We all know that we live in a digital age, and if you weren’t living in this age, Covid-19 would have more than likely catapulted you into it, industries and individuals alike.

Suddenly the whole world has shifted from what was the norm, reshaping consumer shopping habits and buying behaviours, and quickly changing the priorities of retailers and brands.

It’s not surprising, then, that there have been some interesting headlines starting to surface:
• “Toy industry sales increased by 9% in the first half of 2020 across the 12 global markets”
• “COVID-19 to add £5.3bn to UK e-commerce in 2020”
• “Hornby sees sales rise by 33%”
• “Logic games and puzzles are on the rise as smart toys and games sees sales double over 2020”
• “Toy stores thrive amid pandemic’s return to board games, chess and card collecting”

This is because the COVID-19 pandemic has had a minimal impact on the global toy industry, despite the supply chain disruptions and closure of retail outlets. Why? Because e-commerce channels facilitated the growth of the market as the demand increased.

In a competitive, convenience focused society, it’s never been more important to have a strong e-commerce website with features that are perceived by your customers to add value. After all, your website is one of your best marketing tools, and – if optimised correctly – it could easily be your company’s biggest asset. So, how can you optimise your e-commerce website and improve your conversion rate?

To begin with you need to understand your customer data… Who is using your website? Why are they using your website? Does it cater for their needs? Do you know your customers’ journey? What stops them from converting into a sale? What improvements could be made to make their user journey the easiest one possible?

These questions are critical and the data gathered helps direct the focus of your website. Customer journeys also help you work out how people are going to interact with your platform and what they expect from it. In turn, this helps  identify the different ways that enable them to achieve their goal as quickly and easily as possible.

There are also many other features that should be considered when looking to optimise your e-commerce platform to increase sales and compete within the industry.

For example, a full product description can decrease the abandonment rate and help customers to trust your brand. If your customer returns an item, more than half of them won’t make another purchase from you.

The speed of your website is especially important – every second counts. Being fast and efficient not only keeps your search engine ranking relevant, leading to more visibility, traffic, conversions and revenue, but also prevents your customers from having to wait.

The more they have to wait for a page to load, the higher the chances are of them leaving. In addition to this, your e-commerce website should be built so that it is scalable and can accommodate growth, without the end customer ever being disrupted.

You can also make it easier for your customers to use your website by having features such as related product suggestions, or the option to do an on-site search with drop down lists of frequently searched items.

It also offers your customers an improved, smooth shopping experience by making things easier for them and in turn this helps to increase basket values.

Understanding your customers purchase histories and patterns gives rise to an opportunity to create an element of personalisation. This creates a depth to the technology your customers are using and builds brand loyalty.

When asked about why UX design and the need for e-commerce platforms to be optimised is important, Tom O’Malley, Head of Design at Si digital commented: “As technology continues to expand, expectations are at an all time high with customers looking for a convenient and flexible experience. Creating a shopping experience that customers want and need is an opportunity to give your business a competitive edge. Small design tweaks that focus on a customer’s journey can have a profound impact on sales and profitability, which means it’s never been more important to focus on the customer in order to succeed”.

If you want to throw some ideas around or ask us a question about UX features and how your site could benefit, please contact us at ​enquiries@sidigital.co,​ or visit our website to find out more about us at sidigital.co​.

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Digital transformation. That big, long scary word that not everyone completely understands fully. It’s become a bit of a catch-all term to describe how digital technologies are helping improve business operations. Digital transformation comes in many forms. This could be using new web or cloud technologies or integrating machine learning. It can sound a little overwhelming.

What’s a basic example of digital transformation then? Do you remember writing documents in Microsoft Word? Some still do. Saving changes as you go, to your computer or server. If you wanted to share the document with a team member, you’d send a link from the server and await feedback. Someone would try to open your document, at which point you would need to exit the file so they could view it. Frustration!

Then along came cloud-based software such as Google Docs. You start writing, it saves automatically…Woah. You need feedback, so ping your colleague a link and boom, there they are in the file with you, collaborating and leaving their thoughts. You’ve had to leave work early but need to finish off the document on the train. Your phone comes out and off you go again, writing on the fly!

Cloud-based software has completely changed business workflows around the world. It’s made life easier, more collaborative, less stressful and more efficient. That’s the aim of digital transformation.

