Web design and social media marketing are two topics that I enjoy studying, and the two certainly impact one another for website owners and bloggers who are attempting to increase traffic to their site. While social media is intended to put a spotlight on the best and most popular content, the look and appearance of a page will often influence social media users and their decision of whether or not they should vote for a particular submission. The design of a site can be either a positive or a negative influence on the voting decision, and social media marketers need to consider appearance as much as they consider the content and headlines.



8 Ways Design Influences Social Media Users:


1. First Impression



The first impression of any visitor, regardless of how they arrive at your site, will be heavily influenced by the appearance of the site. Generally, opinions are formed in a matter of seconds, not minutes, so creating a positive impression is critical. While most of your website’s visitors will have a short attention span, social media users are notoriously quick to leave a site that doesn’t impress them right away.



Obviously, when it comes to social media, first impressions can help you or hurt you. Try to evaluate your site from the perspective of a first-time visitor that is arriving from social media. Would the page increase the chances of getting your vote, or would it make you want to leave and visit another site? Pictures and images can often help with creating first impressions. A great example of this is Blog Well’s post 100+ Resources for Web Developers. This post was popular on Digg, StumbleUpon and del.icio.us. While there are plenty of other similar lists for designers and developers, this one got a boost from a picture at the top of the post (screenshot below). Interestingly, the majority of the comments on the Digg submission (which received over 2,000 diggs) had nothing to do with the article or the developer resources, but rather the girl. This is an example of a blog using a picture to capture the attention of visitors (at least male visitors) and using that to attract social media votes




2. Page Load Time



Because most social media users are impatient, and because they have hundreds of other pages waiting for them to visit, page load time becomes even more of a factor than it is in general. If you plan to market heavily with social media, it’s a good idea to design your site to load as quickly as possible. This doesn’t mean that no slow-loading pages will have success with social media, but it can help you out if visitors are able to get to your content very quickly.



3. Readability of Content



If social media users are voting for content that they like, they need to be able to easily read the content in the first place. Most visitors that come from social media will be scanning the page rather than reading word-for-word, so make it easy on them by using short paragraphs, plenty of whitespace, bulleted lists, bold text, etc. Take the time to consider the layout of the page and how it will affect readability.



4. Emphasis of Content



If you hope to impress social media voters with your content, make sure it is front and center and impossible to miss. Are there other distractions in the design that will keep emphasis away from the content? Sometimes you will see content that is filled with advertisements not doing very well with social media when it could be doing much better with different ad placement.



5. Implementation of Buttons/Widgets into the Design



Most social media sites provide buttons, widgets or links that you can use on your site to encourage visitors to vote. These can be very helpful, especially if they are effectively incorporated into the design. When designing with these in mind, you’ll want them to be located where they will be noticed, but not in the way.



6. Branding



If you are marketing your site through social media on an ongoing basis, as more and more social media users are exposed to your site, your branding will be impacted. How does the design of your site allow you to brand yourself in a way that will make an impact with social media users?



7. Navigation



Typically, social media traffic will average a low number of page views. You can improve this by using effective navigation that leads visitors to other content that they are likely to be interested in. From my experience, the most effective way to encourage social media visitors to look at other pages is to include internal links within the body of the content. With this strategy, you may be able to drastically increase the amount of traffic that older posts receive.



Effect design should also include navigation bars or menus that lead visitors to other relevant content. In my opinion, this can help to increase page views, but not as much as links within the content itself.



8. Subscribers



If you are attempting to gain subscribers through social media marketing, be sure to design your pages so that your subscription options are clear and easy to see. Typically, you will want to keep them high on the page so they are noticed right away, and you may want to use standard icons that are easily recognized by potential subscribers

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Search engines and directories are the main way Internet users discover web sites. Various resources confirm this statement, and the percentages generally range from 42 percent of Internet users to 86 percent.

A January 2001 study conducted by NPD Group, a research organization specializing in consumer purchasing and behavior, tested the impact of search engine listings and banner advertisements across a variety of web sites to determine which marketing medium was more effective. In each situation, search engine listings came out on top. They found consumers are five times more likely to purchase your products or services after finding a web site through a search engine rather than through a banner advertisement.

Jupiter Media Metrix, another Internet research firm, determined that 28 percent of consumers go to a search engine and type the product name as a search query when they are looking for a product to purchase online.

Search engines and directories average over 300 million searches per day. Therefore, regardless of whether the percentage value is as low as 28 percent or as high as 86 percent, millions of searches are performed every day. Properly preparing your web site for search engine visibility increases the probability that web searchers will visit your site.

Additionally, think about your own personal experience. Where do you go to search for information about a company or a product on the web? Where do you go to find a site whose web address you do not know or cannot remember? In these cases, you probably use a search engine or directory to find the information.

Web searchers are not random visitors. When searchers enter a series of words into a search engine query, they are actively searching out a specific product or service. Thus, the traffic your site receives from the search engines is already targeted. In other words, web searchers are self-qualified prospects for your business.

Of course, search engines are not the only way in which people discover web sites. People may find a web address in offline sources such as print, television, or radio. They might click a link to a web site in an email document or a banner advertisement. Word of mouth (referral marketing) also is a popular method of bringing visitors to sites. In addition, people locate sites by clicking links from one site to another, commonly known as surfing the web.

Because millions of people use the search engines and directories to discover web sites, maximizing your site's search engine visibility can be a powerful and cost-effective part of an online marketing plan. A properly performed search engine marketing campaign can provide a tremendous, long-term return on investment (ROI).

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Information foraging is the most important concept to emerge from human-computer interaction research since 1993. Developed at the Palo Alto Research Center (previously Xerox PARC) by Stuart Card, Peter Pirolli, and colleagues, information foraging uses the analogy of wild animals gathering food to analyze how humans collect information online.



Recommended Reading


If our brief explanation of information foraging has whet your appetite, so to speak, consider reading Peter Pirolli's Information Foraging: A Theory of Adaptive Interaction with Information (Oxford University Press, 2006). Be warned that this book is highly theoretical and requires an aptitude for both math and cognitive psychology. But if you can stomach some hard-core science, you'll be amply rewarded with great insights into the underlying principles that drive user behavior on the Web and determine which sites succeed.







Web users behaving like beasts in a jungle? There is ample data to support this claim. Animals make decisions on where, when, and how to eat on the basis of highly optimized formulas that have been developed over generations as behaviors that result in starvation are discarded. Humans are under less evolutionary pressure to improve their Web use, but basic laziness is a human characteristic that might be survival-related. ("Don't exert yourself unless you have to.") In any case, people like to get maximum benefit for minimum effort. That's what makes information foraging a useful tool for analyzing online media.



Information Scent: Predicting a Path's Success



Information foraging's most famous concept is "information scent": Figuratively speaking, users estimate their hunt's likely success from the spoor, assessing whether their path exhibits cues related to the desired outcome. Informavores will keep clicking as long as they sense that they're "getting warmer"the scent must keep getting stronger and stronger or they will give up. Their progress must seem rapid enough to be worth the effort required to reach their goal.



Diet Selection: What Sites to Visit


A fox lives in a forest with big rabbits and small rabbits. Which should it eat? This is a question of diet selection, and the answer is not always the big rabbits. Whether to eat big or small depends on how easy a rabbit is to catch. If big rabbits are very difficult to catch, the fox is better off letting them go and concentrating on the small onesthe probability of a catch is too low to justify the energy consumed by the hunt.



The big difference between Web sites and rabbits is that Web sites want to be caughtbig ones as well as small ones. So how can you design a site that will attract ravenous beasts? The two main strategies are to make your content look like a nutritious meal and signal that it's an easy catch. These strategies must be used together: Users will leave if the content is good but hard to find or if it's easy to find but not satisfying.



Three Ways to Enhance Information Scent


1. Ensure that links and category descriptions explicitly describe what users will find at the destination. Faced with several navigation options, it's best if users can clearly identify the trail to the prey and see that other trails are devoid of anything edible.



2. Don't use made-up words or your own slogans as navigation options, since they don't have the scent of the sought-after item. (Plain language also works best for search engine visibility.)



