VijayWeb.com

Usability Analytics: The four most key factors measured in website usability testing include: learnability, effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction.  Though, it is not a perfect alternative for the traditional one-to-one usability testing methodologies, but very economical and fast when we already have web analytics data with us in form of reports example, Google Analytics Data.

Learnability:

Effectiveness:

Efficiency:

Satisfaction:

URL means Uniform Resource Locator (URL) which specifies where an identified resource is available and the mechanism for retrieving it.

An URL structure generally includes a domain name, folders, files and extensions in it.  We are going to discuss the best practices in URL Structure for the benefit of SEO, Usability and Branding too.

A domain name has several levels to it.  In domain name “www.vijayweb.com ” -  “.com” is called as the Third Level or Top Level Domain, “vijayweb”is actual domain and it is also called as Second Level Domain, and finally “www” is just a sub-domain.  We use www as prefix or a subdomain more commonly as the interent has been branded in that way from the beginning. It is just a custom than a technical requirement.

Choosing a domain name was the most difficult part in the beginning of the DotCom story than it is now One had to really do a lot of research and brainstorming, even taking consultants assistance to really choose a right domain for new dotcom business.  The main factors that were used to rate “a domain name should be easy to remember, easy to recall, easy to pronounce, spell, write” are some of the main requirements to choose a domain. But, with Web2.0 they all have really not a big stand and any catchy word will work, for example, reddit.com, digg, del.icio.us, youtube, flickr etc.,    Earlier there was great option to depend on the domain name for branding the business or service, now with all the domain names are gone with cybersquatting, we are left with minimum options.  Now, we are left with chosing a catchy word and brand the domain name with the unique solutions we are offering.

Best Practice: Choose a Catchy Word, still keep in mind the basic rules (easy… that is usability).  Be particular about choosing a country specific TLDs (top level domain) if your target audience belong to specific countries.  Country specific TLDs are one of the factors that will win Search Engine Ranking Positions in your country specifc search engines while still play in the global search engines.  (I don’t really see it is important to choose a keyword rich domain  that doesn’t meet the above prequalifiers unless you are building the site specifically for the purpose of search engine rankings).

After Domain Name,  a url structure can have one or more levels  to it. And, this is where the most difficult and confusing part as there is a direct SEO benefit.  There is no one formula works for all when creating search engine friendly urls for SEO purposes as there are only 10 positions every other person want to rank in.

There are different SEO URL structures in practice:

1. Creating content theme by having all similar content into one folder or category.

2. Having all static and dynamic files originating from the root of the domain.

3. Use Keyword rich file name and folder name.

4. Not keeping more than 2 or 3 levels down in the url.

5. Having static pages with no query string parameters

6. Having underscores between the words

But, these are pretty old practices…with the social web in web2.0, SEO will also majorly depend on how users are liking the content and sharing on the web.

Best Practice: While keeping the above guidelines in mind, thinking about the user and how he behaves after he lands and what you want him/her to do on the site would give great inputs in how you can align this with the above SEO practices.  Providing seperate identification in the URL for important sections and features of the site would enable visitors to remember the urls and land directly to the pages. Provide short and easy to copy and share urls.

Usability Quote: “If we try to create sites for everyone, it can not be used by anyone”

Web pages are so much cluttered with lots of links when we need only one piece of data or link.   Web masters often try to create websites targeting every one whom they think are potential for their business.  When we as the visitors have so many options and links on the web page, now it is our turn to play the  game “hide and seek”.  But, how many of the visitors have patience to play this game before they get what they want?

The content needs of users are widely varied.  So far I have seen, people have no patience in finding what they need.  I think that is one of the best reasons why Search has become so much imperative for everyone on the web. Though there is a different study on this specific factor that says “creating friction in the user experience would convert to a lead” , I believe it is more applicable when we have a unique product like iphone or an answer to a very niche problem.  Bottom line is “Give What Users Want Upfront”, it only creates a positive brand perception and builds trust (studies found that “Trust” is the single most influencing factor when users buy online, if you are a small web master it is even more important).

Now, you may say: -

1.  we are serving a large audience with varied needs

2.  our targeted audience are thru out the country or globe

3.  we offer a vast number of products, services or content

4. majority of our site visitors are entering the site at the home page

How can we compose a web page content to address eveyone needs?