How Si digital has helped toy companies with digital transformation?
We’ve had great success collaborating with toy companies as an external agency; working with IT and marketing teams to produce bespoke digital software and products.

We’re not talking ‘IT systems’ that look archaic and are ugly and frustrating to use. We’re talking modern, user interfaces; as sleek as Instagram and as easy to use as Amazon.

What’s a good example of this? Think about how you currently show future seasons products to retailers? What does that process look like?

We worked with a toy company who created a printed catalogue every season to share with buyers. This would take their internal team weeks to produce. The information would quickly go out of date. Retailers then sent their orders back to the toy company for processing. This would be in the shape of Excel docs, emails, order forms…File format frenzy.

This way of working was inflexible. It was chaotic, costing time and resource; not to mention all the trees. How could digital solve this problem?

Using web technologies and the cloud; that’s how. This company needed a system that functioned like B2B e-commerce and a customisable catalogue in one. It would display photos, play videos/TVCs and list all relevant product info. All neatly categorised by brand and by type.

Sales and marketing teams could customise the catalogue, so buyers only saw product relevant to their categories. Buyers then gained access by logging in. They could self-serve by adding product and categories to their basket. It was simple, easy to use and efficient.

Additionally, sales teams no longer had to walk around trade shows taking notes. iPad in hand, they could curate orders there and then with the buyer live on screen. And patchy internet at Toy Fair wasn’t a problem – it had an offline mode!

How can Si digital help my organisation?
Digital transformation comes in many shapes and sizes. Alongside our interactive websites, digital products and famous ping pong app, we’ve created inventor portals, online retailer catalogues and asset libraries. These have all helped teams become more productive by utilising cloud and web technologies. Being efficient and staying on top of workloads can often feel like a superpower!

We’d like to talk to you about productivity. What tools do you use? What workflows currently frustrate you across the organisation? Thinking about these answers can help us identify ways to help you innovate.

For more details visit our website, or if you would like a free of charge workshop, please get in touch by emailing hello@sidigital.co

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Whether it’s helping a toy firm with streamlined inventor management systems, or working on a Halloween-inspired campaign designed to shock (literally… their staff were given electronic shocks), Southsea-based digital agency Si digital are specialists in playful innovation.

We caught up with Tom O’Malley, Si digital’s head of design, to learn more about the agency’s work in the toy sector, and why the play space has proved to be such a good fit for the company.

For those who may be unaware, who is Si digital and what do you do within the toy and games industry?
Great question. We’re Si digital, a digital agency based in Southsea, Portsmouth . We’ve been established since 2001 and over the years we’ve helped some exciting clients with digital innovation. Our services include user interface design (UI), user experience design (UX) and Bespoke Software Development.

We’re a mix of creative and technical minds who produce fun, user-friendly designs and process-driven systems to help streamline internal workflows. Simply put, we create websites and software applications.

To date, we’ve helped global toy and entertainment companies develop digital platforms and we’ve created a number of consumer-facing brand websites too.

Can you tell us a bit more about the digital platforms that you create and how they help the toy and entertainment industry?
We create digital platforms that meet a number of challenges a toy and entertainment company could be facing. For example, a current internal process might be resource intensive and therefore, could be automated or an existing system might be painful to use and frustrate the team resulting in lost productivity.

Below are some of the types of platforms that we have created.

· Inventory management platforms – Helping toy companies communicate new product lines and allowing retailers to browse, save and download information.
· Asset libraries – Keeping all assets in one place and giving clients access to download them; saving endless WeTransfer uploads. With different user permissions, some can self-serve.
· Inventor management systems – Giving toy companies and inventors a way to track submitted ideas at each and every step of the process, all managed in one place. No more email chains to follow or lose track of!
· Online approval systems – A place to upload documents or artwork and receive approval from customers and suppliers. This provides a single reference point for everyone involved in a project.

These are just a few examples of the platforms we create.

Everything we design and build is based in the cloud and accessed via the browser, with high levels of security put in place. There are no complex IT installations and these platforms are accessed just like logging into Facebook.

We build products with the user experience in mind. They’re not systems that look like they’re from the Nineties; clunky and slow. They’re modern digital platforms that are branded and bespoke to the company we build them for that solves real business challenges to improve staff efficiency or communications with suppliers/retailers.

