Here is a video Pankaj sent me of Andy dancing at the SEO Meet in Delhi, India. It’s a little choppy but you get the idea.

UPDATE: Also make sure you notice Rich McIver dancing as well. His dancing skills may, in fact, be more hilarious than Andy’s.

UPDATE 2: Apparently, this is the original source.

One of the things I like about usability is that it touches upon literally every aspect of a web business–it’s as much a
school of thought as it is a discipline. There are many little offshoots of that fact–tiny parts of your business which are partly
governed by usability (which you may often not even realize right away). And before your eyes glaze over, let me remind you that
usability always affects profits.

For instance–is your domain name usable? Things that could make a domain name unusable include:

• Having a domain which is not easy to spell. If your site should ever get featured on radio or TV, you want viewers to be able to easily type it into a browser after hearing it. Otherwise you’re going to lose a percentage of them.
• Having a non-dotcom domain. People have a tough time remembering non-dotcom TLD extensions, period. Again, you’re going to lose a percentage of potential visitors by having a
  non-dotcom.

Remember, these visitors you’re losing aren’t just visitors, they’re potential linkerati.
Anyway I just thought this was important to bring up since so many SEOs and marketers seem to be getting into domaining. Don’t forget about usability!

Why is it so difficult for me to get coverage of the college basketball tournament while I’m at work?

After navigating the mess at cbs.sportsline.com to try to watch the games over the live internet feed, (they make it almost impossible to find the link for to watch the games live.) I’ve come to find out that the video for whatever reason doesn’t even work on my Linux box, not to mention crashed my browser several times. I’ve also heard a friend say he can’t get the video working on Firefox either for Windows. He had to use Internet Explorer. HELLO? I wasn’t even aware people still used Internet Explorer.

So failing this course of action I figured maybe I could get a live scoreboard from somewhere. I figured ESPN would have some kind of live updated scoreboard for the tournament. It took me about 3 years to find the link. Then every time I closed out and tried to find it again, I could never remember how I accessed it the first time. I’ve hated ESPN’s website for years, but this really annoys me.

I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting the two links in question with a red outline in the screen shots. You still may not be able to see them. I realize there is a lot of news to display along with video and audio on these two sites, but come on guys can’t we do any better than this? How we me make a special section just for March Madness?

With just a shade under 50 submissions for the first round of the Usability Makeover Series, I had a hard time with the selection process. I ended up selecting Twiddy Outer Banks Rentals because I could tell they had already put a lot of effort into establishing user trust and usability. I think with a few tweaks the site could go from medium usable to extremely usable.

What I Like

First let me point out a few things that I really like about the site (circled in green).

1. Phone number front and center for easy access.
2. Along with the phone number, the BBB logo, testimonials, and the tagline “Family owned and operated since 1978″ add greatly to user trust. It seems like there are real people behind this site, who I could count on to take care of any problems.
3. Multiple navigation paths. The user can find a house by searching by arrival date, or browse by certain criteria.

Problems

Home Page

The biggest problem I see is a site design issue. I think the homepage is too cluttered. There seems to be several areas that distract my eye instead of my eye focusing on one or two main goals. I really dislike 3 column designs for e-comm purposes, because usually you need the extra room to display pictures. I think we can eliminate some visual distractions by blowing away the right hand column and incorporating all the navigation into the left column.

There is also too much text here for a home page. I think one introductory paragraph is good. Then if the users desire more information, they can click on a link to get there. Generally not many people read all the text on the homepage. They tend to just use it as a navigation starting point.

I had my design expert friend mock-up the page really quickly so we could see what it would like without the right-hand column. (As you can see from the previous two pictures I’m not too good with Photoshop.) This isn’t exactly how I would lay it out, but this gives an idea of what it would like with a two column design and less text on the homepage.

In my opinion this design is much more clean and usable. It takes away a lot of the “distraction” from the page.