Let me talk about the answer in 3 easy examples -

1.  Let’s assume you use “EzDSL Broadband services” and their website is www.ezdsl.com, as a user, you visit ezDSL.com in mostly 3 situations : -

a. Pay the monthly charge

b.  Change the package

c.  Talking to Support

Now, ezDSL also has three business goals in respective of your goals:

a.  Make it easy to you to pay the fee, so that you don’t hesitate to pay the bill next time. (every time I have to pay my credit card bill, I had to travel 5km to drop the check, or request my friends to help me,   I used to miss the due data and end-up paying late fee, ultimately I am switching to another bank Bottom line “Make it easy to pay you”

b. Provide competitive offers to retain you as their client.

c. Increase their Support Satisfaction Score.

Now, ezDSL can create a different pages for each of the above goals, since users can not remember all the URLs of the site, they come to your site’s home page to find the link or they go to Google

ezDSL also have people visting their website for buying the service or new installation of the modem, or talking to sales person etc.,   And, these people also have different goals.

How can ezDSL.com can personalize content speific to me as their existing client and avoid content that is less interest to my need?

If you are using ezDSL broadband while browsing ezDSL.com, they can identify you on your ISP Host name and deliver content majorly targeting the above three of your goals. Which means you no longer see those sky-scrapper ads asking you to buy again or they are placed in less prominent places on the home page.  With this kind of targeting Web Page’s real estate has been saved for the users who  need them.

Similarly, you could be having different user segments – Work on how you can identify them using Cookies or other PII methodologies such as “login ids”and target the content to the user.  Pls. drop me the message if you think I could be any helpful for you.

Example 2,  IP Delivery is widely used these days for advertising targeting. Everytime users access the website, their Network IP provided by the ISP is published back to the Internet. Web masters generally do a riverse look-up against the IP-Geographic database generally compiled by ISPs.

For example, if you want to increase your sales of a given product in Bangalore, India and increase sales for a different product in New York. You can offer different content to two different citys by serving the content on the users IP address.

You are browsing from the below location, and I can target offers and content relevent to people in this geograhic location:

<Google Map Code – not embedded>

Latitude: 12.967

Longitude: 77.583

Example 3, Referrer Delivery – If you are a small/mid webmaster, it is very likely that the majority of the traffic comes to  your website from Search Engines like Google or other web resources like Digg, facebook, or even from an email.  Now, you can serve content on from where users coming to the sites. For example, if the users are coming from Google by typing “discounted widgets”.  You would know users with this keyword more likely to convert and serve them more targeted offer or content.

Understanding your website visitor behavioral data for a historical period would give better idea on whom to target with what kind of content and offers.  And also, tells you when to serve the content in the conversion cycle.

Can you read the logo?

And this one….

Today morning I got an email on something that has a link to the site for this brand.  And when I visited obviously as any user I tend to look at the logo to see what the company and was shocked. I can’t read what the logo is and I immediately called 3 of my colleagues and asked them to read what it is… and people are reading it like Dcigo, DDGO etc.,  I don’t know if that is the case with you too.  Post in comments what you feel.  This seem to be a travel brand ixigo which invested good amount of money and resources, nothing to blame but something to learn.  I apologize if there are any other marketing reasons behind it but I or the test users can’t read it.

In the field of usability it is often said and proven that 95% design problems can be found with only 10 users. Those 10 Users are not the people who sit next to your design team but actual users.

OK, now is another test which was asked to me when I was attending usability classes. Go back to the FedEX logo on the above and let me know if you find anything else.  You might if you have already known and if you are not you would be knowing after I said what it is.  And next time you see the FedEx you will spot it that and you will not miss.

That’s what happened I guess with the logo I had shown above. When the people design a logo or saw the logo before and know what it is, people can read it next time.  We, designers  get excited about our creativity but users appreciate creativity after they are happy with the usability.

Honestly now I can read the logo as iXigo after I knew and happened the same with the test users I chose.  This is all cognitive psychology of the people which designers are not generally deal with. So the best choice is to select different users to test your design.

The bottom line is “Design your logo for easy to read, remember, recall and represents your brand“.  When you have that kind of logo there are plenty of marketing benefits for the organization.  In other words, a small effort can cause a huge marketing benefits.

