Website Usability and Web 2.0
Website usability has been changed dramatically with the addition of Web 2.0 and social network marketing sites coming into the mainstream. I have been getting a lot of heat lately over some of my website usability posts, especially the one about keeping content above the fold. Sure I admit that this isn’t as significant when you are talking about blogs, but don’t think that people are going to be scrolling on your site looking for specific products or other information. The fact is you have to lay out your site so that the content and information that make you money is put right in front of your visitors.
I have looked at hundreds of Google Analytics site overlays since I wrote that post and links that are further down on the page just don’t get clicked on with any regularity. This also has a lot to do with the fact that most of my clients had me design their site or work closely with their designers. I stick to the website usability rules I learned in reading Jakob Nielsen’s books because they have always and still do work for me.
Usability and Social Network Marketing Web 2.0 Websites
For most of us social network marketing and Web 2.0 mean blogs and blogging systems. I use WordPress as my platform of choice and have had a great deal of success. I am running a couple of TypePad sites now to test another system, but so far I still think WordPress is the best.
Most website usability rules get thrown out the window just in the very nature of blogs. They are long and require a lot of scrolling. If you look at my blog you can see that I don’t use the more option and don’t use summaries on the home page. Most people believe that summaries are the way to go, but I wanted to run a test. My blog was set up on the same day as I set up one of my data recovery clients blogs. They both are updated frequently and they run different types of set ups. The reason for this is so I can have an opinion that is based upon facts, not conjecture.
The statements that I make about usability are also based upon facts and statistics. I know that everyones website is different, but the most basic rules of usability should still be followed. When you are creating a blog, it looks very clean and easy to follow the first couple of months. The issues start when you are 6 months into the blog and have hundreds of posts. If you don’t properly plan out your blog, it will be very hard for your visitors to find stuff. I use some good plugins that help me keep the site organized and are trying out a few new ones.
At SES in San Diego there was a lot of talk about tagging, Ultimate Tag Warrior and tag clouds. At this time I use the Technorati tagging system because I have concerns about duplicate content and actually have the /tag/ folder disallowed in my robots.txt file. I still think that UTW is a good idea and I am implementing it on a few other sites. As Web 2.0 gets older, website usability plugins will become more prevalent. I am in the process of a major overhaul of this site including a theme change. I will keep all of you apprised of what I have learned and I will explain why I am setting the site up the way I am. The first thing I did was change my permalink structure. This was and still is a major pain in the ass, but it had to be done. You can read about it in my changing the permalinks on an existing site post.
Related Posts:
5 website usability rules that won’t ever change
Web 2.0 Explained
Website usability and the Home Page
Website Usability 5 Rules That Will Never Change
Website Usability rules come and go mostly due to changing technology and design awareness. As time goes on users become more experienced with website design elements and learn how to use the standard features of their browsers. Even though many old website usability rules don’t carry as much weight as they used to, there are still a few that will never change.
Website Usability Rules To Ignore At Your Own Risk
So what are the steadfast rules that no designer in their right mind would ignore?
- No Unscannable Text – users just don’t want to read your site’s content. Sure this isn’t as true with blogs, but if your primary site is a blog, or you have over 25% of your inbound traffic coming into a blog that is part of your main site, you still need to follow this rule. Often called “Dense Content”, long sentences without paragraph breaks and headings make for a hard read. When a visitor hits your site or a page on it and they feel they need to work at getting the info they need, they will make like a tree and leave. You have to make your content scannable and use bolding to highlight the primary keywords within a paragraph. This is also a good SEO practice.
- Visited Links Must Have A Different Color Than Other Links – if you follow standard practices then you utilize breadcrumb navigation and other techniques to help your site visitors navigate your site. This is all well and good as long as the visited links have a different color than the standard blue of millions of hyperlinks all over the web. Users can get confused pretty easy and they should always know when they have followed a link. By changing the color of visited links you assure your users of knowing where they have been.
- No Pop Up Windows – if you use the Internet you must hate pop up windows. In fact most browsers, ISP’s and toolbars come equipped to block pop ups. So why do sites still use pop up windows? Who knows, but it is still a very bad idea.
- No Back Buttons – yes there are still sites that employ the hated “back” button. Back. Back where? Use bread crumb navigation at least, no back, down, up, forward, right or left. This is and always will be a bad practice.
