The slidedecks from the two presentations are provided below both as a Slideshare presentation and as a PDF download which contains my notes, links to further information and image credits.

Usability in a sustainable future

In this presentation my aim was to provide an overview of how usability and user experience design practice can play a positive role in achieving sustainability outcomes. It proposes we extend our concept of usability to include pre-use-ability and end-of-use-ability, considering design, packaging, materials, re-use, recycling and disposal, demonstrating the concepts with recent examples.

Usability in a sustainable future slides with notes (PDF 1.65MB)

Exploring the Human Habitat

This presentation focuses on the research process behind the redevelopment of the Future is Man Made (FiMM) site that I managed while working at WWF-Australia. The site as outlined in the presentation was launched just prior to Earth Hour 2007, and the research informed the approach to social media engagement for Earth Hour as well as the FiMM site itself.

Human Habitat slides with notes (PDF 1.59MB)

I’ll be grabbing a copy of the full report, but I just wanted to focus on a couple of points from the Alertbox piece.

The first is this point about stated motivations of donors – what they are looking for from organisations when choosing to donate:

We asked participants what information they want to see on non-profit websites before they decide whether to donate. Their answers fell into 4 broad categories, 2 of which were the most heavily requested:

• The organization’s mission, goals, objectives, and work.
• How it uses donations and contributions.

Makes sense – this is how I’d answer too. The first point turns out to be the most important:

…an organization’s mission, goals, objectives, and work was by far the most important. Indeed, it was 3.6 times as important as the runner-up issue…

…(Information about how organizations used donations did impact decision-making, but it was far down the list relative to its second-place ranking among things that people claimed that they’d be looking for.)

On finding the donation link, the piece says:

Amazingly, on 17% of the sites, users couldn’t find where to make a donation. You’d imagine that donation-dependent sites would at least get that one design element right, but banner-blindness or over-formatting caused people to overlook some donation buttons.

Banner blindness means that using “big bold buttons” can actually have the opposite of the intended effect. (If I had a dollar for every request to “make the button bigger and more prominent” and having to argue this case…)

Having clearly labeled navigation options is also important. In my own testing I’ve found that the word “Donate” far outperforms other labels (e.g. “Support”) – another case of being clear on your trigger words for navigation.

The last point I thought worth mentioning was a point specifically on usability. For the most part usability was ok, except for one standout:

Our testing did identify some small usability problems, but the only big problem was caused by sites that used third-party payment services, which stumped some users.

My interpretation of this point is that when non-profits rely on third-party payment pages such as those provided by PayPal or their bank to take donations, that the user experience is significantly impacted.

I think this is particularly problematic for smaller NGOs and non-profits who can’t afford to setup their own e-commerce system, and who therefore rely on such third-party systems.

My experience with such systems as a user has never been good, so I advise my clients (as I did my previous employers) to avoid such systems. My argument was that the break in continuity (being directed to a different site) and the usability issues often inherent in such solutions would significantly impact donor confidence, and by extension $$ raised.

I’ve sometimes heard the argument that people trust the banks’ system better than the non-profit’s website, or that including PayPal as an option on your site actually increases donations.

But the usability issues have always been my biggest concern in not implementing such third party payment systems. (I have only begrudgingly started using PayPal more often because trying to pay by credit card in a PayPal enabled system is such an awful experience.

To date, however, it’s been only my word against the vendors’. It’s good to have some empirical evidence on the matter – so I’m looking forward to reviewing it in more detail.

Over the jump I’ll expand on a few techniques that can help increase your site’s visibility to search engines.

Information architecture

By my rough definition, information architecture (for websites) is the process of working out the best way to structure your site – in terms of sections, URLs, page layout etc. (There may be a better, “formal” definition, but hopefully this captures the essence for the purposes of this series.)

This can be a big task, and would be best informed using user interviews, site usage statistics analysis (as outlined in the last article), a content audit and more… The results of such analysis may result in significant changes to your site if it is not already well structured.

The benefit of strong information architecture is that by creating intuitive navigation, with well organised and labels links, headings and the like, will naturally benefit search engines.

Some examples:

• Clearly labeled links in your site, based on trigger words from your audience research (more below), help search engines to categorise and rank your pages based on the most likely search terms.
• Well structured headings can be mapped to the semantically appropriate HTML code which search engines use to determine information priority (more on semantic markup later in the series)
• Page titles and URLs (web page address), which also factor into search engine rankings, can also contain the keywords that people will be using to find information in search engines

As an aside, take care to keep your site structure to as few levels deep as possible – definitely less than 4. Not only is it typically easier (there are possible exceptions) for your users to find information in a well structured, more shallow site, some search engines will ignore or rank lower content more than 4 levels deep.

