Search with Design

My favorite quote of the day:

“I can continue my legacy of creating fiendishly complex spreadsheets and then leaving before training anyone it.

It’s like being a superior alien intelligence and leaving complex machines laying around populated planets”

Not all stats all created equal. And Time On Page is one of those.As a designer, I’m always looking for ways to improve my work and continually that has been directed at delivering quality designs that answer the audience’s questions and provide intuitive design for navigation, content and images. One way to examine your effort is to monitor time on page. But, agh, the TOP stat is so misleading. So for example, I redesign a section of a site to create an easier experience for the user offering more obvious navigation, easy to digest content and a simple tour-style click thru button on the same place on each page. Viola! Great design, great implementation, and yet, the client argues, nothing was gained because the overall time on the page decreased. Is this a valid argument, or could I be right, that a better design makes content more consumable, quicker?

I hate the answer, both are right. So lets look at when time on page counts and when its worthless.

It counts

Flash sites - most flash sites are designed as one page, housing all the content and media in one browser-sized block. The greater the time on this page is also seen as the greater the experience. You could however add tracking to items that could be clicked on to better dissect the audience.

Trailers / Tutorials / Flash Demos - Here time does matter. How far did the visitor get? It’s much like the shopping cart effect. Watch to see where they dropped off, then improve that section of the demo. This was studied by Sesame Street creators and well documented in Malcolm Galdwell’s book, The Tipping Point.

One-page sites - This is close to, but not synonymous with Flash sites. This included ajax sites, and clever javascript sites as well as a good portal with the latest trend of the panel boxes (See yahoo.com as an example)

Checkouts / Registrations / Searches - But it’s the opposite here, you want less time, not more. Time here is a factor of how quickly you can process a request. Think of user errors, indecision, pages in the process, render and download times, authentication of credit cards, server loads, etcetera. If the world was buying your book on your eCommerce site, how many could you process in an hour?

It doesn’t count

Established websites - if you are already receiving traffic and you want to make a change and detect the effectiveness of the new design to the old you need to pick large metrics, like conversion actions not time on pages. When you make a large enough change it become impossible to compare apples to onions.

Advanced web surfers - with Cable internet access and not dial-up, with tabbed browsing now on IE7 and obviously on Firefox, along with “restore session” you can hang on to a site not via bookmarking it, but just tabbing to it, and tabbing off to anything else and tabbing back. I’m notorious for a tab bar full of sites I’ve visited over the last 48 hours. This would swing the metric with just one visitor like me into a different world sending the complete wrong signal to the designer and client alike.

Blogs / News articles - traffic is measured by uniques and total visits, or more basically, page requests, or page renders. If I’m buying ads, I want to pay for the page request, not for the 3rd 30 second time slot on a popular news article. Blogs are basically just creative content. The total time alloted to digesting an article depends on a great number of factors, including how bright your audience is, how tiny your text is, how distracted the reader is, if you content is work safe, and on and on. Time means nothing compared to total page views. How big is your audience, not how slow.

Pages with the print button - If you can print it, you can read it offline. Again, blogs, news, even business sites that have details about their product. I don’t mind reading online, but there are some people who can’t stand staring at text illuminated by a big dim flashlight pointed directly at their eyeballs.

I left thinking I didn’t list everything - that I might have to come back and add a few more. But basically, I’m also left trying to defend TOP as a stat, but not as the standing metric. In any design process going forward I will devote some attention up front to whatever stats I’m looking increase and concentrate on getting buyoff and commitment to those metrics to build better designs.

So I opened a free Stumble Upon account awhile back. And then forgot my password.

No problem. Forgot password link, type in email, boom, inbox(1) new message. But it’s a temporary password. Something I’ll copy and past once, and then immediately change to something I’ll remember. Done, right? Wait for it, wait for it. Nope. Wrong.

Here’s what SU has to say:

“How do I change my password?
Select Change Password from the dropdown meny on the StumbleUpon toolbar (a small, inverted triangle indicates the location of this drop-down menu). Stumbleupon recommends that for security reasons you should choose a password unrelated to those that you might use for Banking or e-Commerce transactions.”

WHAT!?! Download the toolbar? Are they kidding? What drunken CTO dreamed this gridlocked downloading traffic jam up? But no, it’s about buy in. About guilt. About them telling me, remember your password, or get our ugly step-daughter and then, if you want your Princess Password back, download the TOLLBAR, the Toilbar, the toilet-part, the troll-grrarr!