The next main thing I would do is figure out how to incorporate the “Quick Search” and “Browse Homes” sidebar navigation items into one. I have a feeling the “Search” function is probably a proprietary software piece, but I think we could still integrate those two things somehow… maybe just by pasting the “Quick Search” box to the bottom of the “Browse” box.

Another minor issue I see is the “Quick Find”. As a visitor, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with this. I guess it seems confusing because we have “Quick Search” and “Quick Find”. Maybe they could move it or get rid of it all together depending on how many visitors use it. If they decide to keep it they should expand the search area wider. It seems to be only a few characters long right now, not very inviting for typing anything in there.

Another thing that sticks out at me is the text on the first two tabs at the top of the page, “Vacation Rental Search” and “Browse Homes”. You should always try to shoot for consistency across the entire site. I think here we should say “Search Vacation Homes” and “Browse Vacation Homes” to help make that language more consistent.

Product Page

The one thing I dislike about the individual pages for each house is the fact that there is no price “above the fold”. I realize the rates vary by week, but we should find some way to put a price in there. Either the average price or a price chart for the next 3 weeks, or whatever. My concern is that someone who comes in from Google directly to this page sees only this with out scrolling down:

The first thing I look for when considering purchasing / renting anything is price. I do understand, however, that a vacation rental house isn’t really an impulse buy, but if I’m power surfing for weekly rental houses, before I even look at the picture the first thing I want to know is whether or not its within my budget.

I see two links in there, “Rates” and “Amenities”, that take you farther down the page. According to Jakob Nielson these can have an inverse usability effect. Twiddy may want to consider rethinking that or taking that out all together and just letting the user scroll down.

Another thing I would like to see here is maybe 5 line chart just below the main picture of “vital statistics”. Price, square footage, number of beds, number of bedrooms, and distance from the beach, or something of that nature would be great. Remember people don’t like to read. Give them something that they can scan to see if the house is right for them, then they can read the details and the full amenities chart.

Conclusion

I could go on for at least 10 to 20 pages, but I don’t want to bore anybody. As you can see, there isn’t really anything revolutionary here. Most of usability is picking apart the smallest details that when aggregated account for a lot of loss in conversion rate. Will fixing the things I’ve mentioned in this article make their sales go through the roof? Probably not, in fact I may have totally missed the mark, but the bigger idea here is that usability isn’t a destination it’s a journey. If you’re not consistently moving ahead on your site testing new layouts, new placements, new buttons, different price charts, adding new features, and figuring out how to try to stay ahead of the competition then you’re basically moving backwards.

If anyone else has any constructive criticism for Twiddy I’d love to hear it in the comments!

I don’t want to sound like an old-crotchety-cynical-email-will-never-overtake-fax-machine dinosaur but I don’t think podcasts or video blogs are all they’re cracked up to be. I’m the first to admit that I may be way off the mark here, because this is a somewhat counter-intuitive argument. The newer media of internet videos and podcasts seem like the next logical evolution of the written word, but think again. For the near future at least text-based information still has distinct advantages over video and voice.
The main advantages text has are: usability and searchability.

Usability

• Text is much more scanable. Most people on the internet still don’t read entire articles. They like to scan through and pick out certain parts. This is much more difficult with long videos and podcasts. Its just not worth listening to an hour and a half podcast for 5 minutes of useful information.
• Text is quicker and can be more to the point. I think this is the reason people still text-message or instant message rather than just picking up the phone and calling someone. It’s a more convenient way of communication.

Searchability

• Search engines can’t search video or voice. If you ever want to rank for anything you’re better off being text based.

So that’s the problem. Now, what’s the solution? - All podcasts or longer length videos should highlight the important parts with text. If this post were in vlog format:

(5:37) - Interview with Brian Thibault begins.
(9:29) - Brian talks about the significance of podcast usability, and states that podcasts are not usable nor searchable.
(12:14) - Brian says the way to fix podcasts is to highlight important events.