- Don’t Over Do Ads – too many ads on a site is one quick way to loose whatever stickiness you might have had. Having banner ads all over the place will take away from whatever worthwhile content you might actually have on the site. Most users know by now that primary site features are usually in text or in buttons that correspond with shopping carts and images. Google Ads all over the site is a sure way to loose your visitors.
These are just a few of the steadfast website usability rules that have been passed down over the ages. Stick to common design practices and you will do just fine.
Related Posts:
Website Usability Overview
Home Page Usability
Website Usability and SEO
Search Engine Usability
Website Usability: Keeping Content Above The Fold
One of the most important aspects of Website Usability is keeping content above the fold so users are not scrolling up and down your web pages. This is absolutely essential when it comes to the home page. People just don’t scroll on the home page.
By now you should know what I mean when I say “above the fold”, but if you are new here I will explain. When you visit a website, whatever is within the boundaries of your screen is Above The Fold. If you have to scroll down to read content or take action, you are venturing below the fold.
No Scrolling Is The Best Policy
Most users just don’t scroll when they come to a web page. This is more true on the home page than any other page. The majority of your sites’ visitors enter on your home page. The ones that don’t have more than likely hit an optimized page that you created for specific keywords. If they don’t see what they are looking for in 30 seconds they will either hit your home page or leave.
These statistics and others I am going to be using, come from years of experience and analytics from thousands of websites. Today I oversee the management of hundreds of websites, together the average close to a million unique visitors a day. I use advanced algorithms to create usability studies. I also have used teams of these companies employees in usability studies over the years. Read my Website Usability Overview and Website Usability Deep Link Navigation posts to learn more about how and where I get my data. I feel it is nesassary to qualify these statistics so everyone can see the importance of usability and analytics in their web strategy.
I want to be clear about this: I am not saying “don’t put content or site features below the fold” , I am saying “put your message and IMPORTANT site controls above the fold”! I generally will put content geared more to search engines than people below the fold. I am not talking about keyword stuffing, I merely am saying that a few paragraphs and static links within the bottom part of a page can go a long way to letting search engines know what your page is about. The critical info for users as well as search engines needs to be as close to the top as possible.
Users just don’t scroll, in fact 65% of home page visitors will not look at more than 1.3 screens worth of data under any circumstance on sub pages that actually have the information they are looking for! If your site is designed around either templates, includes, or css, keep the skin short, headers should not be more than 150 px high. This give you more screen real estate to work with. I prefer navigation elements to be on the left and across the header. These are very common design practices.
Last year when I was involved in a re-design of a 350 page web site that averaged 10,000 unique visitors a day, my team and a team of their employees looked at a list of 400 websites that were on or similar in topics to my clients. We found that 80% of the sites we looked at used the same design approach.
Out of those 400 websites, 90% of them had major site elements below the fold on the home page. Since my client had hired me to obtain traffic organically as opposed to the $16,000 they were spending a week on Google and Overture, I needed to come up with a design that would not only convert, but also be optimized for search engines.
We set up 4 different versions of the home page and split up the PPC so they got pretty close to equal traffic. By studying the different home page styles we were able to have their site visitors work for us and help us decide which was the best design! This is called landing page optimization. There are several companies that sell landing page optimization systems, and they are all very expensive. They also use scripting to control the different “recipes” or page designs. This is so similar to cloaking that I wouldn’t do it even if my clients had thousands of dollars to throw down the drain. We were able to do it all with our analytics suite for no extra costs at all.
The results were pretty much what I expected. The page that converted the most leads had all content and controls above the fold and used standard design and navigation.
One year later, this company is spending only $4000 a month on pay per click and is averaging more than 10,000 unique visitors.
The moral of this story is: KEEP YOUR CONTENT ABOVE THE FOLD!!!
Website Usability: How Visitors Use The Search Engine Results Pages SERPS
A SERP or Search Engine Results Page is the webpage that shows all the results from a search entered into the engine. If you type in “social network marketing experts” into Google the top 10 websites listed are and the page they are located is a SERP for Social Network Marketing Experts on Google. I have many keywords that are #1 in the results, mainly for localized keywords since I like to meet my clients in person prior to doing business with them. I only work for legitimate businesses and I have to completely understand a business and their marketplace to work my magic.
