It’s been reported that Jakob Nielson spoke about SEO and Usability in his keynote speech at the User Experience 2007 conference in Barcelona. Known to have a strong interest in search engine development, he sometimes gets on the nerves of search engine marketers.

According to Jakob Nielson sees parallels between ethical SEO and usability,

With Web 2.0 still a buzz word and Web 3.0 or even 4.0 on the horizon, Nielson predicts a ‘back to basics approach’ as website owners realise that simplification and resolution of basic problems is the key to a positive user experience, rather than the bells and whistles that come with participation innovations.

Ultimately, Nielsen’s keynote address poses an important question: should we look to trends in search engine development and SEO techniques to persuade web owners that simplest is best for website usability and ‘findability’?

My instinctive reaction to that question is “NO!”. Designing and marketing for the lowest common denominator isn’t challenging, creative or even practical. Twice this week I addressed this in Are We Designing For The Human Experience? and the one my husband felt might ruffle the feathers of SEO’s, Customer Experience, Loyalty and Search Engine Marketing Without Understanding Either of These.

To look at search engines as the holy grail of web design practices?

It’s not that search engines aren’t making an effort to go out and try on every human. It’s that not every human uses search engines, so why base web design on what they’re doing?

User Personas Are Us

The topic, Is It Worth Creating User Personas? took a little turn when 37 Signals wrote in Ask 37signals: Personas? that “We don’t use personas. We use ourselves. I believe personas lead to a false sense of understanding at the deepest, most critical levels.”

As my friend, Adrian Lee, said when I pointed out the 37 Signals post in our Cre8asiteforums thread, Thinking About User Personas,

Heh, well yes, if you’re building something to fix your own problem, then there doesn’t seem much need for personas. But if you’re trying to solve someone else’s problems, what do you do then?

Ecommerce site owners may want to consider the many points in Persona-lizing a site from Internet Retailer.

For example, a project for Home Depot uncovered two very different customers who might have identical demographic profiles—the do-it-yourselfer who wants to pick out all the cabinets and appliances and the customer who wants a kitchen designer to do it all.

The article also describes how FutureNow took a web site’s conversion rate from less than 1% to average 4%, and the return on pay-per-click is consistently 2 to 1.

From My Messy Inbox (Not to be confused with my messy desk)

User testing? Morae is on sale until December!. Go ahead. Spend now.

I really liked this article because it provides case studies and other resources: 30 Usability Issues To Be Aware Of.

Another case study…Landing Page Optimization: Improving Conversion 50-60% by Applying Continuity and Congruence

Laura Milligan wrote The Del.icio.us Toolbox: 50+ Del.icio.us-related Scripts, Tools, and Tutorials. Did you know they’re changing their domain to “delicious.com”? I use this site and had no idea there were so many things you could do with it. This article has them all. Love the “Lazy Sheep”. It’s perfect for me.

If you haven’t been there yet, go now to the newly redesigned and updated Small Business Brief. There’s no slowing these people down!

And finally, SEOMoz has launched the Marketplace. It’s free to everyone to use or submit to. The application itself is just out of BETA and having pounded on it myself as a tester, I found it to be one of the smoothest user experiences I’ve ever had with an Internet application. It’s sleek. Simple. Useful. Attractive. Functions well. If your company handles web development, Internet marketing, usability or Internet software development, the Marketplace is a place to list your services. If you’re job hunting, you can submit your resume too.

November 8 is World Usability Day. From the official web site, “World Usability Day was founded to ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use.”

So here’s a toast to all the people who know what they want and ask for it and especially, all of you who read the minds of those who don’t share what they want or need.

And you build it for us anyway.

Gordon Hotchkiss wrote a blog post called, Why Do We Keep Buying from Bad Businesses, in which he describes a situation many of us may be familiar with. Do you shop at stores where the prices are too high or the environment is uncomfortable? Why?

He describes his wife’s loyalty to a local family-run business, despite poor customer service and questionable product quality. Walmart is another example of what may be an unpleasant customer experience, but the prices are good, so this is often tolerated. Why do we put up with this?

Gord wonders if it’s “Convenience, price and some twisted sense of obligation to the family that runs the offending store.”

My family shops like his wife does.

But Does She Talk to Trees?

There are local shops I’ll run to for something quick, knowing full well it won’t be pleasant. For example, one newspaper/magazine shop in town is so smoke-filled that you have to battle a cloud and hold your breath during the time you’re inside, and when you come out of the place, nobody wants to be anywhere near you. But, it saves on gas to go there for a gallon of milk rather than the nicer stores farther away.

Living in a rural area allows me to buy locally grown food items. I do the same thing my mother did when I was growing up, as does most of my community. We have our routes for fresh meat or organic produce. We know which farms sell what in each season.

