & minor currencies	Both multi-currency & dynamic currency conversion ( Usability design in Australia Steve W — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 04:32:59 +0000 The Hiser Group is one of Australia’s leading usability design firms – providing specialist consulting services for developing intuitive interfaces in any situation where humans interact with machines. At webqem, we’ve had the pleasure of working alongside Hiser on a number of projects – from complex online banking solutions to government web applications. We asked Mike Floyd, GM of Hiser Sydney, about the changes he’s seen in Usability Design in Australia over the last few years. What kind of projects are clients coming to you with at the moment? We�re seeing lots of evaluation and testing, large scale information architecture work (building top notch menu systems), and some large scale redesigns. What are you seeing now in web site trends compared with 12 months ago? Sites that were designed three years ago have grown at a much faster rate than clients anticipated. Content has been poured into them and their structures are bursting at the seams. Clients are coming to us asking for a major redesign, with the emphasis on developing a robust information architecture that will support the current content and provide for similar future growth. How are users changing? People are more net savvy these days. They are more likely to scan pages quickly looking for a piece of information, and their ability to understand page structure has improved. Expectations about where things should be on a page are beginning to standardise more. What challenges are clients facing? A perennial problem is managing content to support web sites and intranets effectively. Budgets are allocated to particular business units, but content is organised around users� topic interests. For instance, one section might contain content from six different business units. Organisations are working out ways to work together better so that they can support this user-centred, topic-based approach. Typically, some kind of central oversight helps to keep this under control. Another challenge is cross linking, for much the same reason. For instance, business units may be in competition with each other internally, for resources, or clients. Yet they want to promote their products or services to another business unit�s customers. Sometimes they can be so internally focused that they don�t even see opportunities for this cross-promotion on their own sites. An organisation-wide approach to this can be very beneficial. What kind of advertising on sites works best from a user perspective, in your experience? The most effective type of advertising from a user perspective (based on the design evaluation sessions we run) has one or more of these characteristics: it contains a piece of factual information that�s clear and simple to understand. the information is relevant and useful to the user within that particular context. the information is seen as helping the user, e.g. to make a decision, or providing additional benefits. It is text-based and integrated into a task context that makes practical sense for the user (ads on Google pages are the prototypical example of this but promotions on commercial sites work in a similar way). While it is not usually an explicit part of our design research, we do still observe a strong �tune-out� effect on explicit ad types such as banners, islands and skyscrapers. This doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that people don�t notice, �use� or click through on these ads in the real world. Where is the Hiser business heading? At the moment, we’re investigating some interesting new products and services at a more complex�level than simply usability.�Watch out for announcements in the next few months.�In the meantime, our business has expanded, adding new staff in all our offices, and our international work is also increasing. If you want to know more about usability and why it’s so important for your web application contact Steve emitch – the online media specialists Steve W — Sun, 08 May 2005 03:53:13 +0000 emitch Limited (ASX Code: EMI) has appointed Lee Stephens as Chief Executive Officer. Lee has extensive experience in the sales and marketing areas of online advertising. He is a former senior executive with Fairfax Digital and jointly founded a media web development business. Most recently Lee has held a senior executive position with the Federal Publishing Company. We asked Lee Stephens for his thoughts on the current state of online advertising in Australia: Why has there been such a huge growth in the past 12-18 months in online advertising? The growth has been a factor of two quite different trends. Firstly we are seeing particular industries such as consumer finance and travel adopt online as their primary acquisition channel. Companies realise that online is the most efficient way to contact and motivate their target audience(s). We are seeing online acquisition costs working out to 1/4 the cost of print and cheaper than TV by a factor of 10 with some clients. Secondly, parts of the market are responding to increased competitive pressure, and that is driving online spend. You can see this particularly in the automotive