I proudly belong to the Design Community and thought it is a valuable post to share.  By the way, in Fedex logo there is an arrow -> between the letter “e” and the letter “x”

The user interfaces and user experiences would dramatically change as the Multi-touch Operating Systems start entering the market. I really anticipate a huge transition would happen at personal computers segment and so the peoples browsing behaviors.

iPhone is a clear success on the multi-touch. (I am not sure on the commercials though)

And, now HP has launched the first touchsmart PC (hopefully it will be used for multi-touch OS). Apple too has come up with the touch enable PC. http://h30440.www3.hp.com/campaigns/touchsmart/IQ500_NA/Model.html

The best part of the next generation user interfaces would hopingly overcome the usabiltiy obstacles that the industry is facing currently and even a novice user should be able to navigate thru Web without any assistance…it is so obvious the moment you touch the screen.

Most of the visual objects we use with 12X21 pixel arrow cursor may get obsolete…as now it is thru just finger which is little bigger than the cursor. The visual affordance of the links/buttons would get a big change, just try to touch a link or button and experience the interactivity The buttons, links, and all other input design objects would be very reactivie and interactive.

Horizontal scrolling would likely to get a boost in place of current vertical scrolling. We may not see the scrolling bars either.

Google announced that landing page loading time is soon to be incorporated into the quality factor that decides how much you pay to google for each click in the campaigns you are running on Google Adwords.  http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/03/landing-page-load-time-will-soon-be.html

I think this is going to be another factor that SEM landing pages have to compete with those of competition. We would need to compare the landing pages with the ones that are competing in each of the keyword category…well that’s again a reverse engineering and require a lot of resources. Instead, I would prefer to build light speed web pages…light speed web pages? again that is also going to be dependent on network speed.

Anything Google comes up is mainly to increase their revenue and their business continuity(TCE-Total Customer Experience which most established businesses measure and monitor to see any pitfalls that effects their business over-time) as a search engine. All these factors are closely inter-related that directly impact their top line.

For example, assume all other factors remains constant…Google has a potential of 100 adwords clicks a day for each of the keywords “discounted widgets” and “cheap widgets”

www.widgetstores.com would like to pay $3 each for the two keywords i.e. $3 * 100 clicks * 2 keywords = $600 in total

www.widgetshop.com would like to pay $2 for each of these two keywords i.e. $2 * 100 clicks * 2 keywords = $400 in total

Now Google has to send all these 200 clicks (100 clicks * 2 keywords) to www.widgetstore.com for optimium benefit.  So, Google has a potential of making $600 on these two keywords assuming it’s searchers would be 100% satisfied (TCE) with www.widgetstore.com which is important factor for their business continuity as a search engine.

Lets say there are users visited Google.com and peformed a search with the keyword “discounted widgets” and adwords results being…

Link 1 position: http://www.widgetstore.com ($3 per click)

Link 2 position: http://www.widgetshop.com ($2 per click)

If good no. of people click on www.widgetshop.com in the link 2 position that means..Google’s recommendation in Link 1 alarms that it has a negative impact on their TCE which will definitely influence their revenues over a period of time.  To avoid this google will make the following adjustment algorithmatically.

Link 1 position:  www.widgetshop.com ($2 per click)

Link 2 position: www.widgetstore.com ($3 per click)

Now www.widgetshop.com being in link 1 position, it has the higher potential to get all 200 clicks for $400…This is what Google calls it as Click Popularity.

After this…let’s imagine the searcher with “discounted widgets” clicked on www.widgetshop.com and visited the landing page and found that it is irrelevant to his search.  And he comes back to Google and does another search with “cheap widgets” and clicked on www.widgetstore.com.  Again their TCE is effected… And, there will be some revenue Google will be loosing as part of discountng multiple clicks for the advertisers.

That is the reason “Accessability, Usability and Relevancy” should be the high prioirty things for everyone in the web business. I am sure all your website design and development guidelines are sorrounded among these three.

Conclusion: Building faster loading pages would be an excellent thing but that alone doesn’t contribute for the success in Google.  For example, assume www.widgetstore.com has a homepage that loads in less than 2 seconds and www.widgetshop.com has a home page that loads in 50 seconds…so Google likes www.widgetstore.com here.

But, on a 2-second home page www.widgetstore.com can only provide a little text content that may not be targeted for everyone visting this page which will have an higher page abandonment…Here Google likes www.widgetshop.com.

Ultmately, We will have to help Google success in getting higher revenues and TCE for our success in terms of traffic drivng to www.widgetshop.com

Pls. note that the above is only an illustraton, the actuals may vary when putting together various other factors.

Today, I was talking with someone who is a webmaster managing various kinds of web sites. He has one specific question for me which I thought I should talk about it in my blog post.

