This week was powerful. It was the end of my son’s football season and I was so impressed with him that for two days I was in deep thought, even lying awake at night with the realization that my 14 year old son had become my hero. When everything that could go wrong, did, he scored the most amazing touchdown in the last 2 minutes of one of the games that had all the parents on their feet. And all he did was to show his heart.

Passion has always been my guiding light. It’s an odd light because others don’t always see it, when you know darned well it’s right there. This week I struggled to come to a decision about where I’d go with my usability work. Was I any good at this? Is there something else I can offer? How does usability work improve life for anyone? The answers came in this week’s discussions in several places about user personas, as well as positive feedback on work I had done for someone new.

User personas are about improving an experience for someone other than yourself. My light flickered and things felt right again.

Last night I presented a rough outline of a plan for the future of Cre8asiteforums to my friend and Co-Administrator, Bill Slawski, that I’d struggled and agonized over for months. The forums are five years old and its earlier incarnation was formed in 1998. I’m burned out one minute and energized the next. Is this normal? Where is the forums administrators support group?

It was funny to watch Bill read my official 4 page brain dump and see him making faces. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking and that drove me nuts. We had a meeting, surrounded by friends, one of my other moderators, Li Evans, and my husband, Eric. It was the moment where I needed to make a personal commitment to move forward and ask Bill if he was ready to stick it out with me a little longer. He said yes.

In a social media environment, what can we do to make our forums thrive and contribute value? For Bill and I, the answer is different because we’re different in how we think a forums should be run and what they’re for. Next week I’ll announce the first part in our projected plan to take the forums into a new direction, with an emphasis on contributing ways to support those who believe in building better web sites for a better world.

I don’t think it was any accident I was given the example of my son, Stefan, and his approach to his life in sports.

He’s very committed, even when he’s in pain. If the other team has 3 guys on him, he fights them off with one arm. When they pile up on him, the ball doesn’t leave his grip. When they’re losing, he still believes in himself. When their Quarterback was out on an injury and the offensive line lost its will, he did what Team Captains do. He tried to offer encouragement and instructions on what to do next, even though he was angry on the inside. In a sad losing game with no score for his team, he “chopped” his way down the center, for the last two minutes of the game and by brute force, got the damned touchdown.

When they were squashed in their last game of the season by an undefeated team (Stefan’s team was undefeated last year), his Dad and I walked out to meet him on the field afterwards to check on his condition. Before we could even reach him, a group of members from the opposing team and four guys from the High School Freshman team, where he’ll play next year, came out on the field, walked up to him and shook his hand.

Respect is something you earn.

Here are my notable article picks for the week, with my thanks to those who inspire me:

Designing for Nonprofits: User Experience Professionals Can Make a Difference in Society

We all find ourselves looking in the mirror at one time or another and asking ourselves if we’re doing all we can for the good of society. What’s it all for?

Those of us in the user experience (UX) profession can actually do something about it. As information architects, interaction designers, usability consultants, and developers, we don’t have to change our careers to do something good for society.

Balancing Usability and Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is the process of designing a Web strategy so that search engine spiders will get the best picture of the Web site that they can. Usability is the process of designing a Web strategy so that visitors will be satisfied with their experience.

Design Engineering: The Next Step

Interaction design determines who the users are, what goals they are trying to achieve, and then creates a tangible, visible plan for how the product will look and behave to get those users to achieve those goals. Over the last few years, more and more companies have adopted interaction design methods. They have flight plans. Why, then, are so many organizations still repeatedly visited by those three ugly horsemen of software apocalypse?

My friends at DT are in the news (again) - Digital Telepathy Helps You Build Your Web 2.0 Startup

The concept is simple: Digital Telepathy offers three design my business options with varying service levels based on the length of each plan. The 15 day plan provides a wannabe startup with market research, strategic alignment, scalable revenue model, instruction manual for project completion and a concept summary delivered as a “Biz in a Box”.

This was a no-brainer for a “bookaholic” like me - Top 5 social web sites for book lovers

Search Engine Land’s Secrets : Mining SearchCap. Perfect for those who equate statistics to Fruit Loops. I am number 57.

Building a Data-Backed Persona is a detailed, well written article on a topic that’s on steroids.