Documenting the events of the vlog or podcast solves the problems to a certain extent by:

1. Making the podcast much more scannable. The listener can cut straight to the point by fast-forwarding to the time intervals of her choosing.
2. Offering an alternative to actually listening to your podcast altogether. Someone can get the information they require either way.
3. Adding text you make the podcast search engine friendly. You increase your chances of picking up many more long-tail searches like “+podcast +usability + searchable”.

I know this just throws a lot more work on your plate, but without it, don’t be surprised if your new vlog takes a nosedive quick.

In a report from November, 2006 Akamai and JupiterResearch concluded that 4 seconds is the threshold an online shopper is willing to wait for pages of the sites to load. In addition:

The report ranked poor site performance as second only to high product prices and shipping costs as leading factors for dissatisfaction among online shoppers.

Based on the feedback of 1,058 online shoppers that were surveyed during the first half of 2006, JupiterResearch offers the following analysis:

* The consequences for an online retailer whose site underperforms include diminished goodwill, negative brand perception, and, most important, significant loss in overall sales.
* Online shopper loyalty is contingent upon quick page loading, especially for high-spending shoppers and those with greater tenure.

Fast load speed is essential to usability and accessibility. If you can’t get your pages to load in 4 or less seconds, this study indicates you are losing a serious amount of visitors. Aside from optimizing code and image sizes there is a nifty little tool out there called MOD_DEFLATE. Mod_deflate is a module you can plugin to your apache webserver to compress the data it sends out. Most of today’s browsers uncompress the data as they receive it. If you’re using a browser that doesn’t support compressed data, then apache will send the normal, uncompressed data stream. Using this does increase the load on the CPU load on the webserver, but sacrificing CPU for faster page loads and saved bandwidth is entirely worth it.

I’m pretty sure most shared hosting accounts use mod_gzip (the older version) or mod_deflate these days, but check with your hosting provider just to make sure. If you’re running your own webserver at home, at work, or at a colocation make sure mod_deflate is installed and operational.

It’s been along time since I’ve had to install or upgrade an Apache webserver, so I’m not sure the exact procedure, but there are some good resources out there already. If you’re a web admin you probably are already familiar with installing modules for Apache, if you’re not a web admin person then you’ll probably have somebody else do it anyway. Regardless, this should help you get started optimizing your page load times with mod_deflate: Howto Forge - Howto mod_deflate.

Something that has really been “eating my head” lately, as my Indian friends say, is the fact that comments haven’t been working on several of my blogs. Of course I didn’t know it until I got an email about it, because I really don’t comment on my own blogs that much.

After you would enter a comment it would just route you to wp-comments-post.php, and the screen was blank, and no comments were coming through in the moderation queue on the backend. After some investigation I figured out what the problem is. I have my .htaccess file set up to redirect http://example.com to http://www.example.com to solve any Google url canonicalization issues, but in my Wordpress options I had the URL of the blog set as http://example.com. When someone would submit a comment, Wordpress would send the comment to http://example.com/wp-comment-post.php but my .htaccess would redirect that to http://www.example.com/wp-comment-post.php. During that redirect the comment was “lost” or the system got confused or whatever and I saw a blank page.

I was also having a problem when logging in at /wp-admin.php. After I logged in successfully I was getting routed to /%2Fwp-login%2F. I would suspect that it was the same .htaccess problem, although I don’t for sure because when I upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 it fixed this problem.

If you’re having the same problem make sure your blog URL and .htaccess match up and it should fix the issue.

This is purely subjective, but I think the hardest part of making a site more usable is resources or peoplepower. Usability takes tweaking, measuring, studying, and more tweaking. There is a limit to how much tweaking to one website you can do, but then by the time you reach that limit you’ve probably already done a redesign or added new features. Usability optimizing could literally be a full time job. How many companies can afford to have a full-time usability person? Probably not many.

