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The Usability Oven is Getting Hotter  

:: Friday, March 05, 2004 ::

The Usability Oven Is Getting Hotter

The recent ruckus over Mark Hurst's The Page Paradigm and whether or not breadcrumb navigation has value continues to thrive. For me, anything that helps both website users and search engine robots is the logical, cost effective choice in today's ROI-driven Internet environment.

To recap.

     "Users don't much care "where they are" in the website. So-called "breadcrumb links," which show the user the exact hierarchy of the website as they click further down, are a nice but mostly irrelevant technology. It's not that users don't understand the links; it's that they don't care." according to Mark Hurst.

To which has been written.

The Oversimplification of Mark Hurst by Peterme.com
     "I did a quick assessment of the site Mark points to, and I can say with no reservation that you should totally follow all of Mark's suggestions when you're designing a 26 page site. Which is how many pages comprise the Shure earphone site. (It gets a little over 50 if you include the Mobile Headset). For all of you out there designing sites with 50 pages, feel free to ignore consistency, breadcrumbs, and the notion of "where content should live." And focus on the Goal, because there won't be much more than one."

The missing page paradigm by Donna Maurer
     "Mark Hurst consistently makes my blood boil"

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, March 1, 2004
     "For example, it's easy to run a study that shows breadcrumbs are useless: just give users directed tasks that require them to go in a straight line to the desired destination and stop there. Such users will (rightly) ignore any breadcrumb trail. Breadcrumbs are still recommended for many sites, of course. Not only are they lightweight, and thus unlikely to interfere with direct-movement users, but they're helpful to users who arrive deep within a site via search engines and direct links. Breadcrumbs give these users context and help users who are doing comparisons by offering direct access to higher levels of the information architecture."

The Business of Design
     "...unlike content websites where higher (ad-) revenue is a factor of increased traffic; on shopping sites, even the smallest change in user experience is immediately reflected in revenues since higher revenue here depends upon conversion rates, even with traffic remaining constant."

You go Jesse James Garrett!

All Those Opposed: Making the case for user experience in a budget-conscious climate is such a kick-bleep article I posted it in Cre8asiteForums.
     "In any commercial enterprise, Web sites exist for one of two reasons: to help the organization save money, or to help it make money. In both cases, the user experience can make the difference between a successful site and a failure."

If you own a blog, you're just plain cool.

Warning: Blogs Can Be Infectious
     "'What we're finding is that the important people on the Web are not necessarily the people with the most explicit links (back to their sites), but the people who cause epidemics in blog networks,' said researcher Eytan Adar."

Yahoo! still hasn't sold everyone on its new Overture/Inktomi Site Match solution. Yahoo Free Inclusion? Not So Fast… raises questions about Slurp and how well or even if, it will work.

Linking for loonies is the topic of Mike Grehan's Google PageRank Lunacy
     "The quest by some to improve their Google PageRank score seems to have reached the point of sheer madness. Even common decency may be abandoned in futile attempts by desperate (or simply less educated) online marketers and others who will seemingly stop at nothing to try and gain links in hopes of seeing more green in their Google toolbar."

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 3/05/2004 10:51:01 AM

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