Uba Kontrovasie

Good usability cannot be found behind a login screen

The recent launch of Google Website Optimiser probably got a lot of web-masters thinking “Great! a free, off the shelf solution to usability”, just like Google Analytics was a free, off the shelf equivalent to all the big names such as Omniture, Nedstad and Hitbox.

Multivariate testing can provide insight into effective landing page rotations and web analytics can provide insight into navigation paths, dwell times and user journeys. Whilst these snippets of information are useful, I believe they cannot replace the expertise delivered by UE creatives and IA’s.

Working with UE creatives has made me realise that their day-to-day work involves:

- Detailed qualitative and quantitive research
- Defining typical user personas and user journeys
- Accessibility auditing and consulting
- Information architecture design
- User interface design and optimisation
- Content consulting and landing page design
- User testing

In addition to their practices and output, they have an understanding of web technologies, web design, consumer psychology and many of them come from backgrounds in design, web-design or product design.

User centered design has never been so important and even when I speak to clients about the design of basic things such as blogs, I always reiterate the importance of taking UI design and overall usability into consideration.

Good usability increases dwell times, lowers bounce rates, increases repeat visitors and most importantly helps the end user achieve their goal or purpose for using your website.

Whilst the mentioned benefits seem fairly straight forward, people often overlook the benefits that user centered design has on Natural Search Optimisation. Approaches adopted to improve usability and accessibility often simultaneously facilitate more efficient search engine crawling and indexing too.

In an economic and digital climate where the customer really has become King and every penny really does count, ensuring your website is user friendly is essential for maximising efficiencies and gaining the most value from website traffic.

Tags: analytics, efficiency optimisation, multivariate testing

Zazzling Zoom

I was surfing the web for t-shirts today, just looking and not buying. I want to print my own, there are so many Banksy tee’s available but no Binoy Varghese tee’s or any of the artists that I like.

Anyway I stumbled upon Zazzle.Com, which at first looked like any other t-shirt website, however, after some exploring I discovered the neat product zoom feature on their home page.

I haven’t seen it anywhere before, but I think it’s pretty dang cool because it eliminates the need to leave the product gallery in order to zoom in on products. I didn’t delve into how they’ve done it, probably some ajaxery at play.

Tags: ajax, art, Design, e-shop, ecommerce, fashion, online shop, tee shirts, usability, web design

Gmail goes arty

So I pressed refresh on my gmail browser tab the other day and up popped a notification for a new feature, themes!

I had a browse and then selected the space theme, or something of that nature. The theme I had selected was quite cheesy and it reminded of me using Encarta 96 (There’s a blast from the past!).

What annoyed me slightly was the fact that it was hard to navigate my way around the menu and change the theme back to something that I liked. It’s quite easy to change themes once you locate where the theme settings are (on the settings page, themes tab), however, this isn’t very clear initially.

Gmail is quite Ajax heavy therefore an extra dialogue above the inbox to confirm theme selection would be ideal and it would improve over all usability.

I found the themes themselves to be quite mediocre, may be Google should open up theme development to the open source community like firefox/mozilla have.

Tags: ajax, Design, gmail, google mail, menus, navigation, themes, usability, User Experience (UE)

Thinking about who reads your content

I remember studying an e-learning module at University during my final year, it involved learning about different learning styles and the psychology behind learning.

One of the learning theories we covered was called VARK learning styles by Flemming and Mills.

The theory outlined four main types of learning style/persona:

- Visual
People who are visually stimulated learn more effectively through images and videos
- Auditory
Learning through sound based mediums such as lectures, music etc
- Read/Write
People who learn most effectively through reading and writing
- Kinesthetic
Learning via vocation or “doing”

Some of my day to day work involves content consulting and advising clients how, what and where to place content on their websites. One key person I always keep in mind is the reader.

If we refer back to VARK we can see four distinct personalities, it is therefore important to identify how your website and its content will cater for these personalities.

Some will argue that a lot of this is hard to determine without quantitive and qualitative research, however, stepping back and using a common sense approach can sometimes be quite effective.

Take an insurance company for example: they could publish online information about their policies in so many ways, some people (including me admittedly) are lazy about the reading the small print so why not publish it onto a video as an alternative?

A couple of years ago I was working on a project with the Beeb for children, it allowed me to gain an insight into how they were teaching children in a Kinesthetic manner, through games and learning tools. The project seemed to take into account the attention spans of their audiences (children) and then provide them with learning tools, which kept them engaged through participation.

So what’s the moral of my story? People absorb information in different ways, the Read/Write types just want the facts and the text, whilst others will prefer different mediums. It is important to make sure the core pieces of content on your website cater all types of learning style/persona.

The easier you make it for people to learn about your brand and it’s offerings, the faster they will understand what your brand has to offer.

(Just chucking it out there… I’m no UE expert, just thinking aloud)

Tags: content optimisation, content planning, elearning, VARK

Act like you deserve your top spot in Google!

Modern approaches to NSO (post meta keyword stuffing) encompass many overlapping disciplines such as PR, User Experience (UE) and good design.

So many people in the SEO field (client side web-masters especially) fail to take note of the UE side of well…UE!

Accessibility always seems to get taken into account as this is something which can be partly remedied by good use of semantic HTML, CSS and things such as skip links, access keys and legends around forms.

Website IA (information architecture) from an NSO perspective is also another factor which gets ticked in the NSO check list. The one trick that many web-masters miss (intentionally most of the time) is thinking about what content users want to see.

If you’re not providing your users with good content then you are essentially delivering a bad  user experience.

I was recently carrying out some searches in Google for a clients research document and I queried “used car kent”. You only have to click on the top three search results in order to see that the quality of information being delivered is quite poor.

Try the search yourself (Google UK).

The top three results contained pages full of links and search forms with accompanying content that was keyword rich and not very informative.

Serving your users with weak content is not innovative use of a good rankings and I guess if we had access to their analytics packages we would see high bounce rates from Google traffic.

So who is doing a good job? Off the top of my head I would say Amazon, I did a search for “brand planning book” and they came up in position one with a landing page which, had the exact item I was looking for and alternative books with user reviews.

All in all a positive UE for Amazon users. Amazon may slip up on other aspects of UE as I am no UE expert, however I believe the basics are in place as the content they serve website visitors is essentially useful! Surprise, Surprise!

The natural search landscape is becoming more competitive YOY as YOY CPC inflation on paid search hits clients harder. Websites who have dominated natural search results for years should now invest in innovative content strategies in order to keep their rankings and better convert/retain the traffic they receive.

Tags: Amazon, car kent, client side web-masters, content, Google, Google UK, HTML, natural search landscape, Natural Search Optimisation (NSO), natural search results, paid search, search forms, search results, UE, web-masters