Known as the web's Usability Czar, Jakob Nielsen is one of the Internet's
most respected consultants, authors and commentators.
Dr. Nielsen's fame stems from his uncanny ability to note basic
things most observers miss or gloss over. Although many of his observations
on website usability amount to basic common sense, his message is
often ignored by small to medium sized business websites and by
newer webmasters and search engine marketers.
The Doctor's message is fairly simple, "On the Web, usability
is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult
to use, people leave." That is easy enough to understand. Keep
it simple and visitors will use it. Make it difficult and visitors
will find something easier to use. The popularity of the ultra-simple
Google interface and subsequent gains made by Google at the expense
of its info-heavy rivals over the past four years is a prime example.
Dr. Nielsen work should be required reading for students of website
design and search engine marketing. Similar concepts are taught
to students of architecture, creative writing and engineering, fields
that share a number of basic skill-sets with website design and
marketing.
For search marketers, there are important tips to be learned by
studying Dr. Nielsen's ideas. In the early years of the industry,
search marketing was mostly about getting Top10 placements for clients
under their chosen keyword phrases. As the sector grows in size
and sophistication, search marketers are expected to help their
clients convert the increased traffic driven by high search placements
into increased conversions and sales. In other words, getting a
client into the Top10 organic placements and effectively managing
PPC positioning is only half the challenge. Helping a site make
sales by advising on usability issues is the second side to every
coin earned by experienced search marketers.
There is a school of thought in the SEO sector that suggests optimization
should be performed for the site users' benefit as opposed to algorithmic
focused tricks and techniques. Sites that are designed to be easy
for human visitors to use are often the easiest for search engine
spiders to navigate. Better navigation options combined with search
friendly site architecture and content tend to produce strong search
engine placements and increased visitor retention. According to
the findings of the Nielsen Normal Group , usability issues have
an enormous effect on website revenues. As clients ultimately measure
the success of search marketing campaigns by their ROI, search marketers
might benefit from a quick review of some of Dr. Nielsen's basic
ideas and observations.
Usability, as defined by Dr. Nielsen is, " ...a quality attribute
that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use." In a short
August 2003 essay titled, "Usability 101: An Introduction to
Usability", Dr. Nielsen lists five quality components used
to inform site builders, webmasters and content creators through
the lifetime of unique site-designs. Each of these components leads
to an assessment of an overall user experience working from the
basic assumption that good experiences are appreciated and rewarded
by online consumers.
The first quality component noted is labeled, "Learnability
".
When a new visitor enters a website, how easy is it for them to
perform basic tasks like moving from point A to point B, gathering
information, or using embedded tools such as maps, video-players
or currency exchange calculators?
The second is labeled "Efficiency".
Once a new visitor gets used to the site, how quickly can they use
the site and its tools to perform tasks?
Third on Dr. Nielsen's list is "Memorability".
On subsequent visits to a site, how quickly can users find their
way around and use site tools and features?
The next component is labeled "Errors".
Web designers should ask how many errors do site visitors make,
how severe are those errors, and how easy is it to recover from
those errors?
The fifth component is labeled "Satisfaction".
How pleasant is the design and does the design please the user?
It is fairly easy to see how applying these simple tests of usability
might affect website traffic, visitor retention and ultimately ROI.
In a widely published quote from his essay, Dr. Nielsen bluntly
notes the importance of usability stating, "On the Web, usability
is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult
to use, people leave. If the homepage fails to clearly state what
a company offers and what users can do on the site, people leave.
If users get lost on a website, they leave. If a website's information
is hard to read or doesn't answer users' key questions, they leave
. Note a pattern here? There's no such thing as a user reading a
website manual or otherwise spending much time trying to figure
out an interface. There are plenty of other websites available;
leaving is the first line of defense when users encounter a difficulty."
Understanding these ideas is one thing. Employing them in site
design is obviously more difficult. Designers and their consultants
work in a bubble of online information and often neglect to consider
user experience. For example, many sites are designed in the favourite
colours of the designer. While a designer might like striking colours
and psychedelic graphics, it doesn't necessarily mean folks visiting
his or her site will. Similarly, site designers often know exactly
where information and products can be found within the sites they
build but the navigation options they often provide visitors serve
to push traffic to competing sites.
As noted previously, many of the major search engines have taken
Dr. Nielsen's theories to heart. Google, Yahoo, MSN and the rest
spend a lot of time conducting discrete user research and overt
beta testing, using the findings of their surveys to adapt page
and product design to users' wants and needs.
In a recent Alertbox newsletter Dr. Nielsen noted that due to their
growing obsession with site usability, "Yahoo! now makes 0.3
cents per page (equivalent to a CPM of $3)." He goes on to
note that over the past four years, Yahoo! has seen a 28% average
increase in page views each year with an increase of 15% per year
in earnings per page view. Dr. Nielsen explains, "These numbers
show that it was about twice as important for Yahoo's growth to
find out what users want as it was to increase the monetization
ratio."
In other words, focusing on the user experience over the investor
experience tends to make both groups happiest in the long run. For
search marketers, there are three important types of user experiences
to consider: the search engines, site visitors and the clients.
Common sense search engine optimization meets the needs of both
search engines and site visitors because spider-friendly navigation
and content is often the easiest for human visitors to use.
At the Search Engine Strategies Conference happening this week
in San Jose , Barry Schwartz writes an interesting report on the
Converting Visitors Into Buyers session. Points made by the two
speakers, Bryan Eisenberg and Mike Sack are well worth the read.
Savvy search marketers already know about push and call-to-action
techniques that help direct traffic from index page to product page.
Learning how live-users relate to navigation prompts and integrating
that knowledge into SEO redesign or consultation can help search
marketers boost their clients' conversions and ultimately, their
own bottom lines.
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