3. Remind users that they're still on the path to the food as they drill down the site. In other words, provide feedback about their location and how it relates to their tasks.






This dual strategy is the reason that Jakob's book with Marie Tahir, Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed (New Riders Publishing, 2002), recommended showcasing sample content on the homepage (appear nutritious) and prominently display navigation and Search features (be an easy catch). Diet selection also supports our traditional advice against splash screens and vacuous content. These elements convey to users that they're in for a tedious ordeal that serves up only scrawny rodents as rewards.



Patch Abandonment: When to Hunt Elsewhere


Grazing environments often feature several different areas where game congregates. So where should predators hunt? In whatever patch has the most prey, of course. And after predators have eaten some of that game, should they continue to hunt in the same patch or move to another one? The answer depends on how far is it to the next patch.



If getting to the next patch is easy, predators are better off moving on. No need to deplete all the game in the current patch; when it becomes a bit difficult to find their next prey, they can move to richer hunting grounds. On the other hand, if it's difficult to movesay, if they have to cross a riverpredators are more likely to hunt each patch more extensively before going to the next.



For informavores, each site is a patch and each site's information is their prey. Moving between sites has always been easy, but for information foraging, it used to be best if users stayed put. The vast majority of sites were horrible and the probability that the next site would be better was extremely low.



We used to advise Web site designers to follow two strategies: Convince users that the site is worthy of their attention (by having good information and making it easy to find), and make it easy for users to find even more good stuff once they arrive so that they don't go elsewhere. An entire movement was devoted to the idea of "sticky sites" and extended visits.




An entire movement was devoted to the idea of "sticky sites" and extended visits. Improved search engines have reversed this equation.





In recent years, highly improved search engines have reversed this equation by emphasizing quality in their sorting of search results. It is now extremely easy for users to find other good sites. Information foraging predicts that the easier it is to find good patches, the quicker users will leave a patch. Thus, the better search engines get at highlighting quality sites, the less time users will spend on any one site. This theoretical prediction was amply confirmed by the empirical data we collected for this book: People left the sites they found useless within less than two minutes.



The growth of always-on broadband connections also encourages this trend toward shorter visits. With dial-up, connecting to the Internet was somewhat difficult, and users mainly did it in big time chunks. In contrast, always-on connections encourage "information snacking": brief online searches for quick answers. The upside of this trend is that users will visit the Web more frequently and therefore find you more often, and will leave other sites faster.



New Design Strategies for Attracting Information Foragers


1. Support short visits; be a snack.

2. Encourage users to return; use strategies such as newsletters as a reminder.

3. Emphasize search engine visibility and other ways of increasing frequent visits by addressing users' immediate needs.




Better intra-site navigation and site maps may tip the balance slightly back in favor of longer stays, but it's safest to assume that users' visits to any individual Web site will become ever shorter. This prediction is supported by our empirical data showing that high-experience users spent less time on pages than the low-experience users.



Informavore Navigation Behavior



Information foraging presents many interesting metaphors and mathematical models for analyzing user behavior. The most important is that of cost-benefit analysis for navigation. Users make tradeoffs based on two questions

1. What gain can I expect from a specific information nugget (such as a Web page)?

2. What is the likely cost to discover and consume that information?

Both questions involve estimates, which users make from either experience or design cues. Web site designers can thus influence users' decisions by designing to enhance their expectations of gains and reduce their expectations of costs. Ultimately, of course, what a site actually delivers is most important, but it will never get experienced repeat visitors unless their first encounter is fruitful.

Users optimize cost-benefit relative to personal criteria and within a system that's larger than any single Web site. It's helpful to remember that they are selfish, lazy, and ruthless in applying their cost-benefit analyses.

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The Web has changed drastically since it started as a collection of physics papers in 1991. The first two years, it was a small type-only hypertext system used by a bunch of researchers, but in 1993 the first major GUI to the Web was introduced with the Mosaic browser. Our research into users' interaction with Web sites and intranets has continued as the Web has evolved through generations of technologyfrom the gray pages in Mosaic through the colorful pages with table-based layout in Netscape to the multilayered, functionality-rich pages in Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE), which uses JavaScript and ever-growing Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

When we began our research in 1994, home users accessed the Internet primarily by dial-up modems with 28.8 kilobits per second (Kbps) throughput, while today most home users in the United States and many other countries have so-called broadband connections running at a few megabits per second (Mbps). (We refer to current cable modems and Digital Subscriber Lines, or DSL, as "so-called broadband" because they are still not as fast as we would ideally like in order to offer an optimal user experience. Fiber-to-the-home service will eventually give us hundreds of Mbps, and that's when we will be able to talk about a truly broadband Internet.)

Haven't these substantial technological advances caused radical changes in usability issues as well? Mainly, the answer is "no." Usability guidelines remain remarkably steady through generations of technology because usability is a matter of human behavior, and people don't change much from one decade to the next. In fact, the great majority of users today are the people who were using the Web ten years ago. Their characteristics are about the same, as are their behaviors. Human short-term memory holds only about seven (plus or minus two) chunks of information, and the last time this design constraint changed was probably at the time of the Neanderthals.


Seven of the 34 original usability problems have become less important today because of changes in browsers, bandwidth, or other Internet technology.




Still, seven of the 34 original usability problems we named have become less important today because of changes in browsers, bandwidth, or other Internet technology. These improvements have somewhat reduced problems with

• Slow download time
• Frames
• Flash
• Low-relevancy search listings
• Multimedia and videos
• Frozen layouts
• Cross-platform incompatibility

In this section we look at those problem areas that lost skulls due to improved technology. Remember that skulls indicate the amount of trouble a usability problem causes. Fewer skulls imply less trouble, and that's indeed a happy side effect of some of the technological advances that have been made since we started developing usability guidelines in 1994.



1986 Air Force Guidelines Stand the Test of Time



From 1984 to 1986, the U.S. Air Force compiled existing usability knowledge into a single, well-organized set of guidelines for its user interface designers called Guidelines for Designing User Interface Software, ESD-TR-86-278. Jakob Nielsen was one of several people who advised the undertaking. The project identified 944 guidelines, most of them related to military command and control systems built in the 1970s and early 1980s, which used mainframe technology.

You might think that these old findings would be irrelevant to today's designers. If so, you'd be wrong. As an experiment, we retested 60 of the 1986 guidelines in 2005. Of these, 54 continue to be valid today. Of the total 944 guidelines, we deduced that 10 percent are no longer valid and 20 percent are irrelevant because they relate to rarely used interface technologies. But nearly 70 percent of the original guidelines continue to be both correct and relevant 20 years later.







Slow Download Time



Download times used to be one of the most important issues in Web usability: In every study we ran, users complained about waiting for pages to download. They rarely praised sites for being snappy.


Most of the sites that grew big in the 1990s featured bare-bones designs with few graphics and fast-downloading pages. Graphic designers complained, but users loved them.




Most of the sites that grew big in the 1990s featured bare-bones designs with few graphics and fast-downloading pages. Graphic designers complained that Yahoo! (1994), Amazon (1995), eBay (1995), and Google (1998) looked primitiveor outright uglybut users loved these sites and gave them ever-more business because it felt good to get the next page immediately after each click.

On a smaller scale, our site www.useit.com grew to become the world's dominating usability site while deliberately sporting an ugly, nondesign look. In the beginning, we felt this was necessary for quick downloading, but today we have retained it as a branding approach because of its strong positive connotations for users. This is an example of how people relate to design on the reflective level outlined in Don Norman's model of emotional design.



Don Norman's Three Levels of Emotional Design



In his book Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things, our colleague Donald A. Norman describes three levels at which people relate to design:

The visceral level is the most immediate and is dominated by appearance. Smooth or round objects have cuddly or pleasant connotations; sharp or pointed objects connote feelings of fear or danger. Spiders give you the shakes when you spot them, and babies make you feel protective. Most visceral emotions are hardwired and triggered immediately because they are based on evolutionary advantages and survival principles. Most graphic design attempts to operate at the visceral level, evoking positive emotions as soon as we look at something.

The behavioral level is based on use of the object. How does it feel to operate it? Is it annoying or pleasant to use? Most usability issues relate to the behavioral level. Response times are a classic example of an issue that affects behavioral emotions: It simply feels bad to sit and wait, and wait, and wait.

