www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbUtL_0vAJk

All of that is about to change!


Google has been more explicit in foreshadowing search engine update changes planned for next year. And as Google fully rolls out their “caffeine” update in January 2010, site load time will start to become an explicit factor in website rankings.


A recent interview with Google’s spokesperson Matt Cutts revealed that website load time (or speed) will be a ranking factor. Going forward, Google is going to reward sites that load faster with better SEO ranking.

So our recommendation is that you start thinking about how to improve your site speed now. If you have not given much thought to page load times, now is a great time to adjust your thinking on this topic so you and your customers can benefit.


Overall, this change represents a win on many fronts for your website. It is a win for the usability of your website and the overall customer experience online. Plus it is a win for your search engine optimization.


In sum, a faster website will improve your customer’s experience on your website, improve your website usability and also improve your search engine optimization rankings.


Thinking about how to improve your site speed is a smart thing to do and will help your site be best prepared for 2010 and beyond.

An easy to use navigation system is one the most important elements of a usable website. Without proper navigation, it will be difficult or impossible for your website visitors to find the other pages within your site.  Having effective navigation will allow your visitors to have a more enjoyable and more engaged experience when using your website. The more your customers like your site experience, the more likely they are to make repeated visits and that in turn leads to improved customer satisfaction and conversion metrics for your business.

Putting together a usable navigation system is not a difficult thing to do.  Here are a few tips you can follow to ensure your site navigation will be usable and ensure an enjoyable user experience.

Top Tips to Make Your Website Navigation More Usable

1.  Use a Consistent Navigation structure across all pages of your site – Make sure that your navigation is at the same location on every page of your website.  Don’t confuse your visitors by making them look for navigation every time they hit a new page.  A consistent page layout helps your site visitors develop a consistent way to navigate the site from page to page. Users will develop a “mental model” of how the site navigation works and the simpler and easier it is for them, the more likely they are to visit more pages, features and content in your site…all of which are likely needed to achieve your business objectives.

2.  Test your navigation – Take time to test your navigation to ensure that all of your links are working and going to the correct pages.  Check all of your links and/or use an automated tool to do this. And testing your navigation in usability testing is essential as well. You can test this by incorporating some “findability” tasks into your usability tests and asking users to find things. For example, “Where would you go to find women’s shoes on this website?” – and then seeing if users are able to navigate successfully to the correct page or item on the website.

3.  Make your logo (or page header graphic) clickable - so that it returns to your home page.  By doing this, the logo will function as an effective navigation element back to your site’s homepage.

4.  Use Text Links to Make Your Navigation Clear – Always, use text links in your navigation.  Even though it is possible to make some wonderful looking navigation systems with JavaScript, you need to remember that some people actually have Java disabled on their computers, which could make it impossible for them to navigate your site.  Using simple text links makes it easier to ensure that everyone visiting your site can use your navigation. Make sure that you use appropriate text.  You do not want to make your visitor have to guess where the link is going to lead them

5.  Underline your text links with consistent formatting – Make sure that your links are underlined.  People that are new to the Internet expect links to be underlined and usually blue.  If you make your links red and not underlined, you could confuse new users to the Internet and they will leave your site out of frustration. This may seem hard to believe but we have seen multiple data points from a variety of companies and underlined links typically have higher click through rates.

6.  Include a search box near the top of your page – If your site visitors do not see what they want from the site navigation and/or site links, they may do a quick search to see if they can find what they are looking for. An effective search box that leads them to well organized results will make them more likely to stay on your site.

7.  Create a custom error page. By including an error page in case somebody types in the wrong URL, or if there is a broken internal link, a custom error page will come up in place of it.  You can use this page to lead them back to your home page.  It can also be effective to put a comment on it, like, “Oops, this page no longer exists.  Please click on this link to visit our home page.  Then underneath this, you can put information about your newsletter or e-mail list with a sign up a form.  You may be surprised to find out how many people will sign up to your list from a custom error page.

8.  Include a site map.  Having an HTML site map with a link to it, on every page of your website leading to it, will help visitors to get around your website if they cannot find it using your site search or main navigation.  This should be seen as a last resort navigation since it typically means that your main navigation and search options “failed” the customer. A site map provides you with another method to let customers find the information they are seeking.  And from a search engine optimization perspective (SEO), an .xml sitemap is essential since it helps the search engines more effectively index the pages in your website. If your website pages are not indexed, they will not show in the search engines, so this is extremely important.

In summary, providing your website visitors with effective navigation on your website is essential for website usability. When you keep your website navigation consistent and easy to understand, you provide a more usable experience for your web site visitors.

Please give us your feedback by leaving a comment below – that will help us better provide the content you are really interested in.

