 Good morning. We are representing Gulf University for Science and Technology in this conference in 2014. We are participating as one of the Goal sponsors in this event. We are going to show you in this session our successful story of using the open source applications in general in the educational sector in our area and then we will focus more on Drupal. But before I go into the details we will distribute a small brochure of our university to each of you to just have a small idea about Gulf. Gulf University for Science and Technology is located in a country, Kuwait, it's in the Middle East, a small country between Kuwait and between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. We are the university established in 2002 and we are now almost 10 years old. We are going to show our success story of using the open source technologies in the educational sector and we'll see how this things can work if you start using the open source application in general and also focusing on this one. Myself, I'm an assistant professor of computer science. My name is Tahir Ali and I'm also playing, I have two hats in the university. I am assistant professor and as well IT director in our university. So I'm managing the IT department. The most challenge of the bottleneck to be successful in any use of open source application is the challenge to convince your upper management to go with open source applications especially in our area the culture of that oh okay who's going to support that the concept of security business point of view those companies who are giving us the close providing the close source applications or solutions they will always try to find that you some organizations in the governmental section or even in the private section especially in the area of Middle East they don't go for open source applications so still in our region there is a little bit people scared from the word open source okay how we are going to manage it who is going to maintain it so those all questions I took long time to convince where I joined I took the responsibility of IT department especially the the applications area it took me a long time to convince my upper management I want to go with the open source solutions so there was a lot of questions regarding the security the quality because the usability of the product the freedom flexibility of those products all those points and I had to convince my upper management that okay using those on the long term we will have a lot of benefits and the most important factor out of all was that to convince them that long time it's going to so save a lot of cost for you and that's that's you know when it comes to financial managers and financial directors they love to to hear such words so this was the first within like in 2008 where we were trying to start build up a team which will focus just on open source solutions to provide different functionalities services to our faculty staff and students and we succeed in that as a result we start using a lot of open source applications here is a major list of applications we have some more small small but this is the major list of applications that right now they are installed currently working in our environment in the educational sector where we are using them each of them it's in it's on this one of course Drupal is one of the biggest one of them because I'm going to talk in few slides about Drupal itself and we have all other those applications Moodle has been used as our official learning management system we are using OTRS in the IT department for ticketing system so anybody needs any kind of service from IT department whether a student staff or faculty they log in and they create a ticket we are using El Presco as a document management system between different entities in the university and so on so we have different we want the server side we have one tool we have Linux and those are the solutions which we succeed to implement and use them as our source application some of them now we are using not the standard community addition we are using the professional addition or we are buying some services to to integrate with our systems but overall the concept is to use the open source application and we succeeded in that and today on reality in whole campus I have just only one application which is closed source people soft our student information system it was there since 2002 so it's not that easy to change your student information system and that's the main core application which from the first day of any university you needed so it was before I joined in 2002 when we established the university people soft was there other than that all the applications used this one the main advantage which I would like to say here we've seen it and we practice it after using the open source application is the integrity integration between the applications when it comes to open source and you have different applications and you'd like to integrate integrate them things becomes more flexible things becomes more easier if you know the back end of it and that makes things much easier this one that's our experience that's what we have found out in four five years after moving towards to the open source applications when it comes to Drupal Gus had decided since 2008 9 Kedem Kier that Drupal will be our main content management system for building any websites in Gus so far we have implemented I have a technical team of two developers and we have implemented so far for our university around 24 25 sites some some of them are very simple sites some of them with a lot of functionality and modules using them and all our in-house development by our technical Drupal team and that was the main one we choose Drupal for many reasons flexibility open source clear as well document API each release is giving us more features we are very happy to