The reflective level is based on how we think about, or reflect on, an object. Does it have positive or prestigious connotations? Does it evoke a happy memory? Branding often works at the reflective level by making people think in advance that a certain product or vendor is special.






A Crash Diet for Web Sites?



Today, it's less important for Web pages to slim down to a design that eschews all graphics. When most users have broadband connections, pages with pictures download reasonably fast. At the 3 Mbps that's typical of cable modems, the browser can download about 300 kilobytes (KB) within the one-second limit that's required for pleasant hypertext navigation. In practice, data download can't fill the entire second because there's some latency in communicating requests back and forth across the Internet. But 100 KB is certainly a reasonable page weight for fast downloads.

This means that a Web page can easily combine a fair amount of text with some formatting markup, a style sheet, and even a few small photos or other images. Initial pages still can't include a lot of big graphics. But if users click a thumbnail photo and request a bigger image, they can receive a huge 200 KB enlargement within a good response time.

Still, slow downloads have been reduced to one skull instead of zero for a few reasons. People who live in rural areas, use mobile connections, or are connecting from a hotel room that hasn't been upgraded to broadband are still restricted to dial-up. Second, even broadband users can only download so much within a second, so there's still reason to watch page weights. Finally, response times are determined by server speed just as much as they are by the number of kilobytes being transmitted. There are still too many sites running on overloaded servers that don't send out the next page view immediately.



Frames




Frames were one of the most incompetently designed "advances" in Web technology. They were bolted onto the very clean page model that was the foundation of original Web browsers and broke many interface conventions that users had grown to rely on, such as being able to bookmark a piece of information or email its URL to a friend. In early browsers, printing pages that used frames was extremely difficult, and they interfered with search engines as well.

Worst of all, frames broke the Back button in Netscape, version 2. (As discussed earlier in this chapter, breaking the Back button is a three-skull usability problem to this day, and any technology that does so can only be described as a usability disaster.) It is still best to avoid frames most of the time, but they are not nearly as serious a problem with modern browsers. The Back button works now, and printing pages with them is easier.



Flash



In the early years, we deemed Macromedia Flash "99 percent bad" because it broke the Back button, didn't work with bookmarks, and caused accessibility problems for users with disabilities.

Flash introduced several serious usability problems in its early versions. First, it encouraged gratuitous animation. ("Since we can make things move, why not make things move?") Animation clearly has its place in online communication, but that place is limited.

Second, it stopped users from controlling their own destiny. One of the most powerful aspects of the Web is that users can go where they want when they want. This is what makes the Web so usable, despite its many usability problems. Unfortunately, many Flash designers violated this principle by employing television-style presentations rather than interactive media. Regardless of how cool a presentation looks, when users are required to sit through it with nothing to do, they become bored and lose their enthusiastic for the site.

Third, many Flash designers introduced their own nonstandard GUI controls. How many scrollbar designs do we need? The world's best interaction designers worked for years testing numerous design alternatives to come up with the current Macintosh and Windows scrollbars. A new scrollbar designed over the weekend is likely to get many details wrong. And even if the new design is workable, it still reduces a site's overall usability because users must figure out how it works. They already know how to operate the standard widget.

None of these usability problems are inherent in Flash. You can design usable multimedia objects that comply with the guidelines and are easy to use. The problem is simply that early Flash design tended to encourage abuse.

After we campaigned incessantly against bad Flash, Macromedia began promoting Flash's ability to add functionality and advanced features to Web sites over the product's glitz. In 2002 a new version was launched that improved Flash accessibility and corrected most of its other usability problems, such as breaking the Back button and using nonstandard GUI controls. Flash seemed well on its way to become a positive contributor to increased Web usability.




Flash: The Good, the Bad, and the Usable




In 2002 we conducted user testing of 46 Flash designs and summarized our findings in a report that includes 117 usability guidelines for Flash. Conducting these sessions with Flash applications reminded us of our tests with the first crop of Macintosh applications in the 1980s. Many of the Flash usability issues we identified related to basic GUI concepts such as making controls obvious and easy to grab.

One of our Flash guidelines is a virtual copy of a guideline from the 1980s: You must provide generous click zones around active screen areas or users will think that they clicked something even when the computer's strict definition of clickable pixels says they didn't. We also repeated a finding from early tests of MacDraw and Lotus Freelance Graphics: When you create new objects on a drawing canvas, they should be staggered relative to other objects so that they're all visible.

Other Flash guidelines are new and irrelevant to traditional software. For example, we discovered many usability issues relating to sound and animated objects, both positivethey can indicate change and directionand negativethey can be distracting, annoying, and difficult for users with disabilities. Some Flash applications have apparently inherited bad habits from Web design.

One particular usability problem is worth emphasizing: In several applications, users missed options because of nonstandard scrollbars. A scrolling control is a standard user interface element in application design, and it should be designed in accordance with users' expectations. We did see a few nonstandard scrollbars that workednotably on Tiffany's site, which is so simplified that users couldn't miss the scroll controls even though they were fairly small and violated GUI recommendations. (These deviations caused other usability problems, but at least people used the scrollbar.) In general, users often overlooked nonstandard scrolling controls and couldn't scroll the lists to see all their options.



The welcome decline in Flash means it doesn't deserve three skulls any more. Many designers are learning to relegate Flash to when it serves a user purpose and not use it purely for show. In fact, Flash technology itself doesn't even deserve two skulls. However, we still give it two skulls because of the way other Web designers implement it. Some designers continue to ignore usability guidelines for Flash, so some new Flash actually degrades the user experience by creating obstacles that prevent people from obtaining what they need quickly.




Low-Relevancy Search Listings



Next to navigating, Search is the most common way that people find what they're looking for on Web sites. Until recently, most sites had miserable Search capabilities that didn't prioritize page hits intelligently.

Early Search software was ineffective in retrieving useful hits because it sorted listings according to how frequently users' query terms occurred on each Web page, not by their relevance. Who cares how often a term appears on a page? It's much better to place the most relevant pages on top.

For example, when a product name is searched, the core product page for that item should be a top hit, not seemingly arbitrary press releases and papers. The product page acts as the central place to get information about that product and is a springboard from which users can access to other relevant information.

Even today, few Web sites have smooth, efficient Search, and many sites return such irrelevant Search results that they ought to get three skulls for bad Search usability. However, Search on many bigger sites is useful enough to be a single-skull issue. On average, across the Web, we now give low-relevancy search listings two skulls.



Multimedia and Long Videos


Three developments have made multimedia and video clips more acceptable on the Web today. First, bandwidth has increased sufficiently to make it much faster to download videos and other media presentations. Second, the technical quality of videos has improved so that viewing them is no longer like watching jerky postage stamp-sized movies. (This is partly due to more bandwidth and partly to better media player software.) Third, Web producers have become better at creating videos and other multimedia presentations for the Web instead of using repurposed television programs.

Multimedia usability is still a problem, but much less so than in the days when we had only one guideline for Internet video: Don't do it. We still need to design multimedia that really works well in the online medium, where users tend to be very impatient. And most video clips need to be shorter than a minute, to keep their attention. Until then, this is still a two-skull problem.



Frozen Layouts



To say that a Web page has a "frozen layout" means that the information displayed on it is fixed in width, no matter what window it's displayed inside. If the window is too narrow, part of the information will be cut off and only visible after horizontal scrolling.




Teenagers: Masters of Technology?




Teens are often stereotyped as being much more comfortable and adept with new technology than are adults. While this is sometimes true, it is an oversimplification. Believing those teens are masters of technology can lead to disastrous outcomes for sites aimed at them. Teens are much more apprehensive about technology than it might seem. In fact, we have found that most teens veer away from downloading plug-ins and clicking the unknown because teachers or parents have instructed them to avoid all downloads for fear of viruses.

In addition, when online multimedia doesn't work the way young people expect it tofor example, when a video doesn't play automatically or requires complex user inputthey lose patience and blame the Web site. In our tests with teenagers, we found that they will give up rather than try to figure out how to overcome technical difficulties. Young audiences have less success with Web sites than adults do because they have less patience. And while teenagers appreciate some graphics and multimedia, they often don't have the computer setup to support them. Most of the teenagers we visited at home and school had outdated, older computers that ran slowly and lacked current software, plug-ins, and speakers.