Christmas trees, both live and cut, are grown here. We choose the best from three places. One is a farm with two huge ponds and sprawling fields, where you can stroll for awhile with your family and hand-saw, and cut your own tree. We go there when we want an experience to remember. (I always thank the tree and talk to it. Everyone laughs at me.) The other two choices we have are local gentlemen who grow their own trees on their properties and you literally walk through their backyards and pick what you want.

All of these local picks that we’re loyal to are advertised by word of mouth and wooden homemade signs on the sides of our back roads. The farm gives a discount to school children and the schools send home flyers.

Unless you live here, you wouldn’t know these businesses exist. They don’t have web sites and don’t invest in newspaper ads. If you’re from the city, you may not care to shop the way we do. Many people want the big well known brand super stores where they drive there once, and get everything in one shot (including trees). They want that experience and are less concerned with supporting the local community or the quality and freshness of the products.

You Go First

Thinking about Gord’s blog post, I came across a statement in a discussion on the what comes first, SEO or Usability debate, in which someone felt SEO comes first because a site must be promoted before it can be “used”.

To which I wonder, if a site falls in a search engine, would anyone hear it?

Do you spend a gazillion dollars to market a web site nobody can use?

Do you know it can or can not be used?

I find this interesting about the argument for SEO “first”. If you hire a company to market your web site but you’ve never bothered to test it for overall usability, what are you thinking? If you market your web site and your landing pages are converting everyone beautifully and visitors love your products, what happens when your shopping cart or sales lead form is too hard to understand or has a bug you’re unaware of?

Your SEO who didn’t conduct a usability audit first is not going to tell you this.

I’ve read the argument that some SEO’s aren’t interested in a client’s web site’s customer experience. Their job is to get people to the web site and what happens after that is none of their concern. In a way, they’re correct because search engine optimization is limited to marketing to search engines.

But, people use search engines.

How can you promote something in which you don’t ask your client to consider the user experience of the person you’re targeting in your marketing campaign?

Was It Good For You Too?

Why would a web site owner hire an SEO who claims to understand their target market’s needs and desires if clearly, their sole point of service has nothing to do with your web site visitors’ experience? Isn’t understanding how people use the Internet and web sites part of the trick to marketing to them?

Customer Support on the Web: Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You, by Daniel Szuc, discusses customer experience and how important online tasks are. He includes a great list of customer characteristics, including:

(They) don’t know about your company—They’re not familiar with your business operations, your internal company jargon, or your company structure. Using your customer’s language in your user interface helps customers to serve themselves better.

If the keywords list is based on the web site’s jargon and customers don’t understand what they’re reading, will they click to go there?

Does your SEO promote your site to a local area and not understand how they shop there? Like I said, most of us know our communities and what they offer. We also do what Gord was talking about. We’re willing to go against all logic and forgo certain pleasantries to get what we want. This is why so-called “ugly” sites may do well. If they managed to connect with their visitor somehow, all the more power to them. Will an SEO, who doesn’t do user testing on the site’s being marketed, have any information for their client on how they think conversions will go?

You get what you pay for. When hiring a company to market your site in search engines and directories, you may find that your money works harder when there’s an honest understanding for who will want to use your web site once they arrive, and who will come back, year after year.

Remember my example of the three places we choose Christmas trees from? There are three of them. If one has outrageous prices one year, we keep driving onto the next one to see if he offers a better deal, even if it means passing up a fun romp in the fields with the family (customer experience).

We keep looking for those signs alongside the roads, hoping for another memorable experience that we can share with friends and family who haven’t gone to get their tree yet. Every year we refer people to these Christmas tree places, along with our experiences with each one.

I’ve always disagreed that SEO or Usability are in competition for “first”. They compliment each other by fortifying the strengths of both missions.

They cover each other’s backs.

…………………………………….

Connecting more:

Excellent resource that illustrates how a marketing campaign may be truly disconnected from the actual people intended to use the product - A Few Questions for CVS by Holly Buchanan.

Is it Worth Creating User Personas?

There’s a good discussion taking place on user personas that isn’t overly technical for those not familiar with them. Cre8asiteforums’s Usability forum is tackling not only what user personas are, but how they might be implemented during the course of web design.

In addition, how do you present the value of user persona development to your company?

Several resources and techniques are presented by members. Though not advanced information by any means, the discussions is a nice introduction to what user personas are and why they are helpful to web design. If you are a small or medium sized business with a web site, the topic may be interesting to you as a way to enhance your present site.

Discussion: Thinking About User Personas

I was encouraged by my first submissions to Catalyze.org, the new social networking site for business analysts and user centered design folks. As an early fan of the site (still in BETA), I’ve been getting to know it (very informative), how it works (some usability hoops), and finally, I got up the nerve to start contributing (I was shy).

