| LED Digest 2610: Special Issue - SEO & Usability |
|
|
|
==================================================
The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom http://www.AudetteMedia.com : the LED's Publisher Boutique Internet Marketing: SEO, SEM, Social Media http://www.SEOToolSet.com/training/ : the LED's Premier Sponsor Bruce Clay's Search Engine Optimization Training & Certification ================================================== Guest Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. March 19, 2008 Issue no. 2610 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== <Moderator Comment> ~ Comments on Search & Usability --== The Interchange of Search & Use ==-- ~ Grant Crowell "I did this interview with Jared back on November 15. Here's a summary..." ~ Jared Spool "You do need to expand things to think about the entire experience." ========= NEW ===================================== <Moderator Comment> Greetings LEDer, Grant Crowell of www.grantasticdesigns.com has something cool for us today: an interview he did with Jared Spool, a veteran usability engineer from www.uie.com. The topic at hand is the interchange between search and usability. Grant highlights the major content of the talk in his post directly below my comments. We've also published it on the AudetteMedia blog (just launched, still working out the bugs) here: http://www.audettemedia.com/blog/interchange-of-search-and-usability The podcast is on the blog so you can listen to Grant and Jared's entire conversation (about 18 minutes long). After listening to the podcast, here are my thoughts: Spool doesn't feel there's any issue here, in terms of search "versus" usability. I tend to agree, and like his analogy of baseball: what's better, a second baseman or a pitcher? The question is meaningless. That said, I think usability engineers tend to discount internet marketing (they discount SEO in particular), and Spool displays this habit. I don't think there's an issue between *either* SEO *or* usability - I agree that's meaningless. But there is an issue here - an important one. Spool hits it dead on later in the call. The issue is that reaching out with internet marketing (I'll just call it SEO) really only works if you've got a good, usable site on the other end. Spool touched on this in the interview when he spoke to "designing for the whole experience" from how a site appears in the SERPs, to how it appears in a user's browser, to making sure a user can share good content. There's another important issue here as well. How do people use search engines? Their behaviour is complex and multiform, but what can be counted on are things like opening links in new windows but keeping them in the background, opening links then quickly going back to the SERP, opening a new page and bookmarking it for later, quickly glancing at results for anticipated words in bold, etc. There's a school of thought for these types of behaviors (with terms like "berry picking" and "pogo sticking" and "scanning" and "foraging"), and they're crucial to usability. They're also crucial to SEO. Being familiar with different types of search behaviours can be a powerful aid in an online strategy. Spool said it very well: we need to approach the web as an entire experience. It's reaching out and promoting your site so people know about it, it's optimizing it to be found, it's running ads on search engines for placement. It's designing good, highly usable sites, doing testing and research, adding functionality. It's all important and it all works together. It's going to get harder to compete online by doing "just enough." Thinking of a web site as being part of a topical "web experience" changes the perspective a ton, and reveals usability and SEO as specific tools within the same tool box. A hammer isn't better than a screwdriver, is it? They're tools that do the same thing: build something. It's the same with usability and SEO. I'd like to thank Grant for sharing this with the list - it's a great topic. I'd love to hear your thoughts. -Adam ------------------- From: Grant Crowell Subject: Search - Usability debate: Interview with Jared Spool LEDers, I did this interview with Jared back on November 15. Here's a summary of the interview, with all statements being according to Jared's perspective. (Jared addresses the question at 2 minutes into the call.) SEARCH VS. USABILITY * The search vs. usability debate, according to Jared, is a non-sequitir argument best reserved for bar room conversations. * "They're completely different things and yet part of a total vision." * He's not sure it matters in terms of figuring out if one can exist without the other. They just both matter on their own merit. * "If nobody comes to your site, it doesn't matter how usable it is. When people come to your site, the act of clicking on that site creates a promise for the user, and that site better meet and exceed those expectations which come with that promise. Both are important, and are very different things. Sometimes, they conflict with each other, but most of the time they don't. Most of the time they cohabitate, but sometimes they do conflict. And when they do, you have to sit down and make some business decisions. But that's true with anything." * There are also business reasons behind why something isn't as usable or search-friendly as it could be. For example, the need for companies to produce advertisement revenue. TRAINING AND CERTIFICATION * Both search and usability suffer from an inability of structure and training around the formality of the trade, and that's just because they're new. Anyone can declare themselves a search expert or a usability expert. At which point, what guarantees are there that they're following best practices and up on the latest knowledge? Unless you get into certification and licensing - which is what they do for doctors and plumbers - this is always going to be a problem in the industry. He believes that the organizations around these professions (UPA, SEMPO, etc.) need to really do a much, much better job on establishing real guidelines for what people need to know and how they apply their profession to their clients. Right now there are no accredited third party institutions, just companies (like his own) offering to training people in their field by what they consider to be best practices and provide their own in-house 'certification.' He thinks that this is just because the industries for both usability and search are still relatively young. RAPID EVOLUTION IN THE INDUSTRY * Jared believes that there is a problem with administering certification in the fields of search and usability, since they move too rapidly and change too quickly for there to be fixed standards on what constitute best practices. Certification and best practices requires stabilization in the field, but the fields of search and usability change so fast. Because it's going so fast, nobody knows what to certify people on, and that's why you don't have certification. It's not because of the nature of the work; it's because it's young, and moving very speedily. Jared believes that it may take another 20+ years for these fields to slow down and allow themselves to be ready for the establishment of basics and standards, towards a certification process. It will settle down, but we're just not at the point yet. THE ENTIRE EXPERIENCE * You do need to expand things to think about the entire experience. You do need to know the steps that people take to get to your site. There's a whole bunch of things that led up to the user coming to your site. Without knowing what they are, you really don't know how the user intends to use your site, and what it takes to make your site more usable. And then there's going to be a whole bunch of things that the user does when they leave your site, and you should know what is going on there, too. The same happens with search engine marketing. There's a whole bunch of things that happen when a user fires up the search engine, and a whole bunch of things when a user leaves that search engine. You need to know what that total experience is. If you're designing for that entire experience, you're going to have a much better success rate with those people and experience greater returns. The people who only focus on a part of the experience are going to find there to be a huge disconnect, and the customers will be lost. Check out the podcast: http://www.audettemedia.com/blog/interchange-of-search-and-usability Grant Crowell, Project Director Grantastic Designs, Inc. http://www.grantasticdesigns.com (c) Copyright 1995-2008 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "He Could have stayed somewhere, but the train tracks kept going And it seems like they always left soon. And the wolves that he ran with, they moaned low and painful Sang sad misereres to the moon." - Josh Ritter |