Trigger words

A good information architecture will utilise key words that users are looking for, known as “trigger words”, to help give people a “scent” of where to go in your site. As such, it’s important to get an understanding of the sort of words your participants’ will be looking for.

Analysing the terms people use to find your site, or to find content within your site, using Google Analytics or other site statistics tools, can help you to work out what people are looking for. So can user interviews and usability testing (more on that in a minute).

You can also use tools like Google Trends to evaluate which search terms are more popular. By choosing the right words, and using them appropriately in your site, can dramatically improve your search engine visibility (and the resultant traffic).

One small example: when I was at WWF-Australia I did a trends analysis on the terms “global warming” and “climate change” and found “global warming” was the most popular term. By making a conscious effort to use the more popular term (where technically accurate) increased traffic from this search term dramatically, becoming the #1 search traffic driver (at the time) over the space of a few months.

Using the words and language familiar to your users in menu and other navigation, as links in the body copy of your site, and even in your URLs, will not only help your users find the information they’re looking for, but will guide search engines as well.

Usability testing

Another way to improve information scent and “findability” is to carry out usability testing. There are many types of testing – formal and informal.

Usability is a big area requiring specialised expertise, so I would recommend engaging a usability specialist to advise on the best plan for your requirements/organisation. Although this may appear like an extra cost, usability testing has the potential to save money (or make money, depending on your perspective) because it can fix errors early in your site’s development, before the costs of design and development have been incurred.

That said, Silverback provides a cost-effective way to carry out informal testing if your on a tight budget, or have the skills internally to run your own usability testing.

Again, this comes back to the “ask your users” approach (mentioned in the last post in the series), rather than guessing based on your own (biased) experience or expectations. By engaging your users in testing the site, you can learn a lot about what works and doesn’t work – informing your information architecture, design and choice of trigger words. This in turn will help when a search engine crawls your site.

Pathways from where your visitors land

Thanks to the effect of search and the “long tail“, many (if not most) of your site visitors may never see your home page.

With that in mind, consider pathways from a content page – say an article, or individual blog post – to other parts of your site that are relevant, based on where they’ve landed. This can impact the design of your site considerably; in fact, some designers start designing the content pages first because of their relative importance.)

The benefit of taking this approach is simply that there are more internal links within your site to relevant content. These internal links may be used by search engines in a similar way to incoming links to your site to rank your page with relation to the words contained in the links.

This is simply another example of helping your participants, and in turn improving your site’s visibility to search engines.

And more…

There are probably lots of other ways to improve findability, and similarly to my last article I run the risk of trying to summarise a bunch of different techniques without doing any of them justice. The core principle, however, is by investing in making your site easy to use to your participants, you are investing in search visibility. It’s a win-win situation.

Related links

These are a few relevant resources that you might find handy. If you know of others, feel free to leave a comment with a pointer…

• A List Apart: Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry
• UIE: The right trigger words
• Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become

In the next installment, I’ll look at how to write search-friendly copy.

World Usability Day – Be a part of it!

World Usability Day 2008 is just 24 hours away. This is your chance to be part of a global effort spanning 43 countries and over 150 locations as we help spread the world about the importance of usability. This year’s theme is transportation, and our Sydney event focuses on the issues and challenges that face alternate forms of transportation in and around the city.

UPA Sydney has put together a varied and interesting program of presentations, discussions, workshops and activities. Our impressive line-up of speakers includes:

• Alinta Thornton (User Experience Lead, Independent Digital Media) on what it really takes to get people out of their cars
• Kevin Cox (Founder and Chief Technical Officer, Edentiti) running a discussion on how to make carpooling viable
• Alan Cadogan (Strategy Director, City of Sydney) discussing the City of Sydney’s Sustainable Sydney 2030 vision
• Michael Lister (Senior Transport Planner, Parsons Brinckerhoff) discussing bus route design – unleashing the omnibologist within
• Warren Salomon (Sustainable Transport Consultants Pty Ltd) on the major role that bicycles will play in the new transport paradigm
• You will also have the chance to view and evaluate the design and photo exhibition, participate in other workshops and discussions, and join the global transport challenge. And finally, you’re invited to help us close out World Usability Day 2008 with a social event.

This event is free and open to the public and will run from 10am– 5pm, Thursday, November 13, 2008.

Location:

University of Technology Sydney
Haymarket campus
Room 12, Level 1, Block B, Building 5
1 – 59 Quay Street, Haymarket.

Drinks to follow starting at 5:30 at Henry Henry (Henry Deane Plaza, 8A Lee St)

For more information, please visit http://www.upasydney.org or send email to events [at] upasydney.org.