and telecommunications sectors. I know you recently joined Emitch as CEO? What attracted you to the company? Emitch is an amazingly focused company. They are single minded in getting the best value for their clients and see online as part of their client’s sales and marketing channels. All the guys work hard to provide value whether it’s a $10,000 campaign or a $1 Million campaign. As a result they have a client list to kill for. The opportunities as a result of this are considerable and I wanted to be a part of it. The company announced a great mid year result, what’s the secret? What new accounts have come on board? The result was great but I think we can do better. We are taking a lot of time with our existing clients, showing how we can extend their online activity at a profit – the new initiatives are working for our clients and for Emitch and is showing in our profitability. There are a few new accounts on board but we prefer not to make a song and dance over it – new clients are great but we are only as good as the clients we keep. Why should marketing directors and agencies be looking at including online advertising in their marcomm spend? It depends on which industries you are working within but we look for two key characteristics of companies when considering how much of their online budgets should be spent online: 1. How direct is the sales channel and can the purchase decision be made online? This doesn’t mean whether or not you can buy the product online. What is important to us is whether a company can communicate everything they need for the target audience to make a decision to act. This action might be a phone call or an in-store visit. We also look at the structure and relationship of re-sellers. Sometimes it makes sense to spend more money on re-seller support and less on direct online advertising. We work through these issues and plan media solutions accordingly. 2. How are your target audiences researching their purchases of your products? If you are in the travel industry you need to be online. It’s not an option. We look very closely with our clients on how their customers are behaving and the online behavioural stages these consumers go through before making a purchase. There are often a couple of stages in the purchase consideration process and these require different advertising responses. What do you see as the big things in online advertising over the next 12 months? I think some other major publishers will follow 9MSN to offer a performance solution like Performance Plus. This will probably lead to an increase in the popularity of affiliate marketing networks similar to Linkshare and Commission Junction in the US. This diversity will be good for marketers and agencies in Australia. We are also in for some consolidation within the industry as large traditional agency groups move to strengthen their online position. Find out more about emitch. Australian Online Advertising Soars Steve W — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 01:46:58 +0000 Interview with Martin Hoffman, CEO, NineMSN According to the Audit Bureau of Verification Services (ABVS) online advertising grew 58% in the 2003/2004 financial year to reach AU$300million. There’s every indication we’ll see a continued meteoric rise this financial year with forecasts pointing to online making up 5% of total advertising spend for 2004/2005. We asked Martin Hoffman, CEO, ninemsn for his thoughts on the current state of online advertising in Australia: Why has there been such a huge growth in the past 12-18 months in online advertising? One of the key drivers has been the size of the audience. More than 10 million Australians use the Internet every month and this audience has become too big for advertisers to ignore. Major brands are beginning to capitalize on the dramatic difference that online can make when used in a balanced, thoughtful and cross promotional way. Coupled with this we are seeing media consumption habits change and it Land Rover campaign heats up over winter Steve W — Tue, 01 Jun 2004 00:00:08 +0000 If you were lucky enough to hit the slopes at Perisher Blue this season, you hopefully managed to avoid hitting the many parked Land Rovers and Land Rover billboards on display. Land Rover’s huge sponsorship of the resort also extended into the online space with sponsorship of the very popular Perisher Blue snow cams. Further presence across ski.com.au and Fairfax snow sites meant all visitors researching snow holidays online were exposed to the Land Rover brand. North Sydney Advertising Agency, Morris & Partners, have taken Land Rover online in a big way in 2004 – partnering with webqem to develop some very distinctive and successful online campaigns for the Land Rover and Range Rover brands. Online has been used in conjunction with an outdoor campaign, and the outdoor creative has translated well into the online environment. As a brand campaign, the online is primarily being measured on its ability to elevate the luxury dimensions of the Land Rover brand, rather than on click through rates alone. Despite this, the ads are still generating higher than expected click through rates. Tracking research as well as click through rates will be used to measure the effectiveness of the campaign.