“How do I Measure the success of a web page?”

I was a bit paused when I hear this question. And, that’s really an excellent question that should be looked into.

Well, when doing SEO I always see, though there are many common characteristics among the web pages, they always have a unique personality like individuals. Because of many uncontrollable parameters, a web page has unique personality which is what a web page with the same kind of content and links can be treated differently in search engines, even by the users sporadically. Perhaps, I will speak more on Web Page Personality in my future posts, now I really want to deal the question I was asked on “Measuring the success of a web page”. Please note, I am not talking about success of a web site but success of an individual web page.

Let’s take a real case as an example, have you ever advertised on Google, Yahoo or any other publisher’s sites or you might be getting some traffic to your website thru whatever source. Do they enter your website thru one of the web pages from your site which we call as entry page or gateway page. When the web site visitors land on one of your campaign landing pages or website gateway pages what would you expect them to do?

1. Buy a Product - Do you agree with people buy products/services as soon as they land on your website?

2. Fill-in a Questionnaire/lead generation form - Do you agree, people drop their email addresses and other personal info. as soon as they land on your website landing page.

3. Explore the website – Do you agree, visitors land on your campaign landing page and enjoy the user experience of your website or is it that you expect them to do?

Pls. ask the above 3-questions to yourself, the answers slightly vary based on what you are trying to achieve with your online campaigns or your website.

But, as soon as visitors land on a landing page or a website gateway page – within the first second they try to ensure themselves they landed on the right page. And, try to smell the scent that was lured them to come to this web page i.e. find the relevant text, links or images that help them to ensure themselves. If they can’t find the relevancy to their need of visiting your landing page…the best they will do is “Abandon Your Website Landing Page” and move their journey back to search engines.

So, the success of Campaign Landing Pages and Other Website Entry Pages is purely depended on how many people clicked on and get-into the next page of your website. These pages are typically I call as “Directional Pages”

A majority of the landing pages and gateway pages are “Directional Pages”. The primary duty of these directional pages is to direct visitors to the right section or source of information on your website. These pages include Home Pages, Site Maps, Product Listing Pages etc., The goal of all these pages is not to “Sell the products or services” but direct visitors to the right section where they find information or even buy something. Hence, the success of the Directional Pages is measured by no. of people getting into the websites. I use a metric called “Committed Visits” which is Total Visits to the page subtracted by exits at the page.

That is all about measuring success for Directional Web Pages. Now I will talk about another kind of web pages – Descriptors.

Descriptors receive visitors from Directional Pages. The goal of the descriptors is to talk to the visitor on your products, services or support in terms of giving an overview about your product, talking about the product features, provide the pricing, how your product works, how is it different from your best competition etc., Each descriptive page has one call to action (infact, several in many cases). On product overview page, you may call the visitor to read about benefits of the product, on the benefits page – you may call the visitor to learn about how is it different from your competition and testimonials. You would need to find out on which point you would need to call the visitor to make the ultimate action i.e. “Click Here to Buy Widgets Online!”

The success of these Descriptors is measured on No. of times the website visitors have taken the action on “Defined Call to Action”. For example – No. of times viewed the product flash demo, no. of times people clicked on Benefits link in Product Overview page. You can mix and match while defining these call to action even combine a few of them for each descriptive web page.

Lead Generators/Converters are the web pages whose responsibility is to convert the prospect into the defined goal. These are the  web pages that generally upsell your products or services, these are the web pages that pitches about the benefits of your product, offers, testimonials etc,

The success of these web pages is measured by associating the visits to these pages to the no. of goals achieved. For example, out of 100 orders that you made today check how many of them visited these converter pages prior to their purchase at your website.

I was recalling myself when I was learning computers, the teacher was telling computers is all about taking Input from the users and Processes (CPU) to give a defined Output. Similarly, we do have a list of pages that come into this category “Processors” (let me know if I could coin a better word

Processors are the web pages whose sole responsibility is to receive the information as Inputs and process it and give the defined output to the users. These are the pages typically we have in any website like login forms, registration forms, shopping carts, payment forms etc.,

The success of these processors is measured by no. of people started the process and completed the process successfully. The best example is web site shopping cart funnel. The success of shopping cart funnel is measured by looking at the people started adding products to cart, to checkout to payment information to our best friend thank you page or order confirmation page.

Similarly, we can measure the success for a registration form, login form etc.,