what we hear right now with the technical team about Drupal 8 and what is going to present in Drupal 8 as new additions and features so that was one of the reasons that Drupal has been used in Gus this one most used models that we are using during our development lifecycle different websites views rules web forms tokens automatic note title and because we have an LDAP server so that's very important for us to use the LDAP integration so these are most major main rule the models that we are using in our systems here is an example of some sites that we have built it up using the Gus websites this is the Gus main website we have done the library website those all websites which you are using to present them in the last slide which I would like to say this question I have been asked so many times and during the conference because we have a booth why Gus is participating in such a conference because this is not an educational related conference we we felt as the university administration since we are using Drupal since 2008 and we use it a lot to build lot of provide a lot of functionalities and services to our faculty and staff so it it is the responsibility of the university that we participate we contribute the community of Drupal so this year we decided to move towards to be one of the sponsors the gold sponsors of the event and hopefully we will try to continue this relationship with the Drupal Association in future to support this project and maybe we involved more we are planning now we are working with the Drupal Association and maybe I have other couple of meetings last two days we are trying to make Gus as an official training center a certified training center for Drupal in our area in the Middle East so there is not a lot of awareness of a content management system and Drupal in Middle East so we are trying to reach to a kind of agreement either with Drupal Association or with any certified partner of Drupal Association to make Gus as official training center and official testing center for those who are looking to be trained and certified in Drupal in the future in near future especially in our area thank you very much and now I open the the channel for any questions if anybody have any questions thank you very much for your time and patience hope you enjoy the trip and see you soon thank you morning everyone let me just make sure the microphone sounds good I really love this format kind of fast paced and in fact this presentation I've done here I've given it as a 40 minute version a 30 minute version a 20 minute version and so now I'm basically going to go through until the time's up and let's see if I can rattle that through fast enough so um obligatory kind of the Twitter information so I'm Miles I'm the CEO of Icos we're at Drupal shop we specialize in e-commerce that's it we focus on all aspects of e-commerce experiences from building out great customer experiences the front integrating at the back that's that but this is all about content and us sharing some knowledge that we are learning along the way and continue to learn so within e-commerce um this is just about usability and what I love to call it's the small stuff that when combined can make an enormous difference and we deal with customers that sometimes spend some really large money on things like paper click and google and adwords and seo maybe a little less these days but they find a lot of ways of getting addicted to spending that money they're getting good at measuring it and they can see the coins going in the top and the coins coming out the bottom and that feels really good but we talk to people and say you know this statistic is phenomenal right one percent increase in your conversion by the way one percent can be really hard to get to that's kind of part what we're talking about here but can be the equivalent of 16 percent extra conversion if you've got a company's got a budget and they're spending could be a hundred thousand a quarter could be a lot more than that in some areas and they they took just a small percentage of that budget worked for improving their user experience on their website and really increased that conversion the impact is enormous the return on investment certainly justifies continual investing in the right area and I say sometimes the right area is investing in your user experience your design your customer experience so what we're really looking to do is I'm just going to share some of the things that we've learned some of it learned through anecdotes some of it we've learned through actually measuring and some of it we've learned through mistakes so the and just on this slide here what we're really saying is generally speaking if you think of two big levers yeah that you got the persuasion the marketing budget getting people to even come to your site when you've got commercial site comes with the cost and on the flip side what we're really talking about here today is what can you do to reduce the effort and the frustrations that are seemingly still around in a lot of websites and I see it a lot in a lot of Drupal sites because it's so capable but it also does throw out a layer of crud and systems messages and you really need to get in the practice of helping to tidy that up so classic example forms my view on forms very simple you know don't make your visitor think let's make it as easy as possible and don't worry you don't have to take that in that's far too small for anyone's eyesight and I'm standing close to it but this was a study that did the classic it kind of studied what is the impact of taking the same information and displaying it in different ways single page multiple page or with an accordion because we often get that request saying you know you know we want to change your customers with marketing people they get caught up like you know I've heard this we should