Video presentation by Jared Spool - Delight by Functionality

And finally, Green Communities and Social Networks. Bill hit many of us in a good place with this list, giving us some new ideas and ways to meet others who dream.

The Search Engine College announces its latest project, Search Engine Wiki today. Founder and Director of Studies, Kalena Jordan, has been actively involved with the search engine optimization and marketing industry from its beginnings. She and husband, Jerry, founded the Search Engine College, providing online learning, self-study and certification courses at affordable fees.

Today’s announcement culminates 10 years of intimate involvement and tracking the industry. The new vertical wiki enables visitors to get the most accurate information and resources, as well as networking for employment opportunities.

Lists of international search engines categorized by country, type and industry
A glossary of definitions for common terms used in SEO, PPC and SEM
An extensive library of search engine marketing articles
Employment resources where you can find SEO, PPC and SEM jobs
A collection of popular search engine marketing blogs and newsfeeds
Frequently Asked Questions about search engines and SEM
A list of popular search engine marketing tools and time saving software
Links to upcoming search industry conferences and events
Introductions to well known search industry personalities

Plus a large variety of other resources relating to the exciting and fast-paced world of search engine marketing. We’ve been compiling these resources for over 10 years now and we’ve decided to share them all with the public in the form of a collaborative wiki. This means that YOU can become an editor and add your own favorite resources.

For fun, try Search Engine Marketing Personalities, Search Engine Marketing Frequently Asked Questions and the list of industry related blogs.

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.

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.

It’s been an interesting time for both the usability and search engine marketing industries. The following is a tour of some of my favorite finds and discussions, as well as proof I didn’t sleep all week.

Introspection:

Don’t Ignore Accessibility explores the implications of not applying usability and accessibility practices. The kicker is that the article comes from the highly esteemed SEO resource, Search Engine Watch.

Professionalism In Our Industries - Recent public outings in the SEO industry, as well as recent hot topics at Cre8asiteforums, prompted this discussion.

What Does Copyright Cover? is another discussion at Cre8asiteforums but this one gets pretty deep. Who owns the content in a web site forums? Who owns blog comments? Can you sell this content?

Should Something Be Done About Cybersquatting / Domainname Farming Etc. ponders the idea of regulation and control. Web folk either love the idea or despise it.

Erotic Life as a New Frontier in HCI - Case study; “Adopting a perspective of life quality in technology development implies that quality of erotic life should also be accounted for.”

Women in SEO” Turning Into “Hot Young Teen SEO? - You can just imagine what happened in this discussion.

Back to the Future

Starting The Seo Process: An SEO Forward - A roundup of tips, advice and guidance culled from a lively discussion.

What is the Future of Usability? captures differing views and points to an unsettled future where there will not be enough trained people to go around.

How Much Money Would It Take? starts off with a generic question about the cost of building a web site. In this case, it’s a dating site. I wondered if this newcomer would get laughed off the stage, but the responses are patient, thoughtful and educational.

Adobe’s Form Follows Form can’t be viewed unless you have FLASH. When I showed this interesting demonstration on making forms more usable to the community at Cre8asiteforums, they were frustrated at not being able to access it without needing a fast connection, plug-in, etc. There’s more to their case study, if you have the time and technology to access this document.

Hope

The Road Film - “The Road is a film about the journey of four friends from San Diego, California who ventured into the jungles of one of the world’s most repressive countries to expose generations of atrocities against a people who face extinction.” A search engine marketing friend of mine helped get this site featured on CNN.

Read This to Me. Volunteers needed.

How Do Users Really Feel About Your Design? explores one of my personal passions…emotions and usability (captology). Do you know how your visitors really feel about your web site?

Funny Sad Thing

As you know, end users, usability, QA testing and user experience design, including accessibility, are vital elements for the long-term success of your online business. A smart marketing budget includes money spent on hiring an individual or company that performs usability audits because they focus on what happens (or doesn’t) when customers find your site.

Even Google is focused on the user experience, as evidenced with this instructive video from 2006. (The page is static. You can then choose to view the video.)

The Art and Science of User Experience at Google

A year later, I still can’t find a written transcript or audio version for the car.

…………………………….

I will be reporting on next week’s SMX Social Media conference in New York City for Search Engine Roundtable. This is my last conference for the year.

I’m interviewed tomorrow for a Podcast. If it turns out well and they decide to run it, I’ll post the news.