Supported Banks

Payment Types

Currencies

Notes

ANZ Bank

Credit Card
Direct Debit

AUD

BankWest

Credit Card

Major & minor
currencies

Both multi-currency & dynamic currency conversion (

Usability design in Australia

Steve W — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 04:32:59 +0000

The Hiser Group is one of Australia’s leading usability design firms – providing specialist consulting services for developing intuitive interfaces in any situation where humans interact with machines.

At webqem, we’ve had the pleasure of working alongside Hiser on a number of projects – from complex online banking solutions to government web applications. We asked Mike Floyd, GM of Hiser Sydney, about the changes he’s seen in Usability Design in Australia over the last few years.

What kind of projects are clients coming to you with at the moment?

We�re seeing lots of evaluation and testing, large scale information architecture work (building top notch menu systems), and some large scale redesigns.

What are you seeing now in web site trends compared with 12 months ago?

Sites that were designed three years ago have grown at a much faster rate than clients anticipated. Content has been poured into them and their structures are bursting at the seams.

Clients are coming to us asking for a major redesign, with the emphasis on developing a robust information architecture that will support the current content and provide for similar future growth.

How are users changing?

People are more net savvy these days. They are more likely to scan pages quickly looking for a piece of information, and their ability to understand page structure has improved. Expectations about where things should be on a page are beginning to standardise more.

What challenges are clients facing?

A perennial problem is managing content to support web sites and intranets effectively. Budgets are allocated to particular business units, but content is organised around users� topic interests. For instance, one section might contain content from six different business units.

Organisations are working out ways to work together better so that they can support this user-centred, topic-based approach. Typically, some kind of central oversight helps to keep this under control.

Another challenge is cross linking, for much the same reason. For instance, business units may be in competition with each other internally, for resources, or clients. Yet they want to promote their products or services to another business unit�s customers.

Sometimes they can be so internally focused that they don�t even see opportunities for this cross-promotion on their own sites. An organisation-wide approach to this can be very beneficial.

What kind of advertising on sites works best from a user perspective, in your experience?

The most effective type of advertising from a user perspective (based on the design evaluation sessions we run) has one or more of these characteristics:

it contains a piece of factual information that�s clear and simple to understand.
the information is relevant and useful to the user within that particular context.
the information is seen as helping the user, e.g. to make a decision, or providing additional benefits.
It is text-based and integrated into a task context that makes practical sense for the user (ads on Google pages are the prototypical example of this but promotions on commercial sites work in a similar way).

While it is not usually an explicit part of our design research, we do still observe a strong �tune-out� effect on explicit ad types such as banners, islands and skyscrapers. This doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that people don�t notice, �use� or click through on these ads in the real world.

Where is the Hiser business heading?

At the moment, we’re investigating some interesting new products and services at a more complex�level than simply usability.�Watch out for announcements in the next few months.�In the meantime, our business has expanded, adding new staff in all our offices, and our international work is also increasing.

If you want to know more about usability and why it’s so important for your web application contact Steve

emitch – the online media specialists

Steve W — Sun, 08 May 2005 03:53:13 +0000

emitch Limited (ASX Code: EMI) has appointed Lee Stephens as Chief Executive Officer. Lee has extensive experience in the sales and marketing areas of online advertising. He is a former senior executive with Fairfax Digital and jointly founded a media web development business. Most recently Lee has held a senior executive position with the Federal Publishing Company.

We asked Lee Stephens for his thoughts on the current state of online advertising in Australia:

Why has there been such a huge growth in the past 12-18 months in online advertising?

The growth has been a factor of two quite different trends. Firstly we are seeing particular industries such as consumer finance and travel adopt online as their primary acquisition channel. Companies realise that online is the most efficient way to contact and motivate their target audience(s).

We are seeing online acquisition costs working out to 1/4 the cost of print and cheaper than TV by a factor of 10 with some clients. Secondly, parts of the market are responding to increased competitive pressure, and that is driving online spend. You can see this particularly in the automotive and telecommunications sectors.

I know you recently joined Emitch as CEO? What attracted you to the company?

