Archive for December, 2009
New Site Usability Testing Tool: Usabilla
An innovative site usability testing tool called Usabilla popped on my radar a couple of days ago. It looks like a really interesting way to collect user feedback. One of the advantages is that you can test your designs before they are even finished. Getting early feedback on mock ups can cut back losses drastically. A lot of time and money is wasted on design that on completion doesn’t perform and needs to be redesigned. This service looks to have a good future.
There are some things to keep in mind though with tools like these, they do not replace actual live testing. The type of feedback you get from people who are deliberately looking at a design for the purpose of giving feedback is very different from natural user behavior. This is a very important distinction. The pitfalls are that you can get into a never ending feedback loop with your design never getting finished. And then there is the danger of basing your design on user feedback, rather than actual performance. It is far more important to measure performance and improve based on those numbers than solely rely on feedback obtained from tools like these (combining the two can be extremely powerful!).
Having said that, this tool looks to save designers and companies a lot of money. I love the way how it streamlines visual feedback. I’m going to try it out myself for a project I have going.
To get a good look at what it does, have a look at the video on their homepage: http://usabilla.com
Nifty Spam Tracking Trick For Gmail Users
I stumbled upon a very nifty little ninja gmail trick that helps me keep track of where spam is coming from. Every time we give supply an email address, the potential is there for that email address to be compromised and fall into the hands of a spammer. Only recently even the trusted Aweber suffered a breach which resulted in a lot of spam being delivered. It’s an unfortunate occurrence but there is always that chance, even with a variety of measures in place.
There is a way of finding out what source leaked your email address and making it very easy to filter out all subsequent spamming, that is, if you’re a gmail user!
The next time you pass your email address to a website via opt-in or what have you, apply this little known trick:
Instead of typing in your formal email address, add a period somewhere in your email and at the end close with: +whateveridentifieryouwanttouse.
So for example:
johntravoltasmit.h+outwit@gmail.com
You see, Gmail will ignore the placement of periods and ignores everything after the + sign. You will receive the email just as normal…except now you can easily find all inbound email by the email address you supplied, create a filter for it and if you like, have it go directly to trash. The next time you find yourself overwhelmed by a sudden rush of spam, you might actually be able to pinpoint what source leaked the address.
ps.
if you’d be using johntravoltasmit.h+outwit@gmail.com as your address,
enter this as a search in gmail to find all inbound email:
“to:johntravoltasmit.h@gmail.com”
You can’t however use the + sign in a gmail search query.
The Best Part of a Site Audit is…
Uncovering hidden assets!
The best thing about consulting is finding out what hidden resources and unused assets have been going untapped. It’s amazing that many businesses are sitting on a lot of money without them even knowing it. Sometimes it takes just a slightly fresh angle. Consultants are great at honing in on these assets. There is something about a fresh face looking at your business and evaluating it from an entirely different lens.
To make a slight segue, Google have been releasing a flurry of new Google Analytics features. Analytics of course, is a well known web statistics suite…and it packed a punch before, but now Google have taken it to another level.
A great place to look for hidden assets is by digging into your web analytics. If you have Google Analytics or a comparable package, there is a mountain of data at your command. There is just one problem, or two actually. Data in itself is meaningless. Especially if it comes in it’s information overload form. The bottom line is that to really discover those hidden gems lying within your website, is that you need to understand how to interpret the Data. Your average business owner or webmaster simply doesn’t have the time…and that’s not all.
You see there is one down side to Google and that is that they have packed in so many features it has become overwhelming to actually use their services anywhere near its potential. Google Analytics is a prime example. To make matters worst, their help pages are written more for programmers than they are for humans. Seeing too much techtalk, unfamiliar words and code will make ordinary people have fits. It’s a shame because there is a lot of money to be made if you can understand the data you have at your control.
Consider this post a bit of intro to some upcoming articles around analytics and how even the average Joe and Jane can use it to create more value from and for their business or website. One of the upcoming topics is going to be the new ‘asynchronous tracking’, ‘advanced segments’ and ‘splittesting’. All to be explained.
In the meantime, watch this video as it will give you an idea why your webstatistics are probably one of your biggest hidden assets, just waiting to be found:
Visual Walk through Of Google’s Search Innovations
Let’s run through some of the major innovations Google Search has implemented recently. The results are quite stunning.
Real Time Results on Steroids
Google Real Time Search for Lebron James Screencap
Below we see a query for NBA basketball player Lebron James. You can mimic this search result by clicking ‘show options’ and clicking ‘Latest’. This search gives us up to the minute results. In fact, even faster than that. Note how a twitter message that was posted 24 seconds ago is at the top of the page. That’s how fast Google is now ready to index content.
Universal Search Example and it’s impact
The following screen shows us how rich Search pages have become. Again we searched for Lebron James through the ordinary search box. We see news results, followed by 3 normal listings, followed by image results. This pretty much will appear above the fold (the space you’ll see without having to scroll down. Below are more standard listings – these are below the fold. Now more than ever, being listed lower than the #4 slot is close to meaningless for most searches. You need to be in that top 3 slot above the fold. Of course, with all the new types of content being featured, it makes sense to position yourself in those slots too. Publishing video and optimizing your images could get you a short cut to the first search results page.
Real Time Results come in various forms
Searching a sports team can bring up live scores.
Google’s auto suggest becomes smarter
Auto suggest brings up a dropdown box that tries to guess what you’re searching for. Further evidence that Google will try to figure out your intention before you even type it. Here we see instant weather forecasts being shown.
