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We Shall Be Findable  

:: Friday, June 25, 2004 ::

By now, many of you realize user centered design is less about fonts, white space and colors and more about an entire Process. This process relates to user behavior, meeting desires, accomplishing tasks...engaging the user all the while.

An article, called User Experience Design by Peter Morville talks about the user experience honeycomb, and offers illustrations for it that include an IA foundation, and moves on to "Facets of the User Experience"

Some snips:

     "Last Summer, while redesigning the Q web site, we identified findability as a top priority. Our quest to make this small site more findable took me beyond the discipline of information architecture and deep into the realm of search engine optimization.

That experience proved useful last Fall, during a redesign project for the National Cancer Institute, in which we used findability concepts and SEO statistics to alleviate an unhealthy fixation on the home page, raising awareness of the need to design findable documents for direct access via the Google, MSN, and Yahoo! search engines"


     "And this Spring, I was hired to perform my first findability audit for a major international nonprofit. Feeling a bit concerned about dedicating four weeks exclusively to findability, I asked whether I should also consider usability factors. "No thanks," my client replied. "We already had Jakob in last year to focus on usability."

     "The honeycomb hits the sweet spot by serving several purposes at once. First, it's a great tool for advancing the conversation beyond usability and for helping people understand the need to define priorities. Is it more important for your web site to be desirable or accessible? How about usable or credible? The truth is, it depends on your unique balance of context, content and users, and the required tradeoffs are better made explicitly than unconsciously."

Discuss: User Centered Design, What is this?

The Answer is No

Jen Laycock, Robert's new SearchEngineGuide.com sidekick, talks about UsabilityEffect.com in Is SEM Worthless Without Usability Analysis?

Rather, I find the two compliment one another in many ways, and will continue to do as competition for rank, sales and traffic gets tougher. Understanding user behavior in search engines and on web sites is vital to usability.

Jill Whalen's High Ranking Forums has an excellent thread on this >>>Conversion Not Placement, Being #1 doesn't pay the rent. It's great for SEO's who ask real questions and care about the long-term success of their clients, but know they can't control what happens after SERPS clicks.

On Findability

Findability.org - "Information architecture is a discipline concerned with the structural and semantic design of shared information spaces. Findability is a goal of IA, along with usability, desirability, credibility, and accessibility. Many people contribute to the findability of websites and intranets, including writers, designers, and developers."

And, SEO/SEM's.

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 6/25/2004 03:26:24 PM

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