We know from our testing that users hate horizontal scrolling and always disparage when they encounter it. That is surely reason enough to avoid horizontal scrolling, but there are two other reasons to as well. First, users expect vertical scrolling on the Web. As with all standard design elements, it's better to meet user expectations than to deviate from them. Second, when pages feature both vertical and horizontal scrolling, users must move their view port in two dimensions, which makes it difficult to cover the entire space. For people with poor spatial visualization skills, it's especially challenging to plan movements along two axes across an invisible plane. (Typically, users score lower than designers on spatial reasoning and visualization tests.) In contrast, one-dimensional vertical scrolling is a simple way to traverse content without advance planning: You just keep moving down or up.

The risk of inducing horizontal scrolling is an obvious reason not to freeze layoutsor at least not to freeze page widths to a size that's wider than most users' windows. How do you know how big your users' browser windows are? If people maximize their windows, then browser width can be derived from monitor width, and most people currently have screens that are 1024-pixels wide. In the future, bigger monitors will be more common, and many users already have monitors that are 1600-pixels wide or wider. People tend to utilize the space on these big screens to show multiple narrower windows, however, instead of enlarging one window to fill the entire screen. But frozen layouts are undesirable even if the page is narrower than the user's window. The user loses the benefit of having a big monitor because the page doesn't expand even when more space is available.

Frozen layouts cause usability problems, but they have dropped in severity from three to two skulls because of the increased prevalence of big screens. It's very rare for a site to have frozen pages wider than the 1024 pixels of most users' monitors. As an alternative, however, we recommended a "liquid layout"a Web page that expands and contracts with windows so that it's always exactly as wide as the browser, neither more nor less. Users with sufficiently big monitors who want longer lines of information can have them, and those who prefer reading shorter lines get those.



Cross-Platform Incompatibility



Worldwide sales of PCs reached 183 million in 2004. Of these, only three million were Macintoshes, leaving the Mac with two percent of the market. Going forward, the Mac will probably continue its decline because most of the growth in Web use will come in countries where Apple has little or no presence. (Apple's market share is 3 percent in the United States, 1.5 percent in Europe, and about 1 percent in the rest of the worldwhere the growth is.)

Is it worth testing your Web site on the Mac in order to cater to that two percent of the market (three percent if you are a United States-only site)? We would probably still say "yes," at least for bigger Web sites for which a two percent increase in business is worth more than a few tests and easy fixes. Smaller sites, on the other hand, might decide that the financial return is insufficient to bother testing on the Mac. As always, with a limited budget, you must choose your battles.

For Web sites, cross-platform compatibility means the ability to work on different browsers, not just on different computers.

Cross-platform design is still of some importance, which is why we give it two skulls. We had reduced this guideline to one skull in presentations we gave in 2005, but it's been bounced back up because of the success of the Firefox browser. For Web sites, cross-platform compatibility means the ability to work on different browsers, not just on different computers. After Microsoft wiped out Netscape in the original browser wars of 1997 to 2002, almost all users employed Internet Explorer, version 5, drastically reducing the need for a site to work across browsers. With little competition, Microsoft reduced the pace of new browser releases, so there was also not much need to test across browser versions. As of 2003, only two percent of Internet users were on version 4 browsers, so it was getting to be reasonably safe to ignore them. By 2006 even these last holdouts had abandoned version 4at least as far as can be measured reasonably. In 2006, Internet Explorer, version 5 had become the minority browser, with five percent of users. Such is the cycle of life.

Sad Mac

It saddens us to state that the Mac is approximating insignificance because of its tiny market share. Our company was cofounded by a former vice-president at Apple Computer, Don Norman, and one of our other colleagues, Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini, wrote Apple's first human interface guidelines. We were happy and loyal Macintosh users for 12 years; Nielsen got his first Mac in 1986 and even used a Lisa in earlier years. Still, business is business, and you gotta go with the numbers, not with your memories.

Our general advice is to wait five to six years after the launch of a new browser version before you stop caring about the previous one. For example, IE 5 was launched in 1999, so you could safely ignore version 4 in 2004. IE 6 was launched in 2001, so you can probably start ignoring IE 5 in 2007. IE 7 was introduced in 2006, so you probably will need to support IE 6 until 2012. (The five-to-six years rule is useful for long-term planning; to actually make the decision to stop supporting a browser, check your server logs to see what percentage of your current customers employs that version.)

More recently, new browsers such as Firefox, Apple's Safari, and Opera have gained some market share, and Microsoft has resumed development of Internet Explorer and is launching new versions. This means that at any given time, a Web site will be visited by users on several different versions of IE, as well as by people using third-party browsers, including earlier versions of these browsers.

Given this renewed diversity in the browser space, you might imagine that cross-platform incompatibility would remain a three-skull problem. Not so. Advances in technology came to our rescue and reduced the status of the cross-platform problem. New browsers are more standards-compliant than the browsers in the 1990s, so it's more rare for a Web site to work in one browser and break in another. Breakage still happens, so you should test your site in several browsers and several versions, but the problem is not nearly as bad as it used to be.

Even though we credit technological developments for the reduced skull rating, designer restraint is also partially responsible. Heavy-duty cutting-edge design is rare these days, which is good because such it is more likely to fail in minority browsers.



Mobile Devices: A New Argument for Cross-Platform Design?


We used to think that the growing prevalence of mobile devices with Internet access would be a strong argument in favor of cross-platform Web design. After all, cellular phones, Blackberries, PocketPCs, and other handhelds are very different from PCs and won't display sites that are coded too narrowly for a big-screen environment. Our studies of users accessing mobile content and services have convinced us otherwise. Mobile is so different from PC that it really requires a separate Web site with a much simplified user experience.

Cross-platform really only means "across fairly similar platforms." Mac vs. PC vs. Linux? Yes, they are similar enough that one design should work for all three. IE vs. Firefox? Same thing. Fourteen-inch monitor vs. 28-inch monitor? Again, the same site ought to work when there's only a factor-four difference in available pixels, especially since users with huge monitors tend not to maximize windows and spend all their pixels on just one.

On the other hand, there's a factor-eight difference in screen size between a Treo smartphone and a smallish 1024-by-768 PC monitor, and that's simply too much for the same user interface to scale nicely. A more traditional cell phone display is 31 times smaller than the desktop monitor. This gap is so huge that a single user interface simply can't scale and provide good service to both classes of users.

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The entire concept of "Web design" is a misnomer. Individual project teams are not designing the Web any more than individual ants are designing an anthill. Site designers build components of a wholeespecially now that users are viewing the Web as a single, integrated resource. Unfortunately, much of the Web is like an anthill built by ants on LSD. Many sites don't fit into the big picture and are too difficult to use because they deviate from expected norms.



Defining Standards and Conventions


Standard: Eighty percent or more of Web sites use the same design approach. Users strongly expect standard elements to work a certain way when they visit a new site because that's how things almost always work.

Convention: About 50 to 79 percent of Websites use the same design approach. Users expect conventional elements to work a certain way when they visit a new site because that's how things usually work.

Confusion: With these elements, no single design approach dominates, and even the most popular approach is used by less than half of Web sites. For such design elements, users don't know what to expect when they visit a new site.





We must eliminate confusing design elements and move as far as possible into the realm of design conventions. Even better, we should establish design standards for every important Web site task. Standards enhance users' sense of mastery over a site, help them get things done, and increase their overall satisfaction with a site.