change we should change we should change the format and what this study basically showed is it's nothing to do with the number of steps in fact if you have exactly the same form fields and you just lay it out in a different way you're talking marginal gains to almost negligible certainly doesn't value the time and effort to to build it so if that doesn't kind of work what does well actually what does is making it really easy and on this particular slide you see this John Newman kind of part now what John Newman has just done is put his name it's the you know he's done it and the first and surname in the same form you know of a study where usability study people did this the first I've got some nods here of everyone who's done this I've done this I kind of we get that form field the first 19 people in this study did that and it's like well hang on you can if you can kind of learn that then you could separate that out and you can make on the left hand side I think we've got an example of helping people understand what the form is trying to achieve and people are still you know my email address is quite protected I just can't stand getting spam so give people a reason why you're asking for their email that's in context so and other things we can do is remove steps Drupal's great we're developers we can do stuff you know what how many times you go to a website and it says choose your card and they're tiny little icons there's four visa icons and is that the visa debit or the delta or whatever and yeah you can detect the credit cards it's so easy you see the based on first four digits or six if you're looking at China Bank it's all you know that stuff is just readily available and I would say go even further tell people what card you accept detect from the first few and then why not then let them know hey great you're using your visa card welcome whatever you know I think you can help this a lot and I always like putting this up it's been around with my slide deck for a number of years you may even recognize the design from several years ago it's an Apple website I love this it talks about we talk about making things clear and here we have three types of shipping well two-day shipping okay that takes two days cost me ten dollars next day next day shipping all right comes next day everyone see what's wrong with this yeah standard shipping a month three weeks I don't know and so the these are things these lack of clarity points can be there's some a little bit more flippant than others but lack of clarity in an e-commerce journey puts people off and generally speaking when it comes to shipping goods people care about two things fast or cheap and that depends on whether you've left your wife's present until the next day and then you would it really fast or you're buying that thing you know hey that's a kind of novelty buy and I don't mind I'll use Alibaba I'll wait 20 days for that shipping to come over but that's what people really care about so when you kind of know that I think you can build a great experience and make it really clear to use as what you make it really clear and again you know developers we've got the ability the front-end engineering that we can now do we can do so much more contextually in the browser and this experience right I'm not picking on the Drupal site but hands up we've done that filled out the form hit submit don't know where they are scrolled up and found some big red error message you know that's so frustrating because then you have to read in there which bit did I do and then you go and fix that problem and you submit it and it didn't also save your password and then you've got another thing and I've been through that yeah I'm glad we're nodding right we've all been through that system that's driving people nuts that is a great reason to leave people leave through frustrations of sites and this is an area that as developers we can really do it and you know what you can think it through and you can reduce errors some little standard things all this is doing is saying you know just looking at it and this is common in good experiences but yeah I my feeling is there's more bad experiences than good and e-commerce websites been around for like two decades it's like we really should have figured some of this stuff out by now or you'd like to think it pervades across so all this this is about let's make things quicker make things simpler and I think there's really nice things that can be done if I look at this again it's part of a study and it was about when you use real-time feedback on a form you've got 22 this isn't it's not like you do this you get 22 percent jack increase in your sales but it was just a form sort of test between one and the other and success rate also included accuracy and other other key parts but it's like you know here we are someone who may not even be thinking about logging back into the website because unless you're going back into an amazon or a site that you're always using you often does not forget that password but actually we could we could detect that password and say hey welcome back enter your password speed you through the form we've got your address update your address so these are the things that we think about we try to influence and a lot of time you can use defaults you can certainly study and the vast I mean here's a huge sweeping statement most people shop buy and deliver it to themselves in one of two locations that's it it's often is not delivered to that office location you can use defaults and from and if you don't know what it is you could do a lot worse than just starting out by saying yeah using that kind of checkbox and it says my shipping address is the same as my billing just you know all things that can significantly speed people through we're huge fans of using postcode lookup this happens to be a UK postal