Nathan Massey's dashboard

I think it would be great if Barclays made available a sticker with a built-in NFC (contactless) chip that was linked to your bank account, that you could stick to the back of your phone, so you can pay for things just by swiping your phone on the contact-less reader.

Seeing as phones with built-in NFC chips are going to take a while to come to market, a small sticker that can be attached to existing phones would be ideal.

On Facebook, each user has the option to add their favourite Music, TV programmes, Films and Books to their profiles. At the moment, you just type these different things into Facebook and they are displayed on your profile.

With the new addition of 'Pages' on Facebook where you can become of a 'Fan' of things like bands, TV shows, movies etc, I think it would be useful if Facebook showed the Pages you are fans of under those headings rather than having to type them in.

For example, i've become a fan of the show QI of Facebook, but if someone were to look at my profile under the 'Favourite TV Shows' section, they wouldn't know that I liked QI as it isn't listed there.

After doing this, the 'Personal Information' part of your Facebook account could be limited to just the Activities, Interests and About me sections.

Argos have recently added a new feature to their website where you can enter your postcode to find you nearest store, and then see every clearance product that store has in stock, and reserve it to pick up. This is a great tool for bargain hunters, as they can find products that might otherwise get lost in the warehouse or in dump-bins, and it's great for the company as it efficiently clears out end of line stock.

It would be great if PC World introduced a similar system on pcworld.co.uk, as I have seen many clearance products at good prices in-store, that are not listed on the website at all.

A PC World iPhone app would be a really useful tool for customers when shopping a PC World. Ideally such a App would have the following features,

- Uses Location Services (GPS) to find the nearest PC Worlds to the user (shown in both Google Map view and list view, sorted by distance from store). You would then be able to select a store, see it's photo, address, opening hours, phone number, email address and any other relevant info.

- You should be able to buy any of PC World's products right from your phone, or reserve items from your phone to Collect@Store. The app should save the reservation numbers of any reservations, so you don't have to write it down or make a print out. Ideally, the app would display the reservation number as a barcode on-screen, so that the member of staff in-store can just scan that barcode off the phone's screen to bring up the details of that reservation.

- It could use the iPhone's built in camera to scan the barcode of products to see more information about that product. If you scanned the bar code of a digital camera, you would see a full description of that product, it's price, it's features and technical specifications. You would also be shown a photo gallery of the product, unboxing videos, and video reviews.

You could also be shown reviews of the product from blogs like engadget.com, stuff.tv, t3.com, theregister.co.uk and Cnet. You could also see reviews/ratings from other customers from pcworld.co.uk (if pcworld.co.uk starts doing customer reviews like Amazon).

You would also be able to see related products. For example, if you were looking at the page for a printer, you would see USB cables, ink cartridges (for that printer), paper and photo paper in the 'Related Products' section.

The ability to see the store's stock level of that product would also be useful, so if you're at a store, scan the barcode of a product from the product's price ticket, you could see if other nearby stores had it in stock, or even buy it online right from your phone, and have it delivered to you instead.

As a ex-employee, I know how long price changes can take to do, and how much time it takes away from serving customers. Rather than the current system of printing of paper price tickets and going around the store finding the relevant products, PC World could install a e-ticketing system instead.

E-ticketing uses a small "e-paper/ink" display to show the name and price of a product, which is wirelessly updated when price changes are made to a central database. There are a few companies that produce these kind of systems (http://www.elabelsys.com/index_sim.htm is just one).

This would save both time wasted not serving customers, and both resources (paper and ink).

It would be great for PC World to create a forum (forum.pcworld.co.uk) where customers can sign up and talk to each other about the products that PC World sell. Many companies now do this (O2, Vodafone, Gameplay etc) so maybe PC World should as-well. It would be a great way for PC World to build a community around their brand, and get a sense for which products people are talking about.

It would be good for PC World to have a blog to announce new store openings/re-openings, new features on pcworld.co.uk, and other announcements. A blog would be a great way for PC World to communicate with customers, and to hear back from them in the comments.

Many companies have blogs, and I think it creates a great bond and loyalty between the company and customer by showing that the company isn't some faceless corporation, and that personalise the brand.