Seven Reasons for Standard Design Elements


Standards ensure that users:

1. Know what features to expect
2. Know how these features will look in the interface
3. Know where to find these features on the site and on the page
4. Know how to operate each feature to achieve their goal
5. Don't need to ponder the meaning of unknown design elements
6. Don't miss important features because they overlook a design element that is not standard
7. Don't get nasty surprises when something doesn't work as expected





Even if you don't believe in the theoretical arguments in favor of user interface standards, the empirical evidence strongly favors complying with existing design conventions and usability guidelines. In this chapter, we have seen that the users most often:


1. Go to a search engine and type in two to three words
2. Look at the top few listings on the SERP
3. Visit some of these sites but leave them after less than two minutes if they don't seem sufficiently useful
4. View most site pages for less than half a minute



With this little time to communicate your product benefits to prospective customers, you want everything else out of the way. If a user spends 27 seconds looking at a product page, you don't want them to spend most of it wondering about your navigation design or puzzling over other user interface elements. If your design follows conventions, they can allocate their attention to your content. That's the simple business rationale for complying with standards.



There are certainly cases where it's OK to deviate from the usability guidelines. That's why they are called "guidelines"because they usually, but not always, hold. Take Victoria's Secret as an example. The very successful e-commerce site of this famous fashion and lingerie company usually scores among the top sellers on the Web. The nature of the company's products and positioning mean that it can do certain things on its site that would be a mistake for almost any other company. For example, the Web site attracts large numbers of visitors every time it streams an hour-long video production. Most Web sites would do better with shorter video clips.



Even those sites that violate some guidelines are only successful if they comply with the vast majority of them. A few sites are so special that they can get away with violating most of the guidelines, but they are truly the exceptions.

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When we let users loose to go anywhere they wanted on the Web, they went to a search engine 88 percent of the time. Only in 12 percent of cases did they go straight to a Web site that they hoped would help them with their problem. For example, when the task was to research vacation travel to Mexico, only a few users went to a travel site that they already knew and trusted, such as Expedia or Travelocity. The vast majority employed a search engine to help them find sites.

The fact that search engines have become the dominant tool for users looking for solutions is clearly why search advertising has become such a profitable business. Search ads are the main way you get in front of prospective customers at the exact moment they are looking for new vendors.

Increasingly, the Internet user experience is becoming one of dipping a toe into Web sites rather than truly "visiting" them. Using search engines as their Web interface, people often grab query-related nuggets from sites without engaging with the sites themselves.

The search engine has always been an important tool for users. In 1994, when we were trying to understand why people used the Web despite its lousy usability, we asked everyone who came by our lab two questions: What are you doing online? What are your favorite sites? Their answers were strikingly diverse. People's pursuits ranged from golf to knitting to Linux to military history, and their favorite sites varied just as widely. In fact, the only commonality among them was that all users named a search engine among their top sites.

The conclusion was clear: The Web's strength comes from narrowly targeted sites that provide users with highly specialized information that they need or care about passionately. It was also clear that Search was a hugely important general-interest service because even back when the Web had only 30,000 sites, locating specialized ones was nearly impossible without help.

The Rise of "Answer Engines"

The study we conducted for this book confirmed our early conclusion: Users pursue their own idiosyncratic goals and depend on a generic serviceSearchfor guidance. What has changed: Rather than looking for sites to explore and use in depth, users now hunt for specific answers. Search engines have essentially become "answer engines."

A major change over the years has been a decline in using Search to identify good sites as such. People are looking for answers. The Web as a whole has become one agglomerated resource for people who use search engines to dredge up specific pages related to specific needs, without caring which sites supply them. The job of search engines is no longer resource discovery but to answer questions.

It's a testament to the Web's growth that users now view it as integrated whole. This is good news for search engines and users but not for Web sites.

This changing behavior is explained by the theory of "information foraging": The easier it is to track down new resources, the less time users spend at each resource. Thus, improvement in Search quality over time is driving the trend toward answer engines. Always-on connections have a similar effect, because they encourage information snacking and shorter sessions. Finally, Web browsers' despicably weak support for bookmarks/favorites has contributed to the decline in users' interest in building a list of favorite sites.

It's a testament to the Web's growth that users now view it as integrated whole and don't bother with Web sites; they assume that anything they want to know is available somewhere. They just have to ask. "Web sites" weren't really a tangible concept until 1993 anyway. The pre-Mosaic Web in 1991 and 1992 was exactly that: a web of information where the fundamental unit was the article, not the server hosting a particular Web page. So this new user behavior is actually a reversion to the Web's original vision to some extentthough not completely because users still have some favorite sites that they treat as resources.

For search engines, becoming the user interface to the Web's embarrassment of riches is good news. It's also good news for users, who can find answers by visiting a few search hits rather than enduring the obscure design and poor navigation found on many sites. But is this good for Web sites? Unfortunately not. There is very little value in giving answers to users who don't know or care who provides the service.

E-commerce sites are something of an exception, because they often get a sale from users dipping a toe into their catalog. E-commerce sites differ from other Web sites in having confirmation and fulfillment stages that follow up on users' initial visits, and these steps can also grow the site's mindsharethe likelihood that the site will come to mind when the user is thinking about the type of products or services it offers. Thus, closing the first sale is one of the most important drivers of subsequent e-commerce sales.

It would be self-defeating for e-commerce sites to refuse shopbots (software that searches the Web for a product's lowest prices), prohibit deep links, or employ other tricks that require users to enter at the homepage and spend time navigating the site. Any barrier between the customer and the product translates into lost sales.

Four Ways to Grab Value from Search Engine Visitors

There are some tactics you can use to gain value for your company from users who dive into your site from a search engine. Unless you use at least one of these four, visitors may only see one or two pages on your site and never know anything about your company.

Offer flytrap content that attracts users by providing narrowly focused pages with clear answers to common problems. These pages should perform well in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), so remember to write clear headlines.

Embellish the answer with rich "See Also" links to related content and services. Global navigation won't do the trick because answer-seekers will ignore it. Remember, they are not interested in your site. But contextual links will make the most eager users dig deeperand the eager people are the ones you'll want to keep as prospects for your for-pay services. "See Also" links can be embedded or placed at the end of the article, where they serve as a follow-up call to action. The latter gives you the opportunity to let people know that you're actually selling something and not just handing out free information.

Go beyond pure information and provide analysis and insight, preferably from a unique perspective and with a striking personality that supports your positioning. A percentage of users will appreciate your perspective and want more, even after they've found the answer to their immediate question.

Publish a newsletter with additional tips and useful information. E-mail newsletters set up a relationship with users, offering a more personal experience than page viewing.

Even sites that don't sell must accept the trend toward users' answer-seeking behavior. Walling yourself off from the Web's web-like nature won't solve the problem. Tracking numbers of unique visitors is now irrelevant. Most such visitors are sampling a single page to get an answer, not engaging with your site. Instead of tracking them, count loyal users as a key measure for site success.

Organic vs. Sponsored Links

Search engines typically present two different kinds of hits on the SERP: organic listings and sponsored links. The organic listings are those that were naturally found on the Web as the best matches with the user's query, according to whatever algorithm is used by the search engine. Supposedly the organic listings are "pure" and noncommercial to the extent that the site at the other end of each listing didn't pay to be listed and won't be charged if the user clicks on an organic link.

The sponsored links are quite the opposite: They are nothing but advertisements, even though most search engines persist in employing the euphemism "sponsored" in referring to them. Sadly, many less technical users don't understand what "sponsored" means in this case and don't recognize that these links are simply ads.

How People Use the Search Engine Results Page

The search engine results page is usually referred to as a SERP. It's fitting that this term is rarely used in plural because most users don't see more than one SERP per query. In 93 percent of searches, the users in our study only visited the first SERP, which usually held ten search results plus a number of ads. In only seven percent of cases did users page on to a second SERP, and the number who visited three SERPs for a single query was too small to provide a firm estimate, but it was likely less than one percent.

Not only did most users make do with a single SERP; most of them didn't even bother reviewing the entire page. Only 47 percent of users scrolled the first SERP, which means that 53 percent saw only those search hits that were "above the fold." (Originally a newspaper term, "above the fold" refers to what part of a Web page is visible on a screen without scrolling.) On the most widely used search engine, Google, users can only see four or five results above the fold, if they view the page on the most common screen resolution of 1024-by-768 pixels, like those in our study. In addition to the four or five "organic" search results, there are typically six or seven advertisements above the folda total of ten or so items to choose from.

