• What is Usability? • Why do our clients care how does it impact their bottom line? • What are some rudimentary user behaviors and usability principles? • What is most important for an SEO analyst to know?

1. Usability 101
Thanh Nguyen
Senior Usability Engineer, BusinessOnLine

2. The Agenda
• What is Usability?
y
• Why do our clients care how does it impact their
bottom line?
• What are some rudimentary user behaviors and
usability principles?
• What is most important for an SEO analyst to
know?

3. What is Usability?

6. Usable but do
you really
want to use
it?

7. Definitions
• “Usability is the measure of the ease with which particular people
can employ a particular tool or other human made object in order to
human-made
achieve a particular goal.”
- The Wiki, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability
• “Usability i
“U bilit is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user
lit tt ib t th t h
interfaces are to use.”
- Jakob Nielsen, Alertbox, www.useit.com/alertbox/20030825.html
• “After all, usability really just means that making sure that something
works well: that a person of average (or even below average) ability
and experience can use the thing - whether it's a Web site, a fighter
jet,
j t or a revolving d
l i door - f its i t d d purpose without getting
for it intended ith t tti
hopelessly frustrated.”
- Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think, 2000, p. 5

8. “After all, usability really
just means that making
sure that something
works well: that a person
of average ( even
g (or
below average) ability
and experience can use
the thing - whether it's a
Web site, a fighter jet, or
a revolving door - for its
intended purpose
without getting
ith t tti
hopelessly frustrated.”

9. Ease of Use
Aka “Finding What I am Looking For”
Aka Information Architecture

10. Fully justified text is not
as readable as left aligned
text. Usability
Users can’t predict when
the next word will start
the next word will start
Provides the
Constraints

11. Information Design Provides
D i P id
Architecture the Details
Provides the
P id th
Structure

12. Usability Provides
y
the Constraints
Information
I f i
Architecture
Provides the
Pro ides the
Structure
Design Provides the
g
Details

13. Why Do Our Clients Care?

14. Reason # 1 – Their Competitors
• If they aren t providing what their users are
aren’t
looking for, the back button is just a click
away
• A d th next link on th search engine
And the t li k the h i
results page is guaranteed to be one of
their
th i competitors
tit

15. Reason # 2 – The Site Was Built With
Business Objectives First
B i Obj ti Fi t
Web site created with business
Investment ‘A’ concerns first:
• Limited Resources
• Biggest Payback (ROI)
• Fastest Payback
BUSINESS
• Shareholder Concerns
• Customer Impact
Investment ‘C’ Investment ‘B’
• Engineers
• Competitive Landscape (# features)

16. Reason # 3 – Need For Increased ROI
• Improve customer trust and loyalty
p y y
– More return visits = increased traffic
– More brand loyalty
– Less shopping cart abandonment
• Increase customer satisfaction and productivity
• Increase sales and conversions

17. Current Client: Online Sales After 7 Months
$3,522,516
16%
+ $483,093
$3,039,423
Jul 06 ‐ Jan 07
Jul 06 Jan 07 Jul 07 ‐ Jan 08
Jul 07 Jan 08

18. Reason # 4, #5, #6, ∞ - Other Fringe
Benefits
• Usability saves time, money and increases sales:
• Increases operational efficiencies. The number of resources needed to
rework (recode/ rewrite) a product is much greater than to make changes
during the original development process.
• Increases adoption. The more usable a product, the more customers use it.
The more usable the extranet, the more customers will be enticed to use it.
• Increases productivity. Th more usable a product, the l
I d ti it The bl d t th less titime it t k t
takes to
train users and the more quickly they become productive using the product.
• Reduced development time and costs. If usability is taken into consideration
at the beginning of a design process it will reduce the time to develop the
process,
system, therefore, reducing the cost.

