Balancing Search Marketing & User Experience: Why Bother?
Yesterday a colleague asked me to find information on software application response times. I responded with some qualifying questions to refine my assistance but what it boiled down was this: the corporate powers wanted to know how much they could fudge things so that an ecommerce software application could roll out into “production” even though it wasn’t ready to effectively respond to customers. Could this be a problem and if yes, who says so? Selling Customer Experience Most online...
Read MoreNo Guidance, No Interaction, No Sale: Improving Internet Shopping Usability
A good friend recently told me a story about how a company built a web site that needed user instructions to use it. The only page that was allowed to put a link to those instructions was the homepage. Therefore, should a visitor arrive via a search engine to a landing page within the web site, they were out of luck. No guidance, no interaction, no sale. I went Christmas shopping online for a computer armoire. I knew exactly what I wanted because I had done previous research on the...
Read MoreSneak Preview: Emotional Design and Affective Computing
According to popular prejudice, women embody ‘emotion’ and ‘irrationality’ whereas men embody ‘rationality’ and ‘objectivity’. As such, designing for emotions/affect stir up gender issues. Are women better designers of technology which uses emotion and affect? Affective Computing, Affective Interaction and Technology as Experience One free chapter and several videos are available now for Affective Computing, Affective Interaction and Technology...
Read MoreCommon Web Site Usability Mistakes
When you built your first web site, didn’t you just want to promote it everywhere with big bold letters saying, “HEY EVERYONE! COME HERE AND LOOK AT MY WEBSITE! ISN’T IT GREAT?” Or, when you submit your web site to forums for web site reviews, what do you typically ask for? You may write, “Tell me what you think of my web site” or “Which color do you like better, blue or red?” or “Did I optimize for search engines properly?” The worst mistake you will make as a web site...
Read MoreA Different Way of Looking at Usability Skills
Two of my articles were published this week, each of them looking at user experience web design from a different perspective. They were fun to write. The first one, for SearchEnginePeople.com, was Ruud’s idea. I’ve been writing on Usability and SEO topics for over 15 years and it helps when a publication I write for has an editor who can offer me some new ideas. Knowing my heritage and beliefs are rooted in Native American ways, he wondered if I could find some tribal wisdom that...
Read MoreCre8pc Web Site Reviews on Sale
In this, the season of giving, and because web site reviews are so popular, I’m offering the chance to get your site review for just $82.50, on a first come, first serve basis. What Do You Get? A full written report emailed to you in PDF format. Screenshots with notes, suggestions, etc. Fast turnaround. Input on usability, understandability, conversions, calls to action, persuasive design Feedback on information architecture and navigation Organic on page search engine optimization...
Read MoreOpportunity: Three Deep Discounted UX/SEO Services
It’s time to run some specials again! This time I created three custom site reviews designed for different goals and budgets. Homepage Only Usability Review – $125 Discover how your most important web page is performing by investing in this very affordable review. If your conversions are not what you expect, sometimes the problem starts with your homepage. If your homepage is performing fairly well, what else can you do to enhance your customers’ experience? Do you need a little...
Read MoreOpportunity: Three Domains for Sale
I’m selling 3 one-time popular domains that were once home to professional and well respected web sites. Usabilityeffect.com was purchased in 2004. The web site used to be where I placed my usability and search marketing consulting information and order forms. After six years, I came to realize that everyone seemed to associate me with Cre8pc and/or Cre8asiteforums. It was too confusing to try and explain how Cre8pc and UsabilityEffect were connected, so I removed the UE site...
Read MoreBlended Usability and SEO Practices a Hit
Just when I was seriously considering not writing articles for other publications for awhile, something happened. I wrote an article that poured out in one take for Search Engine Land’s newly renamed “Search and Usability” column and delivered it way past my deadline. Turns out, it was a hit. I’d been pondering lately how hard it can be to describe what online marketers and web site designers and developers do for a living. Ask 10 of us what we do and you’ll get...
Read MoreAds Rile Google? Bah. What about we Humans?
This caught my attention. Google May Penalize Your Site for Having Too Many Ads published in SearchEngineWatch states Google is looking at penalizing ad heavy sites that make it difficult for people to find good content on web pages, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, said yesterday at PubCon during his keynote session. The key point Google appears to want to make is that anything that prevents people from reading content concerns them. The article goes on to say, Google has...
Read More