This table shows how often users clicked the search hits at different placements on the SERP list. Since the first SERP only displays ten organic links, users needed to go to the second SERP to click links number 11 or higher. Of the seven percent who actually visited the second page, only five percent clicked therea discrepancy explained by the fact that a few users who visited the second page returned to the first page. It's no big surprise that the top links get more clicks than bottom links, but it may be surprising to see just how dominant the No. 1 spot is, with more than half of all the clicks.

Number One Guideline for Search Engine Optimization

Aim for the top spot in the listings for all the important keywords your users are likely to search for. (Unfortunately, this is an easy guideline to state but a hard one to achieve.) If you don't get the top listing, second or third is certainly good as well. The farther down the list, the less likely your chance of being seen, but if you have a choice between being ninth or tenth, pick the bottom spot on the page, as there is some prominence to being the last element in a list.

If you can't get a decent organic ranking for important query terms, seriously consider running search ads for those terms.

Using Keyword Pricing to Estimate Usability Improvements

It is very expensive and time consuming to conduct broad usability studies like ours of a wide range of Web sites. We can't do it every year, so we can't accurately track usability improvements on a steady basis through direct measurements. Fortunately there is an indirect measurement that's more feasible to acquire and that can be used as a proxy for Web site usability: the prices paid for keyword advertising on major search engines.

Over time, the price for keyword advertising has shown a distinct upward trend. Future increases in keyword bids will be tightly related to improvements in Web site usability.

On most major search engines, keyword advertising works as follows: First a company must consider how much it is worth paying to try to attract a visitor who has searched for a certain keyword and is presumably interested in a product or service associated with that word. The company then bids for each keyword, and the search engine usually displays the ads from the top eight bidders. (There are many twists to search engine advertising, but the basic principle is an auction in which a limited number of slots are sold to the highest bidders.)

For example, our own company, Nielsen Norman Group, usually pays 31 cents per user who searched for "usability training" when that user clicks through from the search engine to the page for our annual usability conference. Similarly, a company that sells vacation packages to Mexico would be willing to pay a substantial amount for users who are searching for "vacation Mexico" or "hotels Yucatan."

Over time, the price for keyword advertising has shown a distinct upward trend. Over the long term, increases in keyword bids will be tightly related to improvements in Web site usability. During the next several years, keyword prices will increase substantially as more companies realize the benefits of search engine advertising. Search ads are the best way to promote a Web site because keyword matching attracts users who are looking for the exact thing you're offering.

Currently most Internet marketing managers are clueless about keyword advertising and spend most of their budgets on advertising techniques that were appropriate in old media but don't work in an interactive medium like the Web. But one of the beauties of the Web is its accountability: You can track the results of advertising expenditures in terms of both click-throughs and the extent to which clickers turn into spenders. Because of this, even clueless managers will gradually reallocate their budgets to the best performing promotions, which will most often be search advertising.

How To Determine the Optimal Bid for a Search Keyword Ad

We say in our discussion of keyword advertising that a company should increase its bids for search keywords as long as it can make more money from the average new visitor than it is paying per click. This is a nice simplification that makes a complicated argument easier to follow, but it's not the best way of actually determining what your bid should be.

In real life, you should maximize your profits, not simply do as much business as possible. For example, let's say that your Web site makes an average profit of $2.00 for each new visitor who arrives after clicking on a certain keyword. (Let's also say that you have a conversion rate of one percent, so the $2.00 profit per visitor was derived from a profit of $200 per buying customer, since only one of every hundred new visitors becomes a customer.)

Your earlier experimentation has established that you will gain the following traffic for each of three possible advertising bids for a keyword that's highly targeted for your product:

Bidding $1.00 places your ad third from the top and generates 500 visitors per month

Bidding $1.50 places yours as the second ad from the top and generates 1,500 visitors per month

Bidding $1.90 places your ad on top and generates 2,000 visitors per month

How much should you bid? Certainly, you could afford to bid $1.90 because you would still make 10 cents per visitor for a profit of $200 a month. On the other hand, bidding $1.00 would gain you a full dollar's profit per user, for a total monthly profit of $500 from the 500 users who were attracted by a third-place ad. Finally, bidding $1.50 will gain you monthly profits of $750. This is obviously the preferred outcome because it has the highest profit margin.

In this example, you are better off doing without the 500 extra users who would be attracted by the top ad but who would not click on a second-position ad. These users are simply not worth the higher cost of the top spot. Users who click on lower-positioned ads are often worth slightly more to companies than users who click on top ads because they tend to be more actively committed to getting a solution to their problem.

Of course, you must gather the detailed data for your customers from your own Web site. In general, though, the main guideline is simple: The higher the worth of a new visitor, the more you should bid to attract them to your site.

As more and more companies discover the high return on investment (ROI) of search advertising, keyword prices will be bid up because of the increased demand for a fixed supply of advertising positions. Of course, a search engine could put more ads on each page but only at the price of diluting the effectiveness of each ad. What search engines are really auctioning off is the attention of motivated users, and as long as motivation stays the same, there's a limit to how much a page can be subdivided and remain profitable.

How Much Is Improved Usability Worth?

A company can double the "conversion rate" (making a sale or getting a request for product information from a new user) of its Web site through a good usability project. We found in a study of 42 redesign projects that site measures improved 135 percent after redesigning for usability.

It's difficult to estimate when all companies will fully understand the benefits of search advertising, but 2010 might be a reasonable guess. When that happens, further growth in keyword pricing will be due to improvements in the target Web sites.

As we've said, each company should bid no higher than what it takes to get a positive ROI. So let's say that a company brings in an average profit of $2.00 for each new customer. It might bid up to $1.99 for a click, for marginal profits of one cent per new visitor. Bidding $2.01 would be too much and would result in losses.

Now let's assume that this company performed enough usability work on its Web site to double the conversion rate for new visitors, which is a likely result. The company now makes an average of $4.00 per new visitor, so it can bid up to $3.99 for each click on the keywords that generate the $4.00 visitors. Improving usability and doubling the conversion rate doubles the bid that the company can afford to pay the search engine.

Of course, our example company would hope that it wouldn't have to increase its search engine bids by quite as much. It would be preferable to pocket some of the increased profits from usability improvements instead of handing them over to a search engine. In the short term, the company would indeed be able to retain some of the profits because its site would be better than its competitors'. Until its competitors also increase the value of their visitors, they could not afford higher search bids. Sooner or later, however, they will conduct their own usability projects and improve their profits, allowing them to increase their bids. As soon as eight competitors have doubled their bids, it will be necessary for our example company to double its bid again. Since even one cent's profit is better than no profit, rational companies will increase their bids accordingly.

In the long term, keyword prices will tend to increase at about the same pace as Web site conversion rates. Since the conversion rate is a key measure of usability, bids for search engine advertising will continue to indicate the extent to which Web sites are improving their designs.

As Web sites improve, search engines will confiscate almost all the increased profits they gain from increased usability. In other words, search engines need do nothing but watch their incomes grow as mainstream Web sites do all the hard work of improving the Web. Is this fair? No. But the reality is that search engines drive much of the new traffic that a site can hope to attract.

Three Reasons to Improve Your Site

Why should a Web site bother with usability if most of the value of improvements accrues to search engines? There are three reasons:

If you don't improve, your keyword bids will gradually become insufficient to get your ads shown, and your Search-derived traffic will shrivel to nothing.

If you do improve, there will be a window of opportunity when you're better than the competition and you won't have to increase your keyword bids to the max. During this time, you get to keep the fruits of your labor, so you can hope that your competitors don't read this book and are slow to improve their sites.

Finally, you do get to keep the increased profits from customers who arrive through other means. Although search ads are a great way of driving traffic, they're not the only way. Links from other sites, word of mouth, offline advertising, and many other techniques can drive traffic as well. Also, most search engines allow so-called "organic results," which are free listings where your site is shown because it naturally scores well for the user's query, even if you are not running any ads.

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In the beginning, the question was whether people were even capable of using Web sites. Today the answer is "yes," at least most of the time. When we told people to go to a specific site in the user testing for this book, they completed their tasks successfully 66 percent of the time. Of course, they also failed 34 percent of the time, but on average people did succeed.




There are more than a billion users on the Internet, so any site that has less than ten million customers (in other words, almost any site) has not tapped into 99 percent of the potential audience.






