VIA Interaction

Friday, May 27, 2005

Google: Best page locations for advertising

Scale: dark orange (best locations) to light yellow (worst)

Google has released some advice about ad placement that has a few interesting pointers, including that the page position for most of its own ads is the worst performing spot!

This suggests to me that people gradually train themselves not to look at areas that they don't believe are going to be useful. We've heard of that happening even from site to site, and it's why we like to be careful about putting purely promotional links next to contextual links: we don't want to train people to stop looking at our key navigation areas.

Also interesting is the dark orange at the bottom of the page. We've long believed that that can be a a good spot for important content, counter to the intuition that important things should be "above the fold."

As always, the performance of elements on the page depends on the design as a whole.

posted by Tim Beidel at 5/27/2005 02:58:00 PM

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Marketing, IT and the Web

Of the million and one challenges that our clients face managing their Web sites, there is a big one that is always both out in the open and lurking beneath the surface. One that I (half-jokingly) refer to as "The Tyranny of IT."

Marketing and communications groups are in a bind: They know that they need the Web: Nearly 100 million people have researched a product or service online, and 30 percent of all purchase decisions will be influenced by the Web by 2007.

Yet they are held hostage by their IT groups, who own the mysteries and knowledge enabling them to control your Web site. And who seem to use that advantage to obstruct any and all progress.

At least that's the way that a lot of marketing people see it.

Now there is a study out that suggests the marketing people may not be--as technologists may see it--ditzy right-brainers without a clue.

The study, "IT Professionals as Organizational Citizens," by Jo Ellen More and Mary Sue Love, computer science and management and marketing professors at Southern Illinois-Edwardsville, was published in this month's Communications of the ACM. (It's not available online right now).

It found that IT people in five companies in five different industries had levels of "Organizational Citizenship Behaviors" that were significantly lower than people in other job classifications.

The citizenship behaviors were described as:

• Altruism - voluntary actions to help others with a work problem
• Courtesy - behaviors that help someone prevent a problem
• Sportsmanship - tolerating the negatives in a situation without complaining
• Civic virtue - constructive involvement in political processes at work
• Conscientiousness - going well beyond the norm in completing job tasks

The study identified some reasons for this, including a lower level of trust in management and a higher level of perceived "lack of fairness" by IT people.

Hard to be a good citizen when you don't trust managers and think you are being treated unfairly.

As a recovering IT person, I see a lot of the problem in the "right-brain, left-brain" division. This a stereotype that is dangerous (and silly) to apply to individuals, but the folks who are good at IT just have different personalities than than the kind that are drawn to "creative" jobs.

Another part of it is that from an IT perspective, their jobs really are unfair.

As a colleague in engineering once put it to me, "These advertising guys can make a mistake or miss a loose end, and the ad still runs. With our stuff, you can push the 'on button' and nothing might happen!"

Put yourself in the shoes of an IT person who knows that a single missing semi-colon in a line of code can bring an entire system to a halt, and that it may take a week of debugging to find that semi-colon!

And then look at the fuzzy world of the "creatives" where there are seem to be no hard rules - or even rules at all.

Improving marketing's relationship with IT is a big problem to tackle, but after working with many companies, I believe that Marketing Departments have to have control over company Web sites. This has long since moved from a technology vehicle to a critical marketing and communications medium.

And working with IT, the authors suggest, will require that "IT professionals and work environments [are] managed in ways that kindle perceptions of trust and fairness."

posted by Tim Beidel at 5/27/2005 10:39:00 AM

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Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Must Search Stink? redux

Forrester Research authored a paper in 2000 with the memorable title, "Must Search Stink?" It outlined the problems people had with site searches and painted a bleak picture.

"Search" is one of those hidden disasters on most Web sites. Site searches are so ineffective that many Web users have trained themselves to just ignore them.

In one memorable usability test we conducted,an evaluator searched our client's site by leaving it and going to Google rather than use the site search box the site provided.

There are things that you can do to improve your site search. One of the most important things is to select the right search tool, and customize it to work for your customers. Here are some key tactics and techniques:

• Pay close attention to the HTML titles and metadata in your site's pages. Search engines rank results differently, and you need to form your pages to work best with your search engine. (And don't forget Google and Yahoo, too - they also read this data.)
• Review your search logs and use what you find to update synonym lists and thesauruses. The best way to understand the language your customers use is to review the search logs. You'll also find common misspellings. Enter both into your synonym list and thesaurus in order to return results that are meaningful to your customers.
• Experiment with manual page weighting. For OhioHealth, we push the top-level pages for key service lines and health reference pages to the top of the results when visitors enter certain keywords. These index pages are rich with links to deeper information, and we believe pushing them to the top is a service--not merely a marketing a trick. (Example: a search for "cancer" on OhioHealth.com.)
• Combine "browse" and "search" so that visitors can use the technique they prefer. We're working on a search for a client now that we are very excited about. It not only provides browsing and searching mechanisms, it introduces "advanced search" techniques throughout the searching process so that visitors can refine their search naturally, without having to master a complex interface. That search will go into user testing soon.
  

Trend to watch

We're going to eagerly follow Google's introduction of "Saved Searches," a personalization feature that enables you to look back through your search history to find what you looked for the other day, or last month.

It seems useful, and it will be interesting to see if Web users begin to demand that type of functionality from sites.

posted by Tim Beidel at 5/24/2005 09:15:00 AM

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Monday, May 23, 2005

RSS: Get on board

RSS (which either stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary - depending on who you talk to) is an XML format for distributing content - today, typically news headlines or blog entries.

