It’s been a few weeks since Google made changes to the user interface of its search results. In putting more advanced search options more firmly in front of the user, Google has broken with one of the factors that is widely credited for their success – keeping it simple. Read More
Pure Visibility is working with a company that sells engineering codes and standards to engineers, librarians, and technical professionals to conduct a usability study for their website. We’re interested in learning about how people shop for and purchase standards.
If you are an engineer, librarian, or technical professional that has purchased standards at your current job, we’d like to sit down with you for an hour to talk to you and look at our client’s website together. Our findings will remain confidential and will only be used for this project. We can meet with you during the business day or after work, either at our downtown Ann Arbor office or at any other location in the Ann Arbor/Detroit area that is more convenient for you.
If you are interested, please give us a phone number where we can reach you during the day (and let us know if there are any restrictions on when you’re available to talk). We’d like to get in touch with you for a 15 minute call to ask you a few questions and make sure that you match the profile we’re looking for for this study. Participation in this study will be on a paid basis.
Changes are coming to the Pure Visibility website! In the not too distant future, we will unleash a new site architecture followed by content changes and a visual redesign.
As this effort got underway, we knew it was important to employ the same skills that we bring to our clients – to eat our own cat food, you could say. We did user research and captured that information as personas and then used those personas as the basis for our information architecture work. We then took our early website prototype out to real users to gather some data about how it worked for them. Read More
UXmatters is a great resource for (unsurprisingly) UX-related articles, such as information architecture, usability, and user research. An article from February 22nd, “Review of Information Architecture Evaluation Tools: Chalkmark and Treejack,” provides a great overview of two user research tools from Optimal Workshop.
The first, Chalkmark, allows unmoderated testing of static mockups. You can put up a mocked up page, ask people where they would click to find information about something specific, and then Chalkmark tells you where users clicked.
The other tool that this article discusses is Treejack, which lets you test an organizational scheme, abstracted away from the actual interface. In Treejack, you build a tree that reflects how information on your site is organized into categories and sub-categories (or how you want to organize this information in the future). Again, you ask people to tell you where they think they would find a specific piece of information, but with this tool, they can click around in the tree and think about it before giving you their final answer.
The article on UXmatters goes into further detail about the analysis capabilities that both of these tools provide, and they sound pretty exciting.
Do you have a page on your website that you know could be better? Do you need help showing how subtle changes can have a big effect in conversion rates?
I came across a great site recently: ABtests.com (via The Interaction Designer’s Coffee Break). It consists of the results of A/B tests. It shows two different designs, side by side, points out which one had a higher conversion rate, and presents a theory about why one design did better than the other.
Testing designs is an important part of getting your online sales engine running. It takes advantage of the unique strengths that online marketing offers – the ability to collect lots of data and test ideas. There are free tools out there for doing it, such as Google Website Optimizer, but trying out a new idea can be as simple as rolling out a new page, using it for a while, and comparing the results to the previous design.
When you control the defaults in your product or website, you have the power to shape human behavior.
We touched on the matter of how you can influence users’ decisions on a form back during the presidential campaign, when we looked at the John McCain contribution form. If you were to make a form where the default contribution is $200, you imply that it is the amount that normal people donate. People will probably contribute less, but they’re bound to contribute more money than if you had set the default value to $10.
The recent story on Mashable, “Facebook Founder on Privacy: Public Is the New ‘Social Norm,’” reminded me of the power and responsibility that comes with being able to design choices for people. Mark Zuckerberg stated that the default settings on Facebook would be to share your data on the open web rather than restricting it to your friends. They changed the default with the expectation that most people would simply accept the default of sharing their data, and thereby increasing the value of Facebook.
Whether you agree with it or not, this is a reminder that design choices have consequences.
At Pure Visibility, we savor opportunities to do some detective work for our clients. Analytics offers us great opportunities to dig into what users are doing on websites.
One of our clients has a website geared toward generating leads (as opposed to, say, an e-commerce site). The majority of the leads from the site come from people that are on the site for the very first time, but many leads come from people that visit the site, and then come back later for a second visit.
We got to wondering: when somebody visits the site a second time, how do they get back?
In Google Analytics, we organize the visitors to the site into four categories, based on how they got there:
We could imagine scenarios where visitors came for their second visit through any of those channels. After discussing the matter, we theorized that the second time people visited, they would either type in the URL (or use a bookmark) or do the search again – they would be more likely to be Direct or Organic traffic, the second time around.
The argument for them being Direct is intuitive. After all, if you’re doing research on different websites before making a purchasing decision, why wouldn’t you write down the URL for sites that seem promising?
On the other hand, the Google and other search engines are increasingly becoming people’s way of bookmarking sites. That is, instead of actually using the bookmarking functionality in their browsers, people just do the same search over and over and find the site they want in search results.
To settle this question, we turned to advanced segmenting in Google Analytics. This functionality lets you filter visitors on the site based on most of the things that Analytics measures. In this case, we created a segment that just shows the people that are on their second visit.
Then, we went to the Traffic Sources section of Analytics, to the All Traffic Sources report, and filtered down to Medium. This is the report that can give you insight into the ways that people are getting to your site. We compared the new segment we created to All Visitors.
This is where we had to pull out a spreadsheet and do a little math. First we recorded the numbers from Analytics in this table. Then, we totaled up all those visits and found out the proportion of visits in each category.
As you can see in the spreadsheet, a higher proportion of visitors used search to find their way back to the website for their second visit – from 32% of all visits to 40% of 2nd visit traffic. It looks like the other channels’ share decreased a bit. It was surprising to see that the share of Direct traffic went down slightly, but it was nice to see that fewer people clicked on an ad to get to the site for their second visit!
So what? What do we do with this knowledge? Well, you never know when a bit of research will come in handy, one day. Knowing that users are more likely to choose search when they want to get back to the client’s site underlines the importance of branding. Whether the users search for the client’s name, or do a general search and pick the client’s site out of the search engine results, it comes down to the user knowing the client’s name. Also, we now have another bit of data that we can bake into a user persona when we describe how they might research and choose our client.
Pure Visibility was well represented last week at the Internet User Experience 2009 conference. In addition to helping out behind the scenes, our Co-Founder and Visionary, Linda Girard, was a keynote speaker (“Bringing the Left Brain and Right Brain Together Online: Branding + Optimization”) and participated in a panel on Branding, Search Engine Optimization, and Usability.
The fifth year of the conference was bigger than ever. Attendance was up 50% – an impressive feat in the current economic climate! Beside the outstanding attendance this year, there were speakers from HFI, Adaptive Path, Organic, Enlighten, EA Games, UserCentric, Quicken Loans, Menlo Innovations, and a little-known company named Google. The talks were excellent and once again this conference has proven to be an excellent opportunity to learn about usability and online marketing.
We’ve all been there: You go to a website, you like what you see, and when it comes time to get in touch with the company and tell them you’re interested or ask for help, all you see is an email address.
That website just left you hanging.
So, you’ve started your social media monitoring effort. You’ve got your finger on the pulse, so to speak, of the “blogosphere,” you’ve got a stream of tweets coming at you, and you’ve got your eye on various message boards. You’re even keeping an eye out for reviews of your business.
What are you going to do with that information?
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