Thank you Stumble. Clever. But poor. Tricks don’t get customer’s to treat you better. Open email to SU tech department. Sure, more troll-grrarr downloads. But is it working to build screaming fans? Honestly, I’m just curious.

Well, since my partner-in-design has taken over reporting on new Google features this week (thanks Luke!) I’ve decided to try out a new series of posts responding to some topics from Search Engine Strategies New York.

Recently, a client emailed me a list of ‘notes and things to try’ which he received from one of the attendees of SESNY.  He asked me what he could be doing with each note that would help the optimization of his website. Rather than waste the hour or so I spent putting together the answers on one person, I thought I’d spread the responses around for the benefit of all.  I’ll try out a few of these posts and if it catches on, I’ll make it a series for the next few weeks (there are 39 points on this list in front of me!).  So without further introduction…
Note #1.   We can use Google geo-targeting ads to get an extra line of ad text that lists city and state in the ad.

To clarify the note, let me first explain that if you use geo-targeting in this way, Google will place a line beneath your ad denoting where your business or branch office is located.   Geo-targeting is not quite the right word, and ‘local search’ would probably be more appropriate.  You can see what I mean at the right.  Notice how the AOL ad doesn’t specify a location, where the Athena Capital ad does.

(As a side note, AOL is using half their title line to showcase the word Denver.  You could say that they’re not taking advantage of local search, but I would guess their ad gets more clicks when someone is looking for something in ‘Denver’)

So, where would I recommend using this kind of tactic?  Any industry where being local might be an advantage, or help to differentiate your business.  For instance, if I am a searcher looking for ‘motorcycle parts’ I might be wanting a local shop to help me select and install parts, or I could be looking for an online store.  If your ad doesn’t tell me you’re local, I’m going to assume that you’re national and click or not click depending on what I need.  In this case, the local store would lose business to people needed someone local and would gain excess (untargeted) clicks from shoppers needing a national store.

Of course, if you have a national business that is commonly mistaken for something local, this will compound the problem.  For instance, if you offer national foreclosure listings, but people looking for help with their foreclosure commonly click your ads looking for assistance, adding a locality tagline will only increase the number of untargeted clicks.

I would definitely recommend taking a careful look at which keywords these pros and cons could affect before enabling a local search campaign.  Make sure you are using them wisely.

so there.

Its the same as My Google, which I don’t use. So perhaps this is an effort to convert non-My Google users by pegging the popular “i” in front of their logo. iGoogle’s first noticeable difference is the tabs.

Now you can have tabbed tabs if you are a power firefox user. Or, if you are a superhero firefox user, you will already have set your default homepage to a folder not a single webpage so that on each load of Firefox the browser pulls up all your favorite and necessary websites.

The other trendy addition are themes. Each pre-built theme allows a bit of personalization to the otherwise sterile and milky homepage that is synonymous with Google. The theme changes the font color, heading colors and backgrounds, and main portion of the screen where the Google search box and your admin controls live. This portion has always been my gripe with My Google iGoogle, too much real estate given to their search box, and not enough to my selected content and information. Smart product development though, it keeps Google literally front and center above all your stuff.

I’m heavily anticipating a mac announcement about iapple.com.

Every day I stare at 1 Tens. You know what I mean.

But what if, instead of doing 10 of the same thing, I did 10 different things once a day for a month.

Think of what you could accomplish. A mile a day. A chapter a day. A new recipe, a compliment, an email to an old friend, an hour extra of sleep. Whatever it would need to be. But 10 of them. What would your ten be? And to avoid just pausing at that question, and then continuing to read what I’ve typed, think of the first three, and jot them down. Anywhere.

1 blog post a day. 1 mile a day. 1 extra glass of water.

When I thought of writing this, I thought it would be easy to come up with ten ones, but look at my shabby list I just typed, “1 extra glass of water?!” What’s wrong with me? Besides training for a marathon (still 4 months away) it’s much easier to think of 10 things than to even write down 3. Perhaps its the process of commitment we associate with writing, but I felt as if, in a week if I haven’t blogged each day I’m gonna have an angry comment about what a flaming liar I am. Perhaps fear and guilt are good motivators, but only superfically, and only temporarily. However, personally, the process of commitment can turn into a pattern that then turns into a practice and if I’m ever lucky enough, a theory or theorem (I’m not sure which).

So, what are your 10? At least post one, come on, I won’t hold you to it, but I might comment back on your blog.