Google Suggests Gives Weather Forecast
Real Time Streaming Results And Reputation Management Horror
Here we see both the real time streaming feature at work on an ordinary search page (we queried ‘Tiger Woods’) and also the horror of having to manage your reputation in today’s world. It’s really hard to hide or manage the public’s opinion. And twitter gets a nice boost because their potential audience has grown since people don’t even have to see twitter to see what people are saying on their network. How’s that for advertising.
Tiger Woods is living Social Media Now
New Real-Time Search Impacts Small Businesses
You might have seen it in action by now, but Google has now started inserting real time streams into relevant search pages. In addition to that they now have more access to Facebook users messages, in part through Facebook’s recent privacy policy changes, Google can now supposedly include status messages of Facebook users. Any advantages rival Bing might have had is now gone. This is a big play for Google.
What does is mean for Small Businesses?
It will take some time for us to truly understand how Real Time search is being implemented to really predict when it appears on pages. I am betting that Google will be modifying its application as more userdata comes in. What we can expect is that time sensitive topics are going to include these Real Time search streams, which means that businesses have another method of grabbing attention.
What will be interesting to see is what happens when bad publicity causes a surge in searches – you might be looking at a continual stream of negative reactions like never seen before. If your business has not yet immersed themselves with Social Media, now is the time to do so. It will be critical to reputation management.
Also, Social Media users, or in other words, just about everybody, get more influence. Imagine if a group of users organize themselves, say, to protest something. If they manage to penetrate google’s search pages, they will be able to create some interesting attention. Keeping a good reputation is more important than ever, because managing it across social networks was hard enough, now you might have to contend with real time search results as well – removing the buffer that gives you time to react.
For the SEO enthusiasts, with another rich element added to the page, regular webpages will be pushed down further for certain search queries.
For the spamming enthusiasts…you are no doubt going to try and see if you can manipulate streams based while targeting the latest search trends, without having to do all the work of ranking your pages.
Simple Common Sense SEO: This is What Google Loves
When creating websites and and webpages there are two sources you need to design for. The first one is obviously your target audience, the actual person that will be gaining value through your website. To write for your prospects, your visitors, your potential client, you need to be able to deliver value to them. In essence, you need to know what they want and need.
The other source you need to keep in mind is the Search Engines, namely, Google. The search engines determine how your webpages are going to rank. The better you rank, the more traffic you will receive from these search engines. While search engines are not your only sources of traffic, they are in most cases the most important. So what we really want to know is how to rank well. And the best starting place for that is by asking the question: What does Google want so see?
So let’s get under the skin of google.
Google’s profitability depends on people using their search engine. Everything is thus geared toward obtaining and attaining searchers. To do that they must ensure that searching on Google gives the best possible experience. One way to provide that is to rank websites based on their relevancy in relation to what a person is looking for. Google has made their name by serving highly relevant webpages. This is a win for Google, because this encourages people to keep using their engine and the time spent using their search engine. The more people that use Google, the more money making opportunities to have.
So relevancy is key. Google has been getting increasingly good at judging what is relevant. One area that is in rapid development is the ability to provide relevant search results based on the persons location. In the future Google is only going to get better at judging other factors, like a searchers intention, and take advantage of the huge amount of user data that they have collected. You see, if the search engine knows your attention is to buy something, rather than research something, it would rather serve up review sites and shopping sites than how-to sites and photo galleries.
So relevance depends on a users intention. This is an important key to understanding on how to develop your site. What is the intention of the person looking on your page? Is it to buy, is it to learn or is it to have fun? If you can peg down the intention of the user, you can much more easily get that person to act since you know how to organize the information and design toward that purpose. Often when a page is not performing well, the design and content isn’t conducive to satisfying a searchers intention. Worser still, a poorly designed page typically does not do well in getting a visitor to take the action you are desiring them to take.
If you do not know the intention of the visitor, you can’t cater to it and you will have trouble motivating a visitor to take the action you want them to take. A well designed page capitalizes on a visitors frame of mind and makes it incredibly easy to achieve the right action. It can happen that way because you have designed the page for a specific visitor who is in a specific frame of mind. And if you nail this you are also meeting Google’s wish of serving highly relevant pages!
Google actually can tell how well your page is performing. If it sees that visitors are coming to a page on your site and immediately leaving the site without having visited another page on your site, it will deduce that your page is not relevant or not valuable. This is also referred to as a the ‘bounce rate’. Do you think they will reward your page or drop your page down if people area leaving your site as quick as they are going?
The other important factor that Google loves is a matter of performance. Perhaps your site has great information, but if it needs a long time to load, it’s poorly designed or displays bugs or broken links of any kind, its performance will drop. Google loves fast sites because people love a good user experience. The average time visitors are willing to wait is incredibly short.
To recap: We’ve discussed a few qualities Google loves to see when they rank webpages. They love to see a site that is highly relevant and valuable to what a person is looking for – it needs to satisfy the users intention, they want it to load fast and provide a good user experience.
Action steps:
Review the pages on your site and ask yourself how you can improve relevancy, value, usability and loading times. Need more data? Dig in to your sites logs and analytics data. Find out where people are exiting your site, what they are searching for that leads them to your site and what they look for once they are on your site. You will find that you do not even have to read any hard core ‘Search Engine Optimization’ tricks in order to improve your sites rankings.