The UX of a University Website, xkcd Style

Ever had to visit a university campus and tried to use the campus map on their website to figure out where you need to go? It’s not easy. Between my wife’s recent acceptance to medical school (and the ensuing flurry of activity to get her registered, find a place to live, move across the country, and so on…) and a number of university experiences myself, I’m fairly confident in saying that, in general, universities have less-than-stellar website usability.
“But Ian,” you say, “as the upper echelons of higher education, shouldn’t these institutions be well-equipped to serve the needs of their [...]

A Big List of User Experience Best Practices

I promised some user experience best practices in the latest episode of The Expert Eye, Thinking Like A User, and I intend to make good on that promise.
There are all kinds of lists of best practices out there, ranging in size from small (like Nielsen’s Ten Usability Heuristics) to gigantic (like Usability.gov’s Guidelines), and there will always be debate about what’s most important, valid, easy, or any number of other adjectives. But there is one thing that I think most UX specialists will agree on: if you are aware of these best practices, you can at least evaluate whether [...]

Thinking like a User- Expert Eye Ep. 4

Who is your web site for? It’s supposed to be for your customers, but sometimes company web sites look like they were designed for someone else, like the shareholders, the marketing department, or the CEO. Uh-oh. And what about web sites for mobile users? Ian and Karl visit a few sites to see who’s doing it right.
Read the companion post – A Big List of User Experience Best Practices

Writing for the Web Part III – Expert Eye Series Ep-3

It’s been a while since our ancestors were hunters and gatherers, but some habits die hard. Our brains became hardwired to find the shortest path to the best patches of food. Online, that same instinct is called “information foraging”. In Episode 3 of the Expert Eye, Ian and Karl talk to Gord Hotchkiss about writing for the web and guiding your visitors with the alluring scent of relevant information.

Writing for the Web Part II – Expert Eye Ep-2

In Episode 1, we talked about how people generally skim web pages rather than reading them – that means that you need to make important information stand out in order to convince your visitors to read. In this episode, we’re looking at titles, headings, and links, and how you can use information scent and text formatting to make sure that they’re compelling and easy to read.

Pressing Enter vs. Clicking Login

How many of you fill out a login form and press enter to submit it rather than clicking the login button? I do 99% of the time.
So when I was trying to enter the AirMiles Spring Surprise Contest, I typed in my email address and password, checked off the “Remember Me” box, and hit enter.
But I wasn’t taken to the contest. The page reloaded and my password was gone. Herein lies UX problem number one – lots of people will just press enter instead of clicking the Login button. I did a little bit of searching to try and find [...]

Real Time Search Logs Expose Different Behaviors

That real time search is different from web search probably isn’t that surprising to you. But now we have the proof: Jim Jansen, a professor at Penn State and good friend of Enquiro, collected 6 months worth of real time search log data and is presenting the results at CHI 2010 this week.
The Methodology
Jim and his colleagues recorded real time search logs from Collecta from June to December 2009. This resulted in just over 1 million search queries that they analyzed at a term (individual words) and query (a string of two or more terms) level for frequency, length, and [...]

Content is King – The Expert Eye Companion Post, Episode 1

Why bother creating a website if you’re not going to use it to give people what they want? In the first episode of The Expert Eye, Karl and I talked about how “content is king” on a website, and brought up two best practices:

Give them what they want
Eliminate the fluff

Give them what they want
For the most part, people coming to your website are going to have a specific intent – they’re going to be looking for something in particular, whether it’s information, products, or phone numbers. This means that they’ll be looking for “information scent”, stuff that matches what they’re [...]

Writing for the Web Part I – Expert Eye Ep.1

“Content is King” – the mantra of pretty much anyone concerned with the user experience of a web site. We’re kicking off the Expert Eye with a three-part series looking at Writing for the Web and how you can develop content that really resonates with your customers. In this first one, we’re talking about why writing for your web site is not the same as writing a brochure or catalogue. We’ll touch on how people look at web pages and what they’re likely to read or skip over, and we’ll share a few techniques to make sure that your potential [...]

New PPC Ad Formats Good For Customers Too

Google announced some new paid ad formats at SMX West – I was reading about them today in this post from Search Engine Land. If you want to know why these new formats will be good for your business, read that post. I want to tell you why they’ll be good for your customers.
Get deeper faster
Google introduced organic site links way back in 2006 – those 8 or so links going to deeper content beneath the first organic listing. These are great because they let your potential customers get closer to what they want to find faster, and we know [...]