Most of the time, when we’re designing customer experiences, we are focused on the elements of the customer experience that are utilitarian and practical.

Here is a brief video to inspire us all to think about how fun can be incorporated into the customer experience.

This video was shot at the subway station in Odenplan, Sweden which is currently being remodeled to be one of Stockholm’s largest public transportation hubs.

One of the “business” objectives for this design project was to encourage more people to exercise and take the stairs. And the design team came up with an engaging, imaginative and fun way to achieve that goal -- turn the stair well into a functioning piano.

This video is definitely food for thought about how adding fun to mundane experiences can entirely change the experience. Look at the engagement the people are having. And the fun too. When was the last time you saw anyone that looked remotely happy at a subway station?

How often do we think about how to make the customer experience more fun? Sadly the emotionally engaging elements are sometimes overlooked when focusing solely on “business” metrics and bottom line numbers.  A case study like this helps remind us about things we know but sometimes forget -- especially when we are at work.

Personally, I want to fly over there just to check out this subway station!

If the video inspired you please leave a comment.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJMOI5_FKwg

Yesterday I was shopping on the Costco.com site and added a couple things to my shopping cart that I did not purchase. Today I received this email reminder which is a good example of a shopping cart best practice. It helps remind the customer about their potential purchase, gives a clear time-limited incentive for the customer to take action, and it also helps the company with their business goals.

In general, shopping at Costco in person is usually an enjoyable experience.  Their website, however, has a ton of usability issues, especially with poor information architecture, poor site search and awkward navigation and category structure.  We’ll pick on the website another day.

Most e-commerce sites are not utilizing these types of follow-up emails as a tactic to help improve their conversion, which is unfortunate since a friendly reminder seems like it would be an effective tactic to reduce shopping cart abandonment.

If anyone who is reading this has implemented this approach and has data that you can share, please share in the comments below.

It’s more important than ever to stay focused on your strategy so you don’t get caught up in the negative weeds and lose focus.

Change This is a website with some really compelling content. Erika Anderson recently wrote an excellent article about thinking strategically. Erika is really smart and she offers a refreshing perspective on how to really think strategically and use strategic thinking to help you focus your priorities correctly.  And she keeps it really simple too. Right click here to download her PDF.

And let us know if you found her PDF as compelling as we did – feel free to leave us a comment below.

Your friends, in good times and bad…

A recent research article by Chitika (an online search advertising company), suggests that mobile internet users are far less likely to click on ads when compared to regular internet users accessing the internet from a pc.

Chitika claims to serve over 2 billion monthly ad impressions across tens of thousands of websites.

The ads in this research were identical in both pc and mobile versions, which allows a more accurate apples-to-apples comparison. Their study examined 92 million ad impressions across a wide variety of devices and operating systems.

Mobile internet users are40% less likely to click an ad as shown in the image below.

The overall ad click-thru-rate (CTR) in this research was .48% for mobile users and .83% for non-mobile users.

Overall this study is quite interesting since it is really the first research of these type we have seen that is publicly available.

Clicking an advertisement on a mobile device is a much more disruptive user experience than on a pc. We think there are several main reasons this is so:

First, users are much more task focused on their mobile devices, particularly as consumers use  ”applications” on devices like the Iphone and Android devices to access specific internet features, websites or tasks.  Take Facebook as an example – it is one of the most popular websites in the world. The “application” experience is much more optimized than accessing the site through the web. And the mobile experience is much more focused and uncluttered than the website version in fact, so it keeps the user even more task focused.

Second, the experience is more modal with users focusing on ONE task at a time. Some devices, like the Iphone can only run one application at a time and that forces users into this mental model.

Third, the devices access the internet at much lower speeds than typical pc broadband access, so users are even less likely to interrupt their own experience by clicking something that will take them away – knowing it will take them awhile to get back to what they were doing.

Fourth, most people we know still are not doing any serious or significant e commerce browsing or shopping on their mobile devices, so we just don’t think people are in this frame of mind while using their devices. They are even more task and information seeking focused than on their home or work computers.

We hope to see additional research on this topic published by other companies. Additional validation studies would be helpful to see if these findings are consistent and replicable across other advertising networks. If you have other data to share, please let us know in your comments.

Hootsuite updated their software this past week (excellent upgrade, by the way!) and this is a screenshot of their page. I thought it was a good example of what a maintenance page should look like.  Rather than the usual fluffy about how great all the new features are, blah, blah, blah, they convey the upgrade notice in a quick and clear sentence in bold that the reader can’t miss.

And then the rest of it is a bit tongue-in-cheek and it is also about the owl so it successfully ties humor in with their brand iconography and creates a positive/funny emotional state toward the product.

Owls are awesome indeed.