partner obviously it's different depending on where you are and if you're using other part but zip codes and the light it just comes back to that same philosophy of speeding things through and for people who into Apple if you've got iOS 8 when you're now transacted on if you're just just in browser looking at a mobile website and you get to that payment page it's starting to detect it and you can actually put you can make sure you marry it up scan my card scan your card auto fills it in for you so if you didn't know that little tip it's awesome it's gonna these are things that can really really help and I just hate some of the jargon that ends up around e-commerce sites and this is an example here this is a huge global retailer site and just things I put out you know don't worry the SSL has got your site secured right we're all secure we've got the SSL right this is a tech room here maybe and maybe we know what SSL stands for but where's the context what does that mean is that really helping users and there's other little things here it's like you know add your CVV and we see CVV and we see CV2 and I think if you're shopping a lot you kind of know what it means it's the little bit on the back but that's still really doesn't show any great customer care and I think you can improve it in fact I have to say the only thing I liked about this it was Uniqlo I don't mind saying this I'm gonna name the only thing I liked about this site is they really asked us to help improve their site so I really went to town and said you know what you should do this you should do the why didn't you do this and you know I'm just waiting for their agency to call me up that should be fun. Buttons has been a design tool used by designers and developers and I've read blog posts that said we changed the word on this button and you know this form went up by 200% and generally speaking the whole thing about button it's just got to be the thing you expect it to be don't really make people read it's the thing and it's got to be non-confusion and I just look at context continue with care here is a particularly odd site selling guns it seems but it's um but here we are maybe I skipped over that just a little bit too quick and it's like we're on a phone we're going through we're in the e-commerce journey of this particular site and it says continue shopping that's actually taking you you're about to buy the good and you hit continue shopping and it takes you out of the shopping cart you know that's a really it's bit of an old example but I'm still seeing things like this and then if that's old this is the new problem the new problem around decluttering is as new things come out as new trends come out there's the temptation to keep adding stuff to pages adding the badges adding this and here we are you can register you can log in all with Facebook all with Google and they're just kind of adding all of those those details you know again we can unify we can simplify um that sometimes getting caught with the idea of giving customer more choice is actually detrimental maybe not always but there's a coming one of my favorites you know you can measure this stuff this is the other great stuff guesswork is gone we can measure stuff and um favorite hobby halls of many people it's like you know passwords I mean it's still a still a problem we've all got we've all got but the you know if you are a small you're building out uh almost any e-commerce website unless it's this huge global website if you it's the first time someone's transacting with you and you ask them to set up an account before they can pay imagine doing that in a shop oh you want to buy that that good that jacket that jacket looks great the suit fits you yes really well well if you can just come over here and open this account with no other benefit apart from well no we just want your details but two things happen one three in nine people in a test left said I wouldn't go past this but that's customers walking out the door which is and and of those people that even went through they then expected to be spam and I just said what a bad expectation you've just set that customer I really want to buy up I'm gonna have to register but now I'm already losing trust you know just little very very little kind of things that I think are really important um search I actually I managed to speed this one up by counting lots of parts out I've got a very simple thing about search if you're gonna have search on a website can be really really important if you get this someone searches on it and they get a result not found it will be your highest reason for people to leave and I just say search do it properly do it brilliantly or don't do it at all if anyone saw the case study on lush lush.co.uk site that we built we put it wasn't just another module one feature you know search was a whole for those people into agile it was a two week sprint of two developers minimum plus way more plus a dedicated search box we've really made search the key point of navigation and search is incredibly important you know that's why one of the the highest net value company in the world ultimately makes 95 percent of their revenue through search regardless of the the google car and the mapping and everything else is the search is such a premium product it's not super hard to get right but never under just just don't just stick on a search box in some way if you do people will use it and they'll get this and they'll leave that's that's my kind of take away on search recommendations we like to be recommended hey where did you eat last night was it good ah great you got the name of the restaurant I want to go recommendations is hugely important but at the moment it's been faked everywhere if you look at the world through my lens which is I hope you don't have to this is maybe slightly a UK century but