You also mentioned that you’ve created a number of brand marketing websites. Can you tell us some more about these?
Of course! We’ve had some real fun creating animated landing pages and brand marketing websites for some pretty cool products. The aim of these pages is to tell a bit of a story through animated page elements or explain in simple terms how a product or toy works.

It’s always fun to bring to life some of the assets that are part of a wider brand style guide or failing that, creating our own. Creating pages like this really gives us the opportunity to be creative and bring that little delight factor to cool brands online, which makes for great PR for the company looking to engage with the market. You can check some of these out on our website at sidigital.co.

Can you tell us about your company hack projects? These look exciting!
Hack projects have been a bit of a side initiative of the studio. They were started to give staff time to learn new technologies, experiment and have some fun collaborating together.

Our first hack project was called ‘Shocking Halloween’ which was a digital meets physical hack. We rigged up joke shop, electric lighters that give you a little buzz when gripping them, to a system that dealt these little shocks to members of staff whilst working. The system was connected to their fingers and the shocks were sent by the community on twitter (don’t worry, it was totally safe!).

By tweeting our @sidgtl channel using the hashtag #shocksi, tweets were queued and then a shock was dealt to one of the team. The Apple Macs snapped a picture of the moment the shock was received via the built-in iSight camera which tweeted this back to the user. This caused quite the stir online and in just one working day we received 18k visitors and 1.3k tweets.

With a lot of UK companies owning ping pong tables as an office perk for staff, a more recent hack project looked to help office ping pong players to record their scores in-play and create leaderboards to keep track of rankings. The team designed a ‘progressive web app’ which functions as an app but is browser-based. It takes seconds to set up and start scoring.

Called tivit, the app pushes out audio cues, announcing when each player has scored a point then, at the end of the game, the result is automatically added to the leaderboard so players can see who the office champ really is. We released tivit as a free download , which can be used anywhere to score and record ping pong games.

That’s just a couple of our hack projects. We’ve also created an internet controlled robot with added gamification and immortalised Walter White from Breaking Bad into a Whack-a-mole style digital game .

Keep an eye out for our future hack projects, as we’re always looking to do fun and exciting things with new technologies that includes an element of play.

What inspires you to want to work in the toy and games industry and how do you all stay creative?
Being a digital agency, we get to work in quite a mix of industries. Some are exciting and others can be a bit dry. We’ve always found the toy and games industry to be one of those that we really enjoy. It allows us to work fun projects such as building and animating characters or communicating the fun aspects of a new product in engaging ways.

There’s so much possibility across the digital spectrum to implement cutting edge technologies and we just love having the opportunity to implement these to help toy and games companies innovate.

How do we stay creative? I think at heart, we’re all big kids in the studio. We love to play ping-pong or setup up multiplayer Mario Kart on our Nintendo Switch and some of our notorious hack projects inspire creativity as they always nearly have gamification factors. We’re also just by the beach in the creative town of Southsea, so there are lots of opportunities to stay inspired in these sort of surroundings.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself, Tom. What was your favourite toy growing up?
Yeah, sure. I’m Head of Design at Si digital and I oversee all of the creative and a lot of the day-to-day projects that we work on. I’ve been with the agency over seven years now, so I’m a bit of an old timer around the studio.

Before life at Si digital, I studied Illustration at the University of Portsmouth and then moved into print design where I worked on things like branding and magazine layouts before transitioning to digital UI/UX.

When I’m not working, I enjoy life by the sea in Southsea. Getting out on a paddleboard helps me disconnect and unwind from digital. I can’t think of anything better than sitting out on the ocean watching the world go by.

My favourite toy? I had a few of them when growing up! I had plenty of action figures to keep myself entertained and when I was a bit older, I became a little obsessed with collecting the small Corinthian football figures. Being a bit of an artist, I liked to get creative with them and during the transfer windows, I would repaint a player who had moved clubs into their new kit. Alan Shearer’s move from Blackburn to Newcastle springs to mind!

I had quite a few Mr Potato Heads too, so it was quite surreal when I did get to work on a project involving him.

Thanks, Tom. If a company is interested in Si digital’s services, how can they reach you?
If there’s a challenge that you and your team are facing that you think we might be able to help with, we’d love to hear from you. You can email me directly at tom@sidigital.co or visit our website to find out even more about us at sidigital.co. We are also attending Mojo Nation’s Play Creators Festival in September so look out for myself and Steve our MD at the event.

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