On September 15^th I will be hosting a complimentary webinar titled, “Going Mobile: Serving the Always On, Always Connected.” During this webinar I will provide an overview on the mobile landscape and the opportunities that exist for marketers now, and moving forward into the future. In particular, I will address:

• Latest Mobile Internet Usage Statistics
• Opportunities, Limitations, and Differences Between Desktop vs. Mobile Websites
• The Importance of Context in Mobile
• Different Mobile Marketing Tactics to Engage Your Audience
• Key Differences in B2B vs. B2C Mobile Strategy

Check out the video teaser below and be sure to register today because space is limited and spots are filling up quickly. Hope to see you there!

Jegan Chen is a Sr. Strategist of User Experience at BusinessOnLine.

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If you’ve ever been to the Online Marketing Summit, you’ll know that every year we conduct complimentary 15 minute 1-on-1 labs. This year we’re stepping it up and offering labs in social media, SEO, international SEO, PPC, mobile, online strategy, analytics, and of course, usability!

The usability labs in particular are essentially a 15 minute session with either myself or Jegan, where we’ll take a look at your website and provide you with tangible take-aways that you can get started on right away. Many previous attendees have left these labs, as one conference organizer put it, “glowing.” I’m glad that after my one-on-one sessions with them, they are grinning face-to-face instead of crying (which I haven’t done yet to any attendee luckily).

In the session, we take a cursory look at the organization of your website, the content available, as well as the aesthetic value. We take a deeper look at your homepage to as well as your destination pages to really understand where the usability problems exist. Are you sending users to dead ends? Are your error messages clear so users can fix the problems? Are your forms user-friendly? This is really your chance to take advantage of the information you’ve learned in conference sessions, and apply it to your current online initiatives with the help of Jegan or myself to guide you through it. Follow the links below to sign up for the conference and a free online marketing performance lab today. See you there!

Register for OMS Today for a 25% Discount

Sign-up for a Complimentary Online Marketing Performance Lab

Not planning on attending OMS San Diego this year? Sign-up for a free Virtual Usability Lab today!

See you there!

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Sometimes I come across major brand websites targeted towards consumers that I just don’t get. They’re hard to use, lack any type of branding, and don’t relate back to the product. What’s the thinking behind these sites?

Last month, we had the Skittles Social Media Experiment. At least in that case, I could see what their goal was.

Cheetos.com

This time, I happened across the Cheetos.com website. I saw the commercial for Giant Cheetos on TV, and wanted to see if they were for real. The reason being that I love Cheetos, and how could you go wrong with a GIANT Cheeto?

Supporting Browsers

First, the site is completely in Flash, and it took a minute to load on our T1 connection. After that, you’re greeted with a carousel looking thing with a bunch of TV screens on it playing video clips. At first I could not click on anything, and I realized the site only works on Firefox… no IE7 or Chrome support. When I re-opened it in Firefox, it “worked”, but that’s really a relative term.

Occasionally, a clown will walk by, a marching band will march across the screen, a man with Cheeto nunchucks will perform on screen, or a masked wrestler will scream. Um… okay.

Navigation / Interaction Controls

The internet, of all places, is where a lot of people have short attention spans. The reason being is users visit most website with a goal, and only in certain situations for leisure. It is important to provide intuitive controls and allow users to navigate easily and focus on your messaging, products, and content. The main problem with a lot of these types of websites like Cheetos.com, is that they are introducing new ways (often unintuitive) to navigate and interact. Do you want users to consume your content, or spend time trying to learn how to get to that content? Usability is often sacrificed on these type of websites.

It turns out the site is mostly a collection of games. The only mention of a “Giant Cheeto” is the “Giant Cheetos -Pet,” which doesn’t give me the information I was looking for. Ultimately, I give up after a couple minutes, which is probably a couple minutes longer than most visitors will spend on this site.

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Congrats to Thanh on being recognized by Human Factors International (HFI) as the Certified Usability Analyst of the Month!

Each month Human Factors International (HFI) highlights the successes and achievements of a different member of their Certified Usability Analyst (CUA) community and our very own Thanh Nguyen, Director of Website Usability, was selected for the Month of April. This featured spot was given to her based on her extraordinary ability to successfully design interfaces for the end user, and the incredible thought leadership role she’s demonstrated within the industry.

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At conferences, a frequent question I get is “What is the best website?” or “What is the most usable website?” When faced with this question, it’s always difficult for me to give a direct answer. The reason? I don’t think there is one.

Usually In response to that question, I take the Socratic Method, asking, “For what?” For every website I’ve seen I can point out at least a few things that could be a minor or major usability issue (guess because it’s my job), but a usable website goes far beyond the best practices and minimal standards and heuristics that I can assess from looking at a website for five minutes.

