Archive for 'Usability'

Mar11

Ian Everdell

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Don’t Do User Experience? Actually, You Do.

You have a user experience whether you like it or not, and regardless of whether you’re doing anything to optimize it. From the first exposure a potential customer has to your products or services – whether that’s on a billboard, through direct mail, by word of mouth, or on a search engine – you are providing that customer with an experience around your brand.
In the age of technology, and for most of the people reading this, you ultimately want people to end up on your website – this is where you can really sell yourself, because you’re not constrained to [...]

Mar04

Ian Everdell

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Are you sure you’re targeting the right people?

Making a sale relies a lot on knowing who your potential customer is and what they need. That means that you have to do your research.
We got a call yesterday from a gentleman who noticed that Enquiro “is a sponsored link on Google” and was sure we’re “paying good money to be there”. He was calling because his company has “the ability to take clients’ websites and put them on page one of Google, organically, in 90 days or less.”
He did his research a little too late. About 30 seconds into the voicemail, he suddenly realized that search engine [...]

Feb26

Charlotte Bourne

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Search User Interfaces

If you’re interested in the academic side of search, chances are you’ve come across the work of Marti Heart, a professor at Berkeley’s School of Information. Her work covers everything from search engines, search interfaces, social technology, information visualization and web usability. Her book, Search User Interfaces, came out late last year and is a great resource for anyone interested in the information seeking process and how users interact with search and search results. Better yet, the text of the entire book is available free online.
If you are interested in usability, the chapters on the design, presentation, and evaluation of search [...]

Feb07

Ian Everdell

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The Google Experience During The Super Bowl

Google just ran a Super Bowl ad, something Eric Schmidt said in a tweet yesterday means that Hell has frozen over. Regardless of the current atmospheric conditions in the underworld, one of the more subtle things about the Google ad that caught my attention was a mention in the Google blog that, “our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact.”
Google and its proponents have always made a point of emphasizing the user experience of search – that’s why the Google start page isn’t covered in widgets [...]

Dec21

Ian Everdell

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Site maps aren’t just for SEO…

Site maps came up a few months ago in a post Jody wrote about SEO reminders for e-commerce sites. But site maps aren’t just for the engines – they can help improve the user experience as well.
“Site maps?” you say, “who even uses those?” Good point – site maps aren’t actually used all that much by web site visitors. But when it requires relatively little effort to implement one, imagine if the 5 or 10% of people who might actually use one when they got lost on your web site were able to. Your site map is often your [...]

Dec04

Ian Everdell

1

Eye Tracking as a Method to Improve Search Usability

I was recently interviewed by Sonja Quirmbach, of Deutsche Telekom, about eye tracking, usability, and search. The interview was orginally posted on Sonja’s blog.
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An often discussed topic in the UX world is the eye tracking method and its right to exist as a meaningful and valid usability method.
I am including eye tracking in my usability tests as often as possible, because I found it to be an helpful method to investigate what user look at on a result page. Particularly the information on eye movement in combination with user behavior on the search results page provides a lot more [...]

Nov24

Jody Nimetz

1

The Importance of Breadcrumb Navigation

Original Post from Marketing Jive:  The Importance of Breadcrumb Navigation
We have had a few questions about breadcrumb navigation as of late. The timing is uncanny as we were one of the first who reported the fact that Google is now displaying breadcrumb navigation in the organic listings of their search results.  For e-commerce sites or sites with clear navigation paths, this may prove to be extremely beneficial from an SEO perspective.
Putting the “Bread” in Breadcrumb
So what exactly is breadcrumb navigation?  Well simply put, breadcrumb navigation is a series of links that show the user a navigation path that they have [...]

Nov05

Ian Everdell

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Kelowna Businesses Mark World Usability Day with Enquiro

Just about anyone can make (or buy) a web site these days, and just about every business is online. But it generally doesn’t cost a user more than a few seconds and a couple of clicks to get to your web site, realize it’s not that great, and go find one of your competitors. So the big differentiator now is the user experience. Ask yourself: does your site do what your customers want it to do quickly and easily? Do you know whether your web site is achieving its potential? Do you know what you can do to make it [...]

Oct29

Gord Hotchkiss

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In Search of Usefulness

A few years ago, I interviewed usability expert Jakob Nielsen about where search might go in the future and he shared an interesting insight:
“I think there is a tendency now for a lot of not very useful results to be dredged up that happen to be very popular, like Wikipedia and various blogs. They’re not going to be very useful or substantial to people who are trying to solve problems..”
That stuck with me. Relevancy, as determined by search algorithms, and usefulness are not the same thing. And then, John Battelle touched on the same topic in a blog post a [...]

Aug21

Rich Deakin

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Concerning Eye Tracking

I’ve been doing a heck of a lot of industry research recently and I came upon some vehement rants about the quality and value (or perceived lack thereof)  in the use of eye tracking.  Some of that is along technical/insight lines, but there’s plenty of talk about eye tracking not being “worth the extra cost”.
Here at Enquiro we operate a little differently. Eye tracking is an ingrained part of our Usability studies, and we’ve built a strong reputation on our ability to get the best out of eye tracking technology. We don’t use eye tracking as a $30k upsell to lab based [...]

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