I and I'm no great football man but I know that the premier league is as a pretty big thing globally so here we have you know I am looking at the Manchester I could even get this wrong though the Manchester United shirt okay the Manchester United shirt I'm in the mode of buy net but apparently people who looked at that if that's going to take on and people who actually looked at the Manchester United well according to this they also looked at the Arsenal way shirt which doesn't sound so part but maybe they did they were just looking around and but you know then they looked at the Chelsea homestrip but guess better ultimately the person who looked at Manchester United bought the Liverpool top right now for those people who don't know their football this is not going to happen right this is this that is never happened I'm like really that's not real and this is this is live still now this site is it's a huge website multimillion pound business that has built that and I'm like what the wtf has a flag up a bit for and this was from a last year stat that John Lewis however put much more of a machine learning kind of people who bought this also bought this and they did some great metrics and this was a report it's only consultancy talks about recommendations really hiking sales and we've seen it as well we worked with a company called Nosto and they do that kind of machine learning pattern behavior based on what people have done and we're seeing this make a really good effect and the first thing we did on the site that we helped take over was we stuck it on a search results page because they had a really bad search and it was learning and it soon filled up and nobody ever got you know didn't get that horrible no results page so this this really good tech doesn't have to be Drupal but it can work really nicely with how are you doing Simon if that's if I'm right no I think we are we're okay we've got about three minutes so and I'm number 10 which I decided to finish with any of bonus material so lots of what I've talked about here and I've hopefully I've threaded through is you know a statement I just love you cannot manage what you don't measure and where we are today you can measure everything you can really measure staff and this here this statistic is from a sage pay report they've got a couple downstairs on sage pay stand this is a small group you should go and get it it's called the I think it's like the landmark or the payment the reference for it is that something like the payment landscape report they interviewed 1500 business owners thousands of users they it's really good pieces I think it's almost aimed slightly towards academia not fully but it's a great report they've got a few copies left downstairs and this talked about here they defined successful businesses that track dropouts they also have studied where people drop out and this is kind of just really great takeaway stuff to to to know so wrapping up the takeaway bonus material was also just a couple of things I said ah things that I can kind of thinking of at the moment this guy obviously doesn't do user testing because he looks way too happy but 90 percent of we've got this this this phenomenon now my house you sit on the sofa and there's you know there's a tablet and there's a there's a mobile device and we're switching devices more and more and more so yeah and in e-commerce this is super high and I guess the ultimate takeaway for the three things is I think hopefully stuff here you could take away but each percentage is quite hard for it can be a bit focused on the little stuff because it's the little stuff that drives people mad it roads trust and people sometimes bomb out and and just measure the results and something I put in when I'm trying to push Drupal this is one of the things I say you know the technology is right you're going to really struggle to get the user experience so you owe it to yourself do you need to have the right technology platform but you also need to not be so caught up on that because you just need to focus on the customer experience and I think that's pretty much the time which is a miracle thanks very much of course I'll take any questions so thanks thanks a lot for this presentation actually your it's a typical human computer interaction concepts but you are trying to do to improve the e-commerce through those fines and there is a huge research has been done last 10 years in the area of human computer interaction do you have any studies that shows that if we do those small small tiny things and care about them in our websites and e-commerce is it really affecting the income and is there any study shows that it's there's a percentage of improvement or how much is that improvement or not no studies yeah several of the things in the early part of this come from Bay Mard Institute very happy to put if these slides are going up whatever or I'll give you the thing Bay Mard Institute have done a study that they looked at the top might be wrong here 40 or 50 in terms of transactional websites and they did some detailed studies and they also have done some actually eye tracking and usability and done studies and there was just one or two things that I had here around like 22 percent increase in success that's one particular good source and there are a couple of others that I have referenced here that you know everything I reference I will happily share but there are some but I actually think it's a weakness that I get frustrated that there is not more a sort of academic rigor in this commercial area and where it exists even worse people in our position don't look at that reference material they just could we're all out there learning by iteration and mistaken yet there is some pretty good academic stuff the Bay Mard Institute is one with that well thanks everyone for your time hugely appreciated