Using search analysis to improve your site.

Running user surveys and interviews are good ways of finding out what your users want, but they might not give you the whole picture. People can’t always say exactly what it is that would make a site and its content more usable. Furthermore, what a user wants and what a user needs might not be the same thing!

Analysing search patterns and results on your site is a great way of studying user behaviour which can give you different insights into how your site and its content could be improved to better meet their needs, as well as how you can optimise the internal search on your site.

It’s nothing to sniff at: users are becoming very comfortable and very proficient at using search engines, both on the web (using search engines such as Google) and internally (using your site’s search function). So the better your search works, well, the better.

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Firstly I must point out that I am in no way advocating horizontal scrolling on web pages.

Assuming that you are using a screen resolution of at least 1024×768 pixels (96% of internet users worldwide in 2009), you will almost never see horizontal scrolling. This is because it has been recognised as highly unusable for some time. I won’t be debating that here.

However, I take issue with the fact that vertical scrolling seems to have been tarred with the same brush.

It’s extremely common for a client to request that users should not have to scroll to see any content on their pages (or a large majority of the content at least). This seems to be based on two assumptions. First is that users don’t see content below the page fold (the point at which the content disappears behind the frame at the bottom of the web browser). Second is that users don’t like scrolling and find it a chore.

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Information architecture is a key phase in all of our projects at Content Formula. Whether website or intranet, we know that if you get the structure, organisation and classification of content right at the start of the project, the end result will be a seamless, usable site.

It always starts with defining both the business and user requirements. It’s important that you define both, because the way the business wants to organise their content is not necessarily going to be how users will search for it. There are numerous ways to gather this information (that’s a whole other blog post!), including interviews, surveys and focus groups. This stage is also often combined with an audit of any current site or content.

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A brief history of mobile web browsing

Web browsers first appeared on mobile phones at the start of the millennium. These initial attempts to ‘mobilise’ the web were pretty disappointing. Firstly, the hardware wasn’t powerful enough to handle full web pages, and screens were too small and low resolution. Also, use of WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) and WML (Wireless Mark-up Language) demanded special tools and limited the possibilities for creating usable interfaces. Furthermore, the web’s best content was rarely adapted for delivery to mobiles.

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Many companies have jumped onto the Facebook application bandwagon. Most of these apps bomb and the ROI must surely be negative. However, there are some great apps out there. Here’s a case study about an app we found that ticks the right boxes.

Making sure your designs work no matter which browser is being used is one of the most important things an agency can do. Experience and knowledge go a long way to making this an automatic process, but there is no excuse now for websites that don’t work properly in certain browswers. But what can you do if you don’t want to have dozens of browsers installed, or you have IE8 but want to test in IE6?

The answer is this suite of FREE online tools which make things almost completely hassle free! Enjoy!

http://seleniumhq.org/
http://browsershots.org/
https://browserlab.adobe.com/

It’s pretty common for a client to ask about having a Flash intro on their website. My immediate reaction is to suck air through my teeth like a plumber who’s been quizzed about the cost of fixing a boiler – not because I know it will be expensive, but because I know that it is a bad idea.

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Remember Tom Cruise using his hands to move data around in the futuristic film “Minority Report”? Well it turns out that this image is not that futuristic after all: you can more or less do it on your iPhone right now.

The key phrase you need to know is “augmented reality”, and it is becoming increasingly mainstream these days as more applications are found and the media keep jumping on the “OMG this is so cool” bandwagon. (Which it is, to be fair). But what is it and how does it work? Put simply, augmented reality (or AR) is a digital overlay on the real world. A camera takes a picture, and then the computer overlays King Kong (or whatever) onto your screen. The cool thing is that this can be done in real time while you’re walking down the street.

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Choosing the right content management system (CMS) can be a real headache. You’ve got to match the project in hand to the features the CMS offers and the technical ability of the users who’re going to be updating the site. All the big CMSs have their plus, as well as their negative points and I’m going to try and summarise them here.

My experience lies with the open source CMSs, so I’m going to compare the big 3 contenders: Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. I also use Sharepoint a lot on intranets, and have seen some positive things from commercial CMSs such as Episerver.

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What is a user persona and why do we use them?

A persona is a detailed profile of a user – whether that person is a user for a website, an intranet, an animation or a widget. It turns them from being just “the user” into “Roger Moore, retired, 65 years old, partially-blind, challenged by new technology”: it puts a face on the target audience of the project you’re working on.

Personas are used across marketing. We use them to help us understand the audience of a project we’re working on. This is important because as digital media gurus with a high degree of familiarity with digital technology, we can become removed from the way the general public actually uses, navigates or searches. Similarly, our clients, who know their own product or service inside-out, can also forget that the general public has a different perspective. So personas are about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes – putting the user’s hat on, and asking the questions that they would ask. Would Roger Moore notice that button, and know to click on it?

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