Information Technology

Julie Hawkins, Head of e-Commerce, Borders UK
Greg Jackson, Executive Director, Tangent
Peter Miller, Senior Designer, Tangent
Hannah Mearns, Developer, Tangent

Narrator: The use of IT has become fundamental to managing projects within businesses. Small companies may use it for every day management, such as accounting while others integrate several systems into one interface to manage the entire business. To improve their online presence, Borders UK recently commissioned Tangent to develop a new website.

Julie Hawkins, Head of e-Commerce, Borders UK: Borders UK actually did have an online presence, but actually through Amazon the decision was then made to have a standalone e-commerce of identity. So, hence the decision then to launch the Borders.co.uk. Tangent had to understand and buy into the Borders brand, that was sort of really important for us and it had to be a partnership, so you know, this was going to be a long-term relationship. The platform that we chose had to be future proof, it had to be easily adaptable and also it had to integrate into other sort of systems. So, there was the commercial element, but also the technology.

Greg Jackson, Executive Director, Tangent: First of all, the biggest challenge is time, Borders had lost seven years or something. What they had to do was get live quickly, so we set the target of three or four months from being briefed to going live. These days, the modular approach to building online business is really well understood. So, the idea that the website may be provided by one organisation. The warehousing by another, piles of data may be provided by a whole pile of organisations. There's a website called the Library Thing and at Library Thing book lovers upload what's on their book shelves. There's 17 million pieces of data there that Borders can effectively tap into to provide recommendations to its users and this modular approach, goes right through to things like payment where the credit card handling might be done by another company. Or fraud prevention where the analysis of each transaction may be done by another company. So what we are able to do is assemble an integrated consumer experience, where Borders really own the proposition where they are deciding exactly what the user experience will be.

Peter Miller, Senior Designer, Tangent: What we look that was how we can support the users in similar ways to the way Amazon does by giving them, you know, navigation when they expected it, search upfront and really easy to find and an easy path to purchase which is sort of a visual path that helps them get through the whole checkout process. So those were the important sort of functionality aspects of the design.

Hannah Mearns, Developer, Tangent: They in effect passed me a flat image of how they wanted to look and I used front end technologies such as HTML, CSS, java script and also some Flash or action script depending on what project needs to make the designer's vision, artistic vision of the website, link up with the database and the Content Management System and combine these two things together.

Narrator: The Content Management System allows the customers to manage day to day changes to the website, without having to go back to the agency.

Julie Hawkins, Head of e-Commerce, Borders UK: The home page is our shop window, so we have to have the tools to be able to sort of quickly change the products that are featured, the website needs to be sort of refreshed, sort of daily. A lot of it automated, so very sort of quickly we can sort of change, prices we can upload images we can pull together promotions.

Narrator: Web design and management is an ongoing process.

Peter Miller, Senior Designer, Tangent: We launched Borders a couple of years ago and periodically you have a look, you start you say okay, it's time to get intra-spective about our design agan, it's time to go a little bit back to the drawing board, but with the great information we've already got and build upon what we've got and so, after say six months, we have this design review where we change it and we have just one recently for Borders and the great thing is you can really test your designs, you can, for example, our recent re-launch increased conversion which is people who are buying products, by 25%, which is a huge increase.

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