Why do people use the Web if they fail a third of the time? Because in reality, they don't fail that often. The failures occur when people use new sites, but most people spend a lot of their time on sites that have proven useful in the past, so their success across a day of Web use is actually higher. Because users choose sites to spend time on based on their prior experience with them, those with high usability have a better chance of being selected. Furthermore, success breeds success: Users get better at using sites that they visit habitually. For example, if you have already bought nine books on Amazon.com, it'll be easier for you to buy the tenth than it was to buy the first.



It may be little comfort to learn that users' overall experience is better than indicated by our statistics, though, because a site's only hope of attracting new customers depends on how easy it is to use during that all-important initial visit. There are more than a billion users on the Internet, so any site that has less than ten million customers (in other words, almost any site) has not tapped into 99 percent of the potential audience.



The 66 percent success rate we measured in our study is actually a great advance over the miserable usability that characterized the Web in the 1990s. At that time usability studies regularly measured success rates at around 40 percent, meaning that more people failed than succeeded at using the Web.



The Measure of Success


We define success rate by the percentage of progress users made in completing their tasks. This is admittedly a coarse measure: It says nothing about why users fail or how well they perform the tasks they complete. Nonetheless, we like success rates because they are easy to collect and are a very telling statistic. After all, user success is the bottom line of usability.



Success rates are easy to measure with one major exception: How do we account for cases of partial success? If users can accomplish part of a task, but fail other parts, how should we score them?



Let's say, for example, that we ask users to order 12 yellow roses to be delivered to their friends on their birthdays. If a test user correctly makes the required arrangements, we can certainly score the task as a success. If the user fails to place any order, we can just as easily determine the task a failure.



But there are other possibilities as well. A user might order 12 yellow tulips or 24 yellow roses, fail to specify a shipping address or give the correct address but the wrong date, or forget to ask that a gift message be enclosed with the shipment. Each of these cases constitutes some degree of failure, so we could score it as such. However, we usually grant partial credit for a partially successful task. To us, it seems unreasonable to give a zero to both users who did nothing and those who successfully completed much of the task. How to score partial success depends on the magnitude of user error.



There is no firm rule for assigning credit for partial success. Partial scores are only estimates, but they still provide a more realistic impression of design quality than an absolute approach to success and failure.







So we have come a long way in just a decade. When will we see success rates of 100 percent? Probably never, because there will always be some sucky sites that almost nobody can use. But if current trends continue and sites invest more in usability, we should approximate 100 percent around 2015. Does this mean that the Web will be perfect by then? Certainly not. Success rates only measure whether it's possible for people to use Web sites, not whether it's pleasant or efficient to do so. Furthermore, because the Web is the ultimate competitive environment, once people can use almost all Web sites, they will still tend to use the ones that serve them best.



Web-Wide Success Rates


People succeeded 66 percent of the time when we took them to a homepage and gave them tasks that were possible to do on that site. But when we gave them a blank browser screen and told them to go anywhere they wanted to complete a task, the average success rate dropped to 60 percent. This makes sense because users first have to identify a site that will solve the problem and then use that site to accomplish the task.



If you are collecting usability measures for your own Web site, you should measure your numbers against the success rate we recorded for site-specific tasks, assuming that you too start your test participants on your homepage. This is the most common way to run usability studies because it maximizes the time users spend on the site that you are in charge of redesigning. If your users can perform 70 percent of reasonable and representative tasks on your site, you have above-average usability. Conversely, if their success rate is 50 percent, you have abominable usability and you will need to improve by about a third to bring your usability rates up to the average of 66 percent.



The 60 percent success rate we recorded for the Web-wide tasks is more representative of the overall Web user experience, when users are trying to do something new and they don't already know what site to go to. The lower success rates for Web-wide tasks is a measure of the difficulty of using the Web as a whole and the features that the Web provides to help users identify Web sites (mainly through search engines). So there's still plenty of room for improvement on the Web.



Success by Experience Level


We divided our test users into two groups, based on their amount of Internet experience. All had at least a year's experience using the Web, but there was still a broad range of expertise among them. For the purposes of this analysis, we divided them into "low-experience users" and "high-experience users," according to a variety of issues:



How many years they had been online



How many hours per week they used the Web, not counting time spent in email



How many "advanced" behaviors they exhibited, such as Web chatting, changing the labels on bookmarks, upgrading their browser, and designing their own Web pages



Whether they fixed problems with their computer equipment themselves



How much they followed current trends in technologyfor example, if they subscribed to computer magazines or were considered by friends to be a source for computer advice



In general people were considered "low experience" if they had been online for no more than three years, used the Web for less than ten hours per week, exhibited less than a third of the advanced behaviors, asked somebody else to fix their computer problems, and weren't consulted for advice on technology. Conversely people were scored as having "high experience" if they had been online for at least four years, used the Web for more than ten hours per week, exhibited more than a third of the advanced behaviors, fixed their own computer problems, and were a source for tech advice for others.



Of course, some people were advanced on some of the rating scales and less advanced on others. In those cases, their final designation as low or high experience depended on their average score.



As this table shows, the gap between the low- and high-experience users was 13 percent for the site-specific tasks and 15 percent for Web-wide tasks. In other words, experience was a stronger advantage when users had to navigate the entire Web instead of being told what site to use. This difference indicates that freedom of movement is more of an advantage for skilled users and more of an impediment for less skilled users. This again vindicates the "walled garden" approach (a closed environment that restricts user access to outside information) that AOL used in the early days when it tried to simplify the online experience for novice users.

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Is the end of Yahoo Search Marketing near? Yahoo has announced that they are running limited tests of AdWords sponsored search ads (or Google AdSense for Search, which are AdWords served in the search results of non-Google search properties) beside Yahoo Search results.

Yahoo says that the test will apply only to traffic from the Yahoo.com site in the U.S. and will not include Yahoo!’s network of affiliate or premium publisher partners, like the Newspaper consortium or other Yahoo partners. Yahoo says that the test is expected to last up to two weeks and will be limited to no more than 3% of Yahoo! search queries.This test is a direct result to the Microsoft takeover attempt, even though Yahoo is not admitting it :

Yahoo!’s board of directors is exploring strategic alternatives to maximize stockholder value, including exploration of potential commercial business arrangements. The Company noted that the testing does not necessarily mean that Yahoo! will join the AdSense for Search program or that any further commercial relationship with Google will result. The Company further stated that it would not comment on the nature or timing of any potential relationship.

Back to the beginning of this post. Will Yahoo dump Yahoo Search Marketing and replace it with Google AdWords?

I seriously doubt that Yahoo will throw away or sell their search marketing technology, which outdates Google AdWords in its core history. Yahoo will more than likely use Google AdWords to power the terms or industries which Yahoo is not bringing in as much revenue for.

OR Yahoo will probably serve Yahoo Search Marketing results for the first sponsored search results, then supplement secondary results with AdWords, in a similar fashion that Ask.com has done with Google or Microsoft did with supplementing adCenter ads with Yahoo.

This isn’t the first time Yahoo and Google have worked together, since Yahoo gave Google its start more or less when the company let Google power Yahoo search results earlier this decade.
Hopefully more news will come out of this relationship as it develops, especially if Yahoo can generate much and a response from Microsoft on this Google Yahoo partnership is eagerly expected.

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Compared to building websites, blogs are easier, cheaper and faster to build, but does this mean that you should have more than one?

My answer to this is "yes and no."

A little bit of an ambiguous answer I know, but let me clear up the reasons for my answer …
If you're an intermediate to advanced marketer who knows how to a) get traffic to your blog and b) monetize your blog by converting more of your visitors into paying customers, then I say you have a solid reason for diversifying into other niche markets and build more blogs - so long as you know how to manage all of them of course.

The problem really comes when you don't know how to get traffic to your blog, you struggle with keeping it maintained, your blog posts are mediocre and even if people do land on your blog, they hit the back button in seconds … in other words, they escape your blog without even taking note of what you have to say.