PC World's website is in dire need or a redesign. There are a lot of issues with the functionality and design of the site which need to be looked at, and a full redesign is probably the best way of doing it. Some of the biggest issues that come to mind at the moment are,

- Dual navigation - It seems stupid that there is the same menu navigation both horizontally and vertically across the page. There is no need to duplicate the site's navigation, as it wastes space, and could potentially confuse visitors to the site.

- Blatant SEO-ism - You only have to look at the title of the 'Laptop' section on pcworld.co.uk to see how some SEO advisor has got their mitt's on the website. A title of "Cheap Laptops at PC World - Buy cheap Laptops in the UK. New Laptops and Laptop computers from Acer, Sony, Advent, Toshiba and Compaq." is a little much. Maybe just "PC World - Laptops" would suffice?

- Use of images for text - If you look at the first bit of navigation in the top-right hand corner, all the options are not text, they are just images with text on them. This isn't good practice for a number of reasons, the main being the lack of accessibility of it.

- No DOCTYPE - This is more of something you'll care about if you've dabbled in web design, but it's a indicator of the low quality of the site.

- Horrible URLs - You would expect the URL for PC World's laptop section to be pcworld.co.uk/laptops right? Wrong. It's "http://www.pcworld.co.uk:80/martprd/editorial/Laptops_homepage/?int=top_nav".

PC World just need to get a outside agency in to completely redesign the website, as the internal web team at PC World (if there is one) don't seem to be up to the job.

These are just a few of the problems I can think of at the moment, but i'll reply to this topic if I think of any more.

If you go to the 'Laptop' section on pcworld.co.uk, you'll see that on that page it says "PC World Recommends Windows Vista® Home Premium".

As PC World sells a wide variety on computers with a various operating systems (Windows XP, Vista, 7, OSX, Linux), it would be good for customers if PC World, as a organisation, remained impartial on recommending specific products. PC World should leave it down to their customer advisors to show customers the features of each product, and let the customer decide for themselves.

I think it would be really useful if PC World were to create a forum (http://team.pcworld.co.uk) that any member of staff could log into, and share best practice and ideas. It would be a great tool for staff to gather new ideas to improve the business, and improve their own skills and product knowledge by talking with other members of staff from across the country.

Staff would login with their employee ID number, and create a password of their choosing. Each post on the forum would have the authors full name, branch, position (CA, BA, Tech Guy, Manager etc) and photo avatar next to it.

With the recent news about the DSGi Facebook group, employees clearly want to come together to discuss things, maybe it would be a good idea to provide a place for them to do this, but in a private, moderated environment.

As a ex-employee, I think it would be good to for PC World to change the staff uniform. The problem with the current uniform for customer advisors, is that the whole shirt and tie setup just shouts "I'M A SALESPERSON" to customers, which isn't a good thing. Customers don't want to be sold at, they want someone to give them some friendly advice, so I think making the uniform a little less formal would help to change (some) people's perception of customer advisors.

Here's what I think they changes should be,

- Managers: White Shirt, Black Trousers, Purple Tie.
- Business Staff: White Shirt, Black Trousers, Blue Tie (to match PCWB logo).
- The Tech Guys: No change. (Grey polo shirt, Black cargo trousers).
- Customer Advisors: White polo shirts (large PC World logo on back), Black Trousers.
- Warehouse Team (OOH): Black polo (large PC World logo on back), Black cargo trousers.

With CA's in a new more informal uniform, along with a new lanyard name badge, would be great.

As someone who has previously worked at a PC World, this is more a request coming from a employee than a customer.

I think it would be useful for PC World to replace the current staff name badges with a lanyard badge (with built in RFID chip).

Having a RFID chip in the lanyard would mean that staff could get into restricted areas (warehouse, staff room, secure cage) just by touching their RFID badge to a reader. They could also login to the store's computer terminals using the same method, touching their badge to a sensor connected to the terminal. It could also be used to track when stock is taken out of the warehouse (replacing the 'laptop log'), an employee simply touches their badge into the system, then scans the products they are taking out of the warehouse.

Here's a mock-up of what the badges could look like,