First, I sent them my podcast interview on usability. Then, once I figured out their procedure, I submitted two of my usability articles. I chose two popular ones. One serious and the other one, funny. With a cordial nudge from a staff member, I learned I was contributing something valuable and was welcome to keep it up. If you’re a user centered web site developer, this site is starting to get its groove on. For those looking to meet their peers online, I’m hoping Catalyze opens new doors.

Cre8pc Blog Makes “Top 100 User Centered Blogs”

While I was in NYC, I was emailed by Rich McIver that my blog had made the Top 100 User-Centered Blog. Their list hit a nerve. I saw it referenced every day in my surfing travels. Thank you for the honor and most importantly, introducing me to still more blogs from the usability industry.

We Understand You People

Bravo to Colleen Jones for her excellent UX Matters article this week, Marketing Isn’t a Dirty Word. She had me at hello, with this:

Think you’re not into marketing? Think again. As UX professionals, we share much in common with our close cousins, the marketers.

and later…

More and more, if we’re creating content for the Web or any interactive channel, we’re dealing with marketing issues.

She writes about how “marketing concepts complement user experience by emphasizing consistency, customization, and credibility.” With so much writing coming from me about usability and search engine marketing, it was a real thrill to see someone step up from the user centered industry to talk about the topic. She’s new to me, but I’m an instant fan and look forward to more articles from her.

The End of SEO is Not Near

SEO’s had lots of opinions about Jakob Nielsen’s latest future projections for their industry noted in Bright SEO career prospects could dim . SeobytheSea owner, Bill Slawski, conveyed his usual calm during a thread of comments in Sphinn, with thoughts like:

Funny thing in that interview is that he suggests a shift in search paradigms at the search engines from information retrieval approaches to a popularity based one (which is what PageRank was about). That happened with the introduction of PageRank almost ten years ago. He’s a little late to the party. From a lot of what I’m seeing, there’s a strong shift back towards an information extraction and retrieval approach, and towards a strong use of data mining, machine learning, and the use of statistical models based upon user searching and browsing activity. PageRank, which we’ve probably talked about too much lately, is increasingly becoming less valuable these days.

And while he insisted in that interview that personalized search will never work, the search engines are trying their hardest to prove him wrong.”

Brand New and Still Valuable to You

Sometimes someone will ask me how they can come up with user personas when their business is brand new and just starting out. They haven’t gathered enough information or conducted user testing to truly get an idea about who uses their web site or who responds to it. Bryan Eisenberg uses personalities, which I rely on too, when I create personas using the “storytelling” technique. It’s not difficult to design for certain behaviors.

Bryan uses “Methodical”, “Spontaneous”, “Competitive” and “Humanistic” behavior patterns to help site owners understand what these folks will do on their web site.

A great example of this is his latest article, How Start-Ups Can Build Effective “About Us” Pages.

His article reminded me of when I first started out. I had sent out a poorly written press release to several local newspapers. One newspaper reporter was unusual. He emailed me back and explained where I went wrong in writing the press release, but regardless, I had managed to make him curious about my work as an SEO. (This was in 1996, when little was known about search engines.) He scheduled an interview and came to the tiny apartment I had back then. He literally had to sit on my bed to interview me because I had no chairs in the bedroom, which is where my “office” was.

He wrote a human interest story about the single mom who worked to get web sites into search engines and had a web site where she taught people how to do it too. His story captured my passion, as well as my quaint working conditions. The interview made the local newspaper, where it was seen by employment head hunters and someone looking to fill a position at Unisys, a rather large company. Shortly afterwards, I was working as a sub-contractor to Unisys in web design.

Bryan is absolutely right to use “Humanistic” as an example of people to target. I didn’t do it intentionally but it became a kind of personal theme for me. The more “human” I am, the more accessible I appear to be to prospective clients and later, when I launched this blog, I knew enough to keep “The Kim” intact.

Search Marketers Who “Get it”, Hire Usability Consultants

I supply web site usability reviews, audits, and functional testing of Internet-based applications to companies largely coming from the Search Engine Marketing industry. These companies offer packages that include SEO, social media marketing, web design services and with the addition of my part, usability reviews to make sure their clients’ sites are ready to handle the impact of their marketing investment.

This week I welcomed my new friend, Brendan Picha and his New York based company, Squareoak, to my partnership family. He’s part of the next generation of high energy Internet companies that have an intuitive understanding for what Internet-based businesses need to survive.

Daniweb Rocks!

Finally, here’s a shout out to Dani Horowitz and Daniweb.com, “a massive community of 224,077 software developers, web developers, Internet marketers, and tech gurus who are all enthusiastic about making contacts, networking, and learning from each other.”

I think I met Dani in NYC last week, in a most incredibly complicated Lucille Ball kind of way.

And thank goodness for silly ways of finding new web sites.

I’m now a member of Daniweb and am completely blown away by it.