Not One Size Fits All

If I tell people that site “XYZ” is a good website, I’ll end up seeing a hundred “XYZ” copy-cats coming back and asking me why their conversion rates are not higher and why their customers are not finding the site easier to use, even though all they did was slap their logo on site “XYZ” design.

The reason for this is because the factors that make one website usable may not necessarily work for another website (excluding the minimal standards and best practices). We like to refer to the minimal standards and best practices as the foundation for the site, but user testing is what refines the site and makes it unique and usable for that site’s specific users. The foundation is of course is extremely important, but the refinement is what sets the site apart from others. However, one without the other results in an incomplete site, which explains why taking the foundation from one site and implementing it into another does not magically result in a usable website.

Every website has different goals and different audiences, and building a website without considering these factors is a flawed but common mistake. It is important to determine the personas of users visiting your site and to tailor the nomenclature, information architecture, design, functionality, and content to these audiences.

Technology and People Change

Another reason why one website will never be the “most usable website” is because technology and people’s experience with technology is ever evolving. Ten years ago we were concerned with 800 x 600 pixel monitor resolutions, “web safe” colors, frames, scrolling text, blue hyperlinks, and pop-up windows.

Some of these concerns still exist today, but technology has advanced to a point where 800 x 600 is no longer the norm, and “web safe” colors are not really a concern. Online behavior and experience has reduced the need for links to be blue (they can just be a distinct color), and pop-up windows are actually preferred for non-web documents such as PDFs (Jakob Nielsen, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/open_new_windows.html).

Designer and developer awareness of usability has also almost completely eliminated the use of frames and scrolling text on the web. It is because of these reasons that usability focuses have changed over the years and will continue to in the future.

Do you think there is a website that is “perfect” in terms of usability?

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After using the latest Firefox version (3.0.1), I realized I’ve been using one of the newest features a lot without even noticing it. The feature is convenient for me, but what are the potential usability issues that come along with it as well?

What is It?

Dubbed the “AwesomeBar” by the Mozilla team, the new Smart Location URL Bar for Firefox 3 displays suggestions from pages in your history when you type any keywords into the browser bar. Taking factors such as frequency of visits, time of last visit, bookmarks (and / or tags), and other things, it suggests pages that you might be looking for. It serves like a little search engine just for your browsing history.

Usability Issues

Learned Conventions

If a user has become accustomed to typing in the URL of pages to find it in their history, the new AwesomeBar definitely breaks those learned conventions and will cause frustrations for users.

Typing in “businessol.com,” you can see from the example that the main businessol.com website does not even appear first within the list. Somehow, the algorithm is choosing the businessol.com/staff page as the most relevant result for me. If a user is used to typing “businesso” and then hitting the down arrow and hitting enter on their keyboard, they will be taken to the staff page rather than the homepage. This wouldn’t be so bad, but…

You Can’t Disable the Feature

There is apparently no easy way to disable the AwesomeBar. This violates some of usability’s basic core principles: letting users feel in control of the system, the ability to reverse actions, and consistency of interactions (see: Ben Schneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design). Do a Google search for “disable Firefox smart bar” and you’ll get over a hundred thousand results with no “official” way of disabling it. Some users are obviously frustrated with it because it disrupts their learned behavior with how a URL history bar should work.

How This Affects Your Website

Title Tag & URL Structure

I’m going to start blurring the lines of Usability and SEO, but it seems like the main factors that contribute to the results in the AwesomeBar are the Page Title and URL structure. Caught up in the Olympics fever, I did a search for “Usain Bolt.”

As you can see, the pages with the keywords showing up early in the Title Bar and the URL structure are coming up first before the other pages. I visited each of these pages once, so frequency should not be a factor, and they are not displayed in the order in which I visited the pages.

We have always suggested making descriptive Page Titles and URL Structures from a usability and accessibility standpoint because they allow users to know where they are, identify the pages easily in their bookmarks/tabs/links, and quickly come back to the same page. The examples we see with the AwesomeBar make it even more important than before, and also suggest that having the keyword appear at the beginning of the Title gives it more relevance.

If Title Tags are Not Optimized

Below is a screenshot of pages I visited from a Google News search. The links in purple indicate that I’ve visited those pages before. I purposely visited most of the ones without optimized Titles and URLs.

Now take a look at the AwesomeBar results. The only one that shows up out of those six is the “Usain Bolt gets Kingston dancing.” You may be wondering why the “Usain Bolt has three golden reasons…” page is not showing up in the AwesomeBar. .. It’s because when you click on the link, the page redirects to another page without an optimized Title Tag.

I also checked it out with Benj, one of our SEO Gurus, and here’s what he had to say:

“hmmm I’ve got nothing to say about it. Just SEO the titles and you’re good.”
-Benj Arriola, SEO Guru

So as long as you have been optimizing your page titles and URL structures, you should be in good shape to have your site usable and AwesomeBar Optimized.

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