20. LEARNING USABILITY

21. Usability Provides
y
the Constraints
Information
I f i
Architecture
Provides the
Pro ides the
Structure
Design Provides the
g
Details

22. Usability Constraints
Buying Cycle
User Objectives
User Objectives Research
Compare
Buy
Cognitive Presentation of
f
Aspects Information
Behavior Usability Heuristics
Usability Heuristics
Memory Design Principles
Affect Organization / IA
Align

24. Where s
Where’s the search box?

25. Scan Don t Read
Don’t

26. We Scan From Large to Small

28. We Scan from Irregular to Regular Shapes

29. We Scan From Saturated to Less Saturated

30. We Expect Certain Web Items to Be
Located Accordingly
Back To Home Banner Ads
Internal Web page Links
• 258 participants (179 males 79 females)
males,
• The most common (26%) age-range was 26 to 30 years
• 95% reported using the Internet for more than four years
• 7 to 14 hours per week. They also reported using the Internet p
p y p g primarily for work/business (
y (66%)
)
Key

31. We Expect Certain Web Items to Be
Located Accordingly
Preliminary Examination of Global
y
Expectations of Users' Mental
Models for E-Commerce Web
Layouts
Michael Bernard & Ashwin
Sheshadri, Usability N
Sh h d i U bili News 2004
Shopping Cart Help
Users scan your site, which is why lists are preferred,
they improve comprehension.
Key

32. The Science of Usability is…
is
Based on research (not subjective)

33. The Science of Usability is…
is
Based on what is known to work

34. What is Known to Work
• Minimum Standards
– Ex. Text reads from left to right
• Best Practices
– Ex. Embedded links should be underlined
• Learned Conventions
– Ex A clickable logo on the top left corner of the site
Ex.

35. Nielsen s
Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Heuristics
• Visibility of system status
• Match between system and the real
world
• User control and freedom
Thanh’s Top 10 Usability Things
Top 10 Usability Things
• Consistency and standards
• Error prevention
to Know as a SEO Analyst
to Know as a SEO Analyst
• R
Recognition rather than recall
iti th th ll
• Flexibility and efficiency of use
• Aesthetic and minimalist design g
• Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from
errors
• Help and documentation

36. 1. How Usability and SEO Work Together
SEO = Qualified Traffic Usability = Conversions
Social Media

37. 2.
2 What is Good for the User is Good for SEO
• Spiders follow user behaviors
p
• Semantic latent indexing
• Google only wants to provide relevant results to the user,
therefore, their algorithms are made for that

38. p
3. Information Architecture is Important
Information
Architecture
Labels Organization Navigation
Keyword Site wide
Site wide Linking
Research Linking

39. 4. Break Up Sections on Your Pages
Usability SEO
‐ <h1>, <h2>, etc. Second most important
‐ Break up information into meaningful
p g
on page criteria
it i
chunks of information
‐ More weight
‐ Speeds scanning
‐ Used to summarize blocks of content

40. 5.
5 Put Most Important Content Above The Fold
Usability SEO
‐ Inverted pyramid writing style
Conclusion first, then 1st supporting
C l i fi t th 1 t ti
‐ Text at top of page given more weight
‐ Users scan from top to bottom

41. 6.
6 Embed Keywords Into Links
Usability SEO
‐No need to read contextual
information above or below link to
obtain meaning ‐ Increases internal link relevancy
‐ Good for accessibility

42. 7.
7 Do Not Use Frames
Usability SEO
‐ Cannot be bookmarked
‐CCannot be copied / pasted
tb i d/ t d ‐S
Search engines looks at each frame as a
h i l k t hf
‐ Breaks back button separate Web page
‐ Causes printing problems

43. 8. Breadcrumbs are Crucial
Usability SEO
‐ Automatically creates keyword focused
y y
‐UUsers see hierarchy of information
hi h fi f ti
internal link to each page on web site
‐ Serves as orienting tool

44. 9. Do Not Use JavaScript for your Navigation
Usability SEO
Ensures that people who do not have
Ensures that link metrics can be assigned
g
these technologies enabled in their
correctly to each page of the Web site and
tl t h f th W b it d
browser will still be able to navigate the
that all pages on the Web site will be
site and understand what the
indexed
navigation is communicating

45. 10.
10 A Good Usability Analyst is a Mediocre SEO-er
• Know the foundations of SEO
• A good SEO-er is a mediocre Usability Analyst

46. Recommended Books
• Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
y g
• The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
• Information Architecture by Peter Morville

47. Recommended Blogs / Websites
• BusinessOnLine
– http://www.businessol.com/usability-blog/
• Jakob Nielsen
– http://www.useit.com
• Human Factors International
– http://www humanfactors com/home/usability asp
http://www.humanfactors.com/home/usability.asp

48. Questions?
Thanh Nguyen
Phone: x223
Email: thanh@businessol.com
E il th h@b i l
Additional Resources:
BusinessOnLine User Experience:
http://www.businessol.com/user-experience
BusinessOnLine Webinar on Demand:
http://www.businessol.com/resources/webinars-on-demand