I'm pleased to announce that "The Forrester Wave™: UK Interactive Agencies — Web Design Capabilities, Q1 2010", is now available to Forrester clients on the Forrester Web site.

This report is an evaluation of the Web design capabilities of leading UK design agencies: AKQA, Amaze, Detica, EMC Consulting, LBi, Reading Room, Sapient Interactive, VML London, and Wunderman. Putting this together took six months of effort by a hard-working team that included Harley Manning, Angela Beckers, Richard Gans, William Chu and Shelby Catino.  

In our research, we found that Detica and Sapient Interactive led the pack for transaction-led projects, due in large part to the high usability scores earned by the client reference sites they provided for evaluation. AKQA, EMC Consulting, LBi, Reading Room, and Wunderman were Strong Performers for transaction-led projects, with AKQA's exemplary Brand Image Review scores moving it into the Leaders' circle for image-led projects. Rounding out the field, Amaze showed strength in multilingual projects and image-led projects, while VML London earned top scores from both reference clients for the business results it produced. Both agencies came in as Contenders.

All nine vendors in this report have significant market presence and capabilities to service large clients. They are all ranked in the top 25 UK agencies by fee revenue (using data published by New Media Age).

What sets the Wave apart from other industry rankings and awards is the transparent, fact-based evaluation that underpins it. Forrester clients have the ability to look at detailed vendor scorecards and see what the strengths and weaknesses of each agency are.

To gather information on the strength of each vendor's current offering (represented on the vertical axis) and strategy (represented on the horizontal axis), we used the following methods:

[Posted by Jonathan Browne]

I'm embarrassed to see that we haven't updated our blog in three weeks. I guess it's a time of year when it's hard to stay on top of some things. I found myself exhausted at the end of June. (In addition to my trip to NYC for the CXP forum, I also had to do some business travel in Europe). Perhaps you've been feeling the same way? At the start of July, I took a holiday. It was sorely needed.

I visited Lisbon, which, it turns out, is a very beautiful city with great food and wine. As with all travel, the trip gave me a lot of experiences to think about, including a couple of incidents when I needed to ask people to fix things that had "gone wrong":

[Posted by Jonathan Browne]

I'm noticing more and more "word clouds" in company reports and other business documents:

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[Posted by Jonathan Browne]

If you've read any of Forrester's reports on the state of Web site experiences, you will know that we see a lot of flawed Web sites. (And you probably have personal experience of sub-par Web sites that confirms that assertion).

We've been teaching our 25-criteria methodology for ten years (we've updated it six times during that period) to cliients who want a method for identifying problems in value, navigation, presentation and trust on their sites. But during this recession, clients told us they wanted something even more focused - shorter, quicker, cheaper, easier to do.

Warning - This may be the most trivial thing I've ever blogged. Stop reading now if you're looking for insights into customer experience, business strategy or anything of value really.

A few months back I started to use Twitter in earnest. (Before that, I only ever tweeted that I was updating Twitter, but some serious people started to follow my tweets and the joke wore thin).

I have to confess, I still don't know why I should Tweet. I do it because I feel a need to be involved with new media and it's there and it doesn't take up much time. However, I don't derive great pleasure from it and it hasn't altered the way I behave... at least, nothing like as much as Digg, Facebook, Delicious, iGoogle and other social media did. Things got easier when I started to use Tweetdeck instead of Twitter's web interface. Pretty soon I intend to download a solution to my mobile device, so that I can take snaps, post them to Twitpic or Flickr and I guess it would be easier still if I used some software to automate Tweets like Guy Kawasaki and other ueber-Twitterers seem to, but that doesn't feel right to me.

More experienced Twitterers, like my colleague Jeremiah, have spent time to work out how firms can use the medium to engage with customers and promote their brands.