This is when I argue that you should think twice before building more blogs unless of course, you really feel that you're currently blogging in the wrong market, either because your target market are unresponsive to blogs or to finding information online generally or because you just don't know enough about the subject matter to create an authority blog. Other than that, this is the strategy I would pursue to get more traffic and monetize your blog before building more of them:

Post at least 3 times per week and make those blog posts informative. Infomative could include doing a quality review of a product that you are an affiliate for, giving tips on how to use a particular product and even doing a trackback to someone elses blog post.

Ensure your ping list is up together so that you get the maximum benefit from publishing your blog posts.

Comment on other people's blogs - particularly those in your niche. I know my readers may be tiring of hearing this one, but it's relevant and new bloggers still fail to recognize it as a credible means to getting traffic and links back to your site. If you read comments on other people's blogs then you should be commenting because you already know the value.

Tag your blog posts. Each time you make a post add your keywords as tags at the bottom of your post as well as to your Wordpress pages. I would use the Simple Tags plugin to do this which, will allow you can categorize your content based on a tagging engine so your posts are indexed by services like technorati. This is something that I only started doing recently and so far, it's paying dividends.

Syndicate your posts. Once your post is pinged and tagged properly, you should syndicate your post, which will enable you to generate some immediate traffic. I recommend that you check out Web 2.0 Submitter to do this. Syndicating your posts can be a drawn out, tedious task, but with Web 2.0 Submitter, you can do this in a fraction of the time to about 30 social media sites and for $47, it's worth every penny.

There are a myriad of other strategies you can use to bring more traffic to your site but if you focus on these five and perform each task with due diligence and you'll see your traffic stats increase in a matter of weeks.

Once you've perfected or at least use these strategies comfortably, you can apply them to any niche.

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Last year, the big thing online was about getting your videos on YouTube or Google Video but in my view, 2008 demands much more than creating a video or putting it up on video sharing sites.
Yep, 2008 is about spread! If you want to stand out from the crowd, you have to make your videos viral and if you want to learn more about how to do this, young Gavin over at RyanShamus.com has just written a great article on how to make your videos viral.

As Gavin points out, to be viral, your video has to be different - funny, unique, interesting and, I would add to this, inspiring. In other words, you have to engage your audience enough that they consider your video worthy of sharing with their friends via email, social networking or even on their own blog. After all as Gavin points out, "the term ‘viral’ comes from the same concept as a virus - it spreads! But, in this case the spreading is a good thing."

Basically, having a viral video is like word-of-mouth marketing
But, it's a few thousand times more powerful. Why? Well if you think how long it takes for someone to "tell" a friend about your product or service compared to them being able to click the mouse a few times and have your video watched by billions … I hope you're getting this! Viral video marketing is that powerful and technology is such today that it does not have to be intimidating.

In fact, I received my Flip Video Camera today. And boy, has that thing been on a journey. It started off in America, then to Canada and from there to the UK. It's taken me almost 3 months to get it and yet, you want to know the hardest part of using it? Getting into the packaging!! Man, why do they have to seal these things up so much.

Anyway, once out of the packaging, my 6 year old daughter began recording with it and moments later we were watching her "final cut" on our TV screen. And, this was just because I was too lazy to fire up the laptop since with one flick, a USB connector arm extends so you can attach the video camera directly to the PC. Couldn't be easier.

Anyway, if you want to know step-by-step how to make your videos and podcasts viral and, you want to know which resources will help you get the job done with most efficiency, then I suggest you head on over to Gavin's blog and read the article for yourself. In fact, I saw this article more as a special report than an article because of the approach used to ensure the reader isn't just informed about the fact that viral videos are "in," young Gavin, as I like to call him, even gives you tips on getting the most from using certain video sharing sites, how to market your video as well as resources to help you get started today.

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Useful Tools for Small Businesses on the Web




Blidget




Create a blidget; a widget that sits on your website and pulls in the latest entries from your blog. Customizable and free




Browsershots




Browsershots lets you test how your site looks in different browsers; Firefox, Opera, IE, Safari, running on different operating systems; Linux, Windows, Mac.




Colour Lovers




If you are planning changes to your Web site, Colour Lovers helps you work out what color schemes work well together. It also gives you RGB and Hex reference numbers if you want to pass them on to your site developer.




Contribute




If you are paying a programmer for each tiny change to your website, it can get expensive, and quickly. Contribute allows you to easily update pages on your site using your browser; no technical knowledge required and can save you tons of money in programmer fees. From Adobe - $169 with free trial period available.






Decluttered




How to declutter your desk. Not so much a tool, but a how to on making your desk neater; always good for business – and cheap and easy to do.




Deyey




Design your business cards online for free; then save them on your own PC and print them up. A nice alternative to better design without the cost.




Favicon Generator




A favicon (favorite icon) is an icon that is displayed in the browser address bar before the site’s URL. If you don’t have one, but want one, upload an image and the favicon generator will create a favicon for you to use.




Fax Zero




If you’re in the US or Canada and don’t have a fax machine, go to this site, upload your document and send your fax for free.




Feedburner




Feedburner is a free media distribution service for blogs and RSS feeds. This means you can automate the process of sending your news to your audience via e-mail or RSS. It also allows you to track who is reading your content.




GIMP




Gimp is a free powerful, full-featured photo editing program, comparable to Photoshop. Available for Linux, Mac, and Windows.




Google Alerts




If you want to know what is being said about you or your company online, Google Alerts offers you an easy way to keep track. Type in the words you want monitored (your name, your business name, your competitor etc.) and let Google e-mail you each time that word appears in search results.




Goog 411




Instead of calling 411 for information call 1800 Goog 411 ( 1 800 4664 411) and get a street address or phone number for free.




Icon Buffet




You need an icon, but where to get it? Become a member and get free icons sent to you, or buy your own packs here. The philosophy is quite neat. They give away free icons every month, but not everyone gets the same ones. The idea is to swap them (sorta like swap cards) and use what you like.




Icon Factory




The Icon Factory offers great looking icons you can use for your site as long as it is not for commercial use (then you have to buy them). But, for non profits, this just might be the way to go.




International Time




Does your business deal with customers internationally? Make it easy for them to contact you by adding a link to local time on your contact page–customizable.




Jott




Jott is a free service that converts your voice into text and sends it to you via e-mail or text message; great if you need to record something but don’t have a pen handy. (US only.)




Media Convert




You upload one file format, and Media Convert will convert it to another file format. Works with most formats of documents, spreadsheets, presentations, video and audio.




Montastic




Montastic monitor your website and send you an e-mail if it goes down. This free service can check your site every ten minutes, and saves you the trouble of visiting your site as often.




Open Source Web Design




Over 2000 free designs for you to choose from for your Web site.




PC Decrapifier




Have you ever bought a PC only to find it filled with pre installed junk you don’t need? The PC Decrapifier gets rid of all that stuff. Free for personal use




Resizer




A free image resizing site. Upload your pictures and edit them online.




SEO Tools and Lessons




9 SEO tools you shouldn’t be without from Aaron Wall (with free lessons).




Stock Xpert




Stockxpert is a royalty free stock photography community. With over 100,000 images, search by keyword for the image you need. Costs per image range from $1 - 3.




The elements of typographic style applied to the Web




For the tech inclined.




Typeflash




If you’ve ever been stumped for inspiration when it comes to typography for your site give typeflash a go.




Widgetbox




A useful assortment (over 30,000) widgets that you can add to your site – all free




How To and What is?




Understand Search Engines and Subject Directories




UC Berkeley offers lessons on how to search, including explanations on the differences between search engines, subject directories, and the invisible Web.




What is RSS?




RSS and all its bits explained by Darren Rowse.




The best 10 RSS readers for Windows, Mac and Linux




There are many free RSS readers out there, Tad shows you the best.




Understanding Domain Names




What is a domain name and how does the domain system work? A non technical explanation from Internic.




How to Podcast




A free step by step guide for anyone wanting to create a podcast




How to Design Web 2.0 Style




A tutorial that covers various common graphical elements of Web 2.0, with explanations of how, when, and where to use them best.




HTML for Beginners




In English; also has intermediate and advanced HTML.




CSS for Beginners




In English, with intermediate and advanced CSS guides.




Photoshop Tutorials




Easily understandable and doable, if you’ve ever wanted to give it a go, try visiting this site first.

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