We've been recommending to our clients that they begin preparing for, and publishing, RSS in order to be ready for a potential revolution in the way people find and organize content on the Web.

(You can see an example of the XML generated for this site by clicking here, or in the navigation.)

Right now, early adopters have embraced "news readers" - simple software tools that go out and look for updated RSS feeds from selected sites. For example, you can have a newsreader check your favorite news site every few minutes, and notify you when topics of interest are published. (Think of a news reader like an e-mail program, checking the server for updates.)

Very few "real people" use newsreaders now (a recent Pew Internet and American Life report pegged the number at 5 percent of Internet users), but change is coming: Search engines and portals are making it easier for everyday users to easily subscribe to news feeds.

The New York Times reports that Google's new personalized home page will offer headline feeds "from a narrow selection of information sites like BBC News and, in the future, it will allow users to add feeds from their favorite sites."

It will be interesting to see if Google restricts the RSS feeds to a pre-selection of approved partners (Yahoo style), or lets you add your own.

My bet is that they open it up, and that you can soon make Jerry McGuire's blog part of your home page. Or more important, Analog Devices' customers can make Jerry's blog part of their home page.

May 23 update: Google's Marissa Mayer, quoted in the Boston Globe, says ''We envision in the next one or two months offering full RSS support so we can accept any RSS for you off the Web to be displayed on your personalized home page."

posted by Tim Beidel at 5/23/2005 07:42:00 AM

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Saturday, May 21, 2005

Reintroducing serendipity: The New York Times online

Newspapers - the big ones anyway - do a terrific job of presenting content online. That's not surprising; newspapers have always been in the business of creating, organizing and publishing large amounts of content.

Washingtonpost.com's "Most Viewed Articles" widget.

When they first started to appear on the Web, some newspapers considered it a "new medium" (which it was) that required a new paradigm (which it probably didn't), and their online experiences were a lot different than their offline experiences.

Which didn't make a lot of sense. If the best predictor of success with an interactive system is experience with a similar system, then why abandon the interface that they had established over decades?

That is, there is a front page for the most important stories, a sports section, a features section, an editorial section, etc.

By and large newspapers have returned to that, although some combine properties at the front door, at least, like Knight Ridder's Philadelphia papers, the Inquirer and Daily News, with their unifying Web site, philly.com.

Nytimes.com's "Most Emailed" widget.

Mimicking the serendipity that newspaper readers have offline when they browse through broadsheets (and tabloids) a page or two at a time, is more difficult. Techniques include links to related stories, and a couple of real improvements over the offline experience: links to the most visited pages on the site or section of the site (as with washington.post.com) and links to the articles most e-mailed by readers (nytimes.com).

Lately The New York Times has introduced another feature that gets a step closer to serendipity. At the bottom of its articles, there is now a link to the next article in the section (e.g., "Next article in Arts (1 of 11) >") that takes us a step closer to the experience offline: Coming across something totally unrelated and unexpected.

Nytimes.com's "Serendipity navigation."

posted by Tim Beidel at 5/21/2005 09:19:00 AM

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Thursday, May 19, 2005

Google and iPod

Two of the greatest brands of the early 21st Century have a lot in common.

Google and iPod both offer simplicity.

Google's search interface is unadorned. You don't need to be an expert in Boolean logic to use it, or even its advanced search interface.

Google revolutionized and revitalized online advertising with its "sponsored links" - simple hyperlinks next to search results that generated twice the click-through of all those flashy animated banners.

Apple's iPod is the MP3 player of choice and commands a $100 premium over similar models despite a lack of features.

It was not a surprise when Google introduced its personalized home page that other players in the Portal business would react the way Apple's iPod competitors did - by characterizing it as a beginner's effort.

posted by Tim Beidel at 5/19/2005 06:06:00 PM

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Monday, May 16, 2005

Instructional text: Don't read me

This is taken as gospel by human-computer interaction experts, and we see it over and over again when we do usability on our designs:

People don't read instructional text.

The folks at Amazon don't say much about their usability techniques -- they consider their user experience a brand diffentiator, and proprietary -- but we've seen a few really cool ways that they are attempting to deal with this reality.

In the first case, Amazon knows that people love its one-click ordering option. But how do you tell them about it? One way is the sleight-of-visual hand below. What's that notch doing in the"Add to Shopping Cart" button?


Amazon employs a very sophisticated technique during the checkout process. The "new/returning user" question is a big point of failure.

That's because people, when confronted with entry forms, simply blow right by any instructions and fill in the form on instinct. With user accounts (a concept which is foreign to many customers), they tend to enter their e-mail account user name and password!

Amazon "tricks" people into reading the instructions by not labeling a key form field (the password field) and incorporating the instructions into something they are likely to read: the labels for a the option above the field.

posted by Tim Beidel at 5/16/2005 09:10:00 AM

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Sunday, May 15, 2005

Three little words

Details matter.

We noticed that click-throughs to one of the most popular destinations from OhioHealth's Maternity e-mail newsletter dropped by more than half when the only significant change was the wording of the hyperlink.

When "Browse all Pregnancy classes" became "Find this class" in the hyperlink, click-through dropped by more than half!

Before

After

Without "trigger" words like "pregnancy" in the hyperlink, click -throughs to classes dropped by more than half.

posted by Tim Beidel at 5/15/2005 09:46:00 AM

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