A bigger problem is when a small-company has a website contracted out for some exorbitant sum. Then they get their site usability tested, and almost immediately the next question they ask is “Ok, what do we do now?”. They find out there is about 100 small changes they can implement to make their site more usable and convert more. Now who is going to make these changes? Bill the shipping manager? I don’t think so. They have to go back to the same company that developed their site and ask them to make some changes, add this, do that, and move this over here. Good luck with that, especially if you’ve already paid them. IF they do want to help, you’ll probably rack up another huge bill.

Most brick-and-mortar stores that are trying to establish a web presence have no in-house web development staff and have are on a tight budget for contracted out web work. So what is a small company to do to make their site more usable? Quite honestly I don’t have a good solution. This is something I’ve always struggled with in my in-house SEO job. I’m busy planning the next step for web sites, thinking about the next great feature that will get people talking. I don’t have anybody I can hand a list of minor changes to and say, “lets try it like this”. At this time the only thing that has worked for me, is hiring a part-time employee / full-time college student that has web design experience to make changes on a development box. After we decided that we should go ahead and make the changes live, then it goes to our full-time programmer to make it happen.

I guess my point is here, that while we want to always be moving forward with our website, don’t forget to go backward and optimize usability and accessibility for the existing website. I do realize many companies don’t have the resources to make this happen, but the only thing I can tell you is that you have to spend money to make money. Hire someone whose sole job is to tweak and test the website. This will take the grunt work out of it, while you’re busy doing more important things, like masterminding your future website strategy.

Increasing conversion rate can be a daunting task that requires a delicate touch and some expertise, not to mention some trial and error. Don’t be afraid to fail at it - just remember to keep trying until you succeed. If you work hard at optimizing your site, you really can double or triple your conversions. That said, I put together this quick and dirty list to give you a few changes you can make to get started optimizing your e-commerce site for better usability and more conversions.

1. Remove clutter

Cluttered web pages are one of the most common mistakes on the Web. For some reason people like to jam all their information on one page. Clean things up by removing distracting, useless images, charts, or text. Provide users with information as they request it. You don’t need to put it all in front of their face at one time. The path you want the user to take should be clear from the homepage. When you stack up text and images, it dilutes the goal message, and can confuse users. Less is more!

2. Remove ads

If you’re trying to get people to buy a product or a service and you’re running Adsense or another ad system on your site you may be making a big mistake. These ads provide exit points for your traffic (and potential customers). Keep your customers focused on the task at hand. If they leave the site through an ad, “Great you made $.25,” but just don’t assume that person will hit the back button or ever return to your site. You may have just lost yourself a sale.

Not to mention, ads look extremely unprofessional on e-commerce sites. They are fine for blogs with no other means of monetization, but if you’re selling something do yourself a favor and leave the ads off.

3. Offer more payment options

I generally recommend offering 3 forms of payment for e-comm sites. Taking credit card is obviously the first choice. I think two good alternatives to offer are PayPal and BillMeLater. BillMeLater gives you the money right away and then just bills the customer at a later date. This is great for sites that target demographics who may not have credit cards or checking accounts. Adding BillMeLater and PayPal makes sure all bases are covered.

4. Show shipping costs upfront

How many times have you been ready to purchase an item online only to get to the last step of the process and find out shipping was $15.00? Shipping charges are already a huge deterrent to buying online. Why make it a bigger problem by hiding them?

Be honest and upfront with people about extra charges. When hidden fees are applied, it can anger the customer, and, worse, cause them not to trust you. ( Loss of trust is a loss of sale, and most likely a loss of any future sale.) Put the shipping charges on the shopping cart page before the customer clicks checkout.

5. Sales, Promotions, Free

Many practices from traditional retail simply don’t apply online. Running sales, however, is one that does. Incenting customers to buy is a pretty broad and well documented topic. But the basic principle still applies: everybody loves a sale. Experiment with different promotions to up your orders. Also experiment with different wording and calls to action. I recently tested a category on an e-commerce site called “specials”. We renamed the category “sales” and click-throughs and orders went up noticeably.

