e Magus

An ecommerce site design is the ultimate test for UX, because, unlike corporate websites or portals, the entire business model hinges on the ability of the website to sell the products it hosts. Most website designs are built on the basic principles of - categorization, searchability, findability, relevance, cross-sell up-sell opportunities, product information, easy check-out etc. While these principles do hold good for successful design of any ecommerce website and are necessary, I think adding on 2 more components to your UX strategy would make the website design far more effective. One is based on the basic human behaviour and the Second based on experiences in real life Other than the fulfillment of a want or a need, we also shop to possess. Act of possession (for food, security) etc has been one of the earliest occupation of human societies. Some where down the lane, the division of labour happened, where men were predominantly working as Hunters & women as Ga...

When most us read or write about marketing predictions, it generally revolves around the penetration, usage, or suggested innovation and adaptation to existing model/behaviour. But, here, I wanted to focus more on the tec(h)tonic shift in terms of usage and patterns in Digital Marketing. Why I call it tec(h)tonic shift is because there is going to be a large-scale impact as we go along, these shifts are continuous, and these shifts are not overtly visible. The 4 major shifts are: From Information to Emotion From E-commerce to Experience From Email to Mobile From Perennial to the Ephemeral  From Information to Emotion: The Internet has always been about sharing & searching for information. In fact, till about few years ago, Internet was know as Information Superhighway & in most organizations website and other digital properties were in the purview of IT (Information Technology) department. Social media, nay, Facebook has changed the usage of the ...

I n the   social psychology   of groups,   social loafing   is the phenomenon of people deliberately exerting less effort to achieve a goal when they work in a   group   than when they work alone. (Source: Wikipedia ). However, I’m going to put forward my views of social loafing from the prism of online The time spent of social networking platforms is increasing phenomenally.   This can be attributed to 2 factors mainly driven by technology advancements – -        Accessibility -        Time on hand However in an effort to stay relevant and active in the platform, people are resorting to a different kind of social loafing… The popularity of ‘like’ button compared to the ‘comments’ is a wonderful example. The reason is the ‘liking’ a post or pic takes less effort than to create a comment Similarly are the social sharing buttons on websites, and other features like ‘sh...

W ith great power comes great responsibility, said Voltaire. Well you can also attribute its popularity to Spiderman's uncle too :) When Technology gave us, the general public, the great power of Social Media, we didn't become more responsible, only more frivolous The aftermath of the Hyderabad bomb blasts which took place on Feb 21st saw a slew of Facebook updates and Tweets in my network ranging from benign to malicious. More dangerous were the purportedly expert opinions without proper basis. The same could be seen on popular blogs/websites too which treads on conspiracy theories. This lead me to think, why do people create such conspiracy theories and why it is popular among social media The crux of conspiracy theories lies in the 2 primal human traits - Fear and Greed. Fear helped us survive and greed helped us to evolve as human beings. Most conspiracy theories are based on Greed - Money or Power, and the culprits are usually, Corpo...

Most people think that we are not ourselves, when we are online. True? True. While we tend to fake most of what we say or do in the online space, especially in Social Media platforms – we somehow are more real than we would be in real life. Most of our actions and utterances in real life depend on our immediate environs. The impact of where we are, whom we are with, and about whom we talk; all impacts on what we do and say. For example: saying ‘No’ face to face to a friend is harder than typing ‘No’ on a chat window, email, or even a tweet According to John Suler, the ‘online disinhibition effect’ can be further divided into benign and toxic disinhibition (The Pyscology of Cyberspace – The Online Disinhibition http://users.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/disinhibit.html ). Suler goes on to talk about six prime factors that influences the way we behave in the online space 1)    You don’t know me (Dissociative Anonymity) 2)    You Can’t see ...

Facebook is just not about connecting people who work, study, and live around them. The impact of Facebook is much more than just connecting, or killing time, or increase in data/Internet usage. The best yardstick to understand the importance of Facebook is that every marketer wants Facebook as part of their marketing plan. Trust marketers to know what works and what is impactful or not :-) Broadly, the impact of Facebook on the users and the society can be categorized into 3 types - Material, Behavioural, and Cultural Material: The material impact of Facebook is all about increased consumption and buying. There is an artificial need that is created by the Facebook offerings in terms of its default features or the popular third party applications. Couple of popular consumption/buying pattern that I see amongst my friends on Facebook is in terms of purchase of Cameras (especially high end cameras) and the increase in travel. While there could be various reasons for the increased ...

One of the main characteristic of any mass media is its ability to impact the society. Be it the newspapers, television or radio, each had played its part, in terms of changing views and shaping the society. In the recent past, there have been many news articles about the impact of social media in the civil society movements… Be it Coffee Party in America, The elections in Iran, the civil movements in Tunisia, Egypt (#Twitterrevolution) and other Arab countries...or, closer home, the Team Anna’s anti corruption movement in India…. Social media usage has become an important tactic in terms of spreading awareness and mobilizing support. The question is - has social media come of age? If you look at the history of mass media… it has always been associated with politics. In fact, it is referred to as “fourth estate”, the other 3 being Executive, Legislative, and Judicial. Traditional mass media was and has been controlled by a few (Just imagine, more than 90% of mass media consumed ...