Visitors Usage of SERPS and What You Can Do About It
Looking through the last 2 years of Usability testing studies I have done, the numbers were quite shocking when it came down to the SERPS. In 89% of all searches the tester did not travel past the first SERP, a little over 9% went to the second SERP, and the number of users that hit the third SERP was so few that it was less than 1%. Since a SERP on Google has 2 or possibly 3 ads at the top and 10 results, it is almost a difference of life and death to be above the fold, the fold being the point where a user has to scroll down to see more of the page. Yahoo is even worse because it has a ton of ads as well as sponsored listings at the top, and I dare say they hide paid placement in the natural searches based upon their Site Submit. This leaves very little in the way of room above the fold in Yahoo.
I have some stats that show about half the users didn’t click on any listings below the fold. I am sorry to say that I wasn’t able to separate out the experienced user from the less experienced user while collecting and processing these facts. I heartily believe that a more experienced user, especially one using Google, will traverse past the fold to find the best match to there query.
Generally a Google SERP only shows 4 or 5 listings above the fold, on high profile keywords, some of the sites show 2 listings, usually the home page and the keyword specific page under it. Another note is on the right side their are usually 6 or 7 ads as well for a visitor to choose from. These facts reinforce the statement that your Title and description are the key to getting clicked on!
Website Usability Paid Versus Organic Search Engine Visitors Analytics
There is a vast difference in a visitor that has arrived at your site from either a paid ad or an organic search. Looking through analytics data from a couple of years and spanning several types of industries and website types, I have found that there is a startling difference in the quality of traffic from these different types of traffic sources. At first glance it seems that there wouldn’t be that much difference, after all a keyword phrase is the same whether the SERP link is paid for or natural, right?
WRONG. There is actually a lot of evidence that suggests paid ad traffic is almost entirely made up of less experienced users. This statement is even more apparent with Google and its AdSence ads. Before Google became a word in the dictionary and the behemoth search monster that it is now, it was mainly the source of information for mostly technical oriented users. That still rings true today. In fact most experienced users know that the top of the searches are paid for, and that anyone with some money can obtain high placement in Yahoo or Google by paying for it. They also know that the listings within the organic SERPS have been placed their because Google (and now Yahoo since it has unleashed its updated Inktomi based search engine), believes the site is an authority on the subject the visitor is interested in.
That would suggest that these ads are often ignored by experienced users. Check out my post on Website Usability Testing for more info on what qualifies a user as experienced. As that post explains more experienced users have much less patience when initially visiting a site, but also spend less time on pages since they are more familiar with navigation and other website functionality. That means that the visitors that arrive through paid search are less experienced and require a simpler website format.
Paid Search Visitor Usability
Through custom landing pages (both Yahoo and Google allow for custom entry pages as long as they are relevant to the search term) it is possible to optimize your paid search pages. As I mentioned above most users that are not experienced online don’t recognize the “sponsored” listings for what they truly are – paid advertising. This being said, it is key to arrange and optimize the landing pages for your paid search visitors. I can’t stress it enough, having custom pages not only allows you to separate your paid visitors for analytics, but gives you the opportunity to not waste time getting across the whole point of your website, just the meat of the subject relating to the keyword or phrase that you are paying for.
Another critical mistake often made in the actual creation of a paid listing is to use either the same title and description used on your general pages. If you know anything about SEO than you have optimized your meta tags to follow the guidelines laid out in my Meta Tags SEO Tips post, in other words you are walking that line of what a person needs to see to click on your listing in the SERPS, and what the search engines need to see to put your page IN the SERPS!
With paid or sponsored listings, you don’t have to worry about what the search engines think about either your listing or the optimized landing page.
*Note: Due to increasing pressure both Google and Yahoo take careful steps to NOT give any organic value to paid listings. I have run several experiments over time with pages that were linked in from Google and Yahoo sponsored listings to see if they received any benefit at all outside of normal spidering. Up to a couple of months ago pages within Yahoo sponsored searches DID get a boost, but never in Google, Ever! Yahoo has tightened this up quite a bit lately.
Back on subject now, the title and description that you use for your listing must clearly and succinctly give the use exactly what they need to click on your ad. The description should be short and sweet, preferably with a hook that will separate yours from the plethora of other ads.
Paid visitors are less experienced and are more likely to not understand a complex website. Be sure to utilize optimized and simple landing pages for your paid campaigns.