Emitch is an amazingly focused company. They are single minded in getting the best value for their clients and see online as part of their client’s sales and marketing channels. All the guys work hard to provide value whether it’s a $10,000 campaign or a $1 Million campaign. As a result they have a client list to kill for. The opportunities as a result of this are considerable and I wanted to be a part of it.

The company announced a great mid year result, what’s the secret? What new accounts have come on board?

The result was great but I think we can do better. We are taking a lot of time with our existing clients, showing how we can extend their online activity at a profit – the new initiatives are working for our clients and for Emitch and is showing in our profitability. There are a few new accounts on board but we prefer not to make a song and dance over it – new clients are great but we are only as good as the clients we keep.

Why should marketing directors and agencies be looking at including online advertising in their marcomm spend?

It depends on which industries you are working within but we look for two key characteristics of companies when considering how much of their online budgets should be spent online:
1. How direct is the sales channel and can the purchase decision be made online?
This doesn’t mean whether or not you can buy the product online. What is important to us is whether a company can communicate everything they need for the target audience to make a decision to act. This action might be a phone call or an in-store visit. We also look at the structure and relationship of re-sellers. Sometimes it makes sense to spend more money on re-seller support and less on direct online advertising. We work through these issues and plan media solutions accordingly.
2. How are your target audiences researching their purchases of your products?
If you are in the travel industry you need to be online. It’s not an option. We look very closely with our clients on how their customers are behaving and the online behavioural stages these consumers go through before making a purchase. There are often a couple of stages in the purchase consideration process and these require different advertising responses.

What do you see as the big things in online advertising over the next 12 months?

I think some other major publishers will follow 9MSN to offer a performance solution like Performance Plus. This will probably lead to an increase in the popularity of affiliate marketing networks similar to Linkshare and Commission Junction in the US. This diversity will be good for marketers and agencies in Australia.

We are also in for some consolidation within the industry as large traditional agency groups move to strengthen their online position.

Find out more about emitch.

Australian Online Advertising Soars

Steve W — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 01:46:58 +0000

Interview with Martin Hoffman, CEO, NineMSN

According to the Audit Bureau of Verification Services (ABVS) online advertising grew 58% in the 2003/2004 financial year to reach AU$300million.

There’s every indication we’ll see a continued meteoric rise this financial year with forecasts pointing to online making up 5% of total advertising spend for 2004/2005.

We asked Martin Hoffman, CEO, ninemsn for his thoughts on the current state of online advertising in Australia:

Why has there been such a huge growth in the past 12-18 months in online advertising?

One of the key drivers has been the size of the audience. More than 10 million Australians use the Internet every month and this audience has become too big for advertisers to ignore. Major brands are beginning to capitalize on the dramatic difference that online can make when used in a balanced, thoughtful and cross promotional way.
Coupled with this we are seeing media consumption habits change and it

Land Rover campaign heats up over winter

Steve W — Tue, 01 Jun 2004 00:00:08 +0000

If you were lucky enough to hit the slopes at Perisher Blue this season, you hopefully managed to avoid hitting the many parked Land Rovers and Land Rover billboards on display. Land Rover’s huge sponsorship of the resort also extended into the online space with sponsorship of the very popular Perisher Blue snow cams. Further presence across ski.com.au and Fairfax snow sites meant all visitors researching snow holidays online were exposed to the Land Rover brand.

North Sydney Advertising Agency, Morris & Partners, have taken Land Rover online in a big way in 2004 – partnering with webqem to develop some very distinctive and successful online campaigns for the Land Rover and Range Rover brands. Online has been used in conjunction with an outdoor campaign, and the outdoor creative has translated well into the online environment.

As a brand campaign, the online is primarily being measured on its ability to elevate the luxury dimensions of the Land Rover brand, rather than on click through rates alone. Despite this, the ads are still generating higher than expected click through rates. Tracking research as well as click through rates will be used to measure the effectiveness of the campaign.

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