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:

• Organic: Found the site in non-paid search engine results
• PPC: Paid search advertising
• Direct: Typed in the URL directly, or had bookmarked it
• Referral: Followed a link from another site

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.

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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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Pure Visibility’s Jessica Hullman, author of many fine posts on this blog, has become the first guest poster on the Google Analytics Blog. Her post is titled Mastering Motion Charts – Trend Analysis.

New analysis tools and visualizations like Motion Charts are always exciting for Pure Visibility and we jumped at the chance to continue or work of helping others gain insight from them. Of course, we were also honored to be recognized by Google as a trusted source in explaining and promoting their tools.

Congratulations, Jessica!

Is video really going to help your online marketing? It depends.

The use of video is going to grow. With Google’s universal search (AKA blended search) integrating multiple media into search results, video can give you another way to be found. It gives you a way to explain how your product works in a way that text and static images cannot. It can help you form a more personal connection with potential customers.

But before investing in video, it’s important to understand your primary audience – your users.
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Your company is not a person. When you use services like Facebook or LinkedIn to promote it, your company has to play by different rules.

People connect with other people. We crave authenticity. Social media can be powerful ways to reach out to your audience when you allow your people to be themselves – to put a real face on your company like the sun breaking through an otherwise cloudy sky.

When you get started using social media to market your company or organization, don’t make the mistake of starting a personal profile – the same kind that a regular person would – and slap your company’s name on it.
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