6. Sales copy

Strong sales copy is a must. Check out The new SEOBook sales letter by Brian Clark. Your copy doesn’t necessarily need to be a “sales letter” per se, but Brian does an awesome job explaining the benefits of buying the book to the visitor. I am by no means a sales copy expert, but I do know that with more expensive products and services you need more than a simple description. Explain why the potential buyer absolutely needs this product, and needs it now.

7. Stronger calls to action

Evaluate your calls to action on a site-wide level. I just bet you find some great content or images that really pop, but lack a call to action. You may have come up with some outstanding copy about how special your service is and then left the reader hanging by not telling them to take the next step. You’re wasting your efforts if you aren’t telling your customers what they should be doing. I’m a fan of putting the word “now” on many calls to action because it implies a sense of urgency: “Order your money saving guide now!” This is just one example. There are many ways to form excellent calls to action. Find one that works well for you and stick with it.

8. Add reliability Indicators.

This another small step that can gain a customers trust. Consider adding brand-recognized logos “above the fold” on your site, such as the Better Business Bureau, and HackerSafe. Of course you have to actually join respective company’s services, don’t just put the logo up.

Security concerns such as using SSL to encrypt data are huge for web shoppers. Calm their fears by adding a security logo (maybe “Secured by Verisign”?), and a security policy to your policies page.

9. Offer expert reviews

Another way I like to drum up sales is by adding “expert” reviews / analysis of products. Sometimes a product description just isn’t enough. Customers want to know if this product is right for them. Offering fit and feel analysis, care tips, information about what the product should used for, how it performs under certain conditions, etc. can really help sell. Just be honest, most customers can see right through the B.S. if you tell them how great everything is. Don’t be afraid to list some cons too. Customer’s will appreciate your advice and your company’s willingness to share information (transparency).

10. Add another navigation path

Adding several navigational paths to a desired goal is usually a good idea. Of course, you should have some logical categories that products or services fall under. You may also want to consider adding a search field. Some people don’t like to browse if they know exactly what they’re looking for. If you can also figure out a way to monitor customer searches and search results to keep track of what people are actually looking for on your site, you can get clued into your customers behavior and buying patterns. From there you can fill in holes in your product offerings if there is a pattern of searches for something that you don’t offer.

11. Test. Measure. Rinse. Repeat.

Okay, so this one isn’t quite “quick and dirty.” But trial and error is one of the foundations of usability testing. Try out different elements, such as different headings, one at a time. Then measure the effect through an analytics program. You should test one variable at a time so you know what change caused which effect. If you have some kind of multivariate testing program that can tell you what the effect of each change was, then by all means use it - its much faster that way. Keep whittling away at different page elements (”add to cart” buttons, headlines, page copy, image placement, etc.) until you are satisfied with the results.

An effective way to split-test is to point the same pay-per-click ad at 2 different pages, one with with your changed page and one with the current page to see if your changes were effective.

(Disclaimer: If your site is paying your mortgage you may not want to just go diving into this head first. Use mock-ups and test changes on a development web server rather than your production box, and please don’t just change your site all at once. Roll changes out one by one.)

Other Resources:

• Twelve steps in writing a truly compelling sales copy
• Effective Site Search Whitepaper (PDF, 422k)
• 37 Calls to Action for your website
• Building Better Category Pages

I found a what looks like a great resource when doing competitive keyword research for “web usability“. (By the way, it doesn’t look like I’ll ever rank in the top ten for this term). I came across usability.gov a US Department of Health and Human Services website dedicated to usability research. The sub-result for usability.gov is their usability guidelines. I thought, “Wow, what a gem! How did I miss this for so long?” I clicked on the link to download the PDF only to bring my computer to a griding halt. I had to restart my firefox and AIM and then reopen the site and download the PDF to my computer. I didn’t realize it was a 161 megabyte PDF. Aren’t PDFs supposed to be small and portable? I know I’ve seen at least 300 page books in a just a couple megabyte file. Come on usability.gov what’s going on here?