I’m Speaking at WordCamp Boulder!

July 5, 2010 | Leave a comment →

I'm super excited about speaking on "DIY Usability Testing" at WordCamp Boulder coming up this weekend! I attended last year's WordCamp (in Denver) and had a great time, learned a ton, and I'm looking forward to this year. I'm honestly a bit surprised that I'm going to be speaking, but woohoo, it's true! This is actually a good example of one of my personal philosophies: "You do not have because you do not ask" (a prize to any reader who can tell me where that quote comes from). We all THINK that things are out of reach, but only because we've never stuck out our arm to see! I've talked to a lot of people about their lives & businesses and over and over and over they tell me that they got the "big deal" or landed the "big client" because they simply asked.

For me, I went to the WordCamp Boulder site, bought my ticket, and then thought "Hmm… wonder who's speaking this year." So I went to the speaker page and it basically said, "We're still looking for speakers. You interested?" Well shoot, yeah! So I submitted my idea (even though it wasn't strictly a WordPress theme) and a couple weeks later I got confirmation that they'd picked me to speak! It's going to be awesome, and I'll post slides/video up here as soon as I can. Wish me luck.

SEO Rankings does NOT = Sales

June 15, 2010 | 2 Comments →

Last year a local tree service, Fort Collins Tree Care, came to me with a problem:

  • Their website was #1 in Google for EVERY keyword they wanted
  • They were getting almost ZERO leads from this #1-ranked site

Shouldn't a #1 Google-ranked site be getting them some serious sales? Isn't SEO rankings what it's ALL about? Well, NO!

It was obvious from looking at the site that it needed an updated design (at the least), but that wasn't going to be enough. FC Tree Care's main goal was to get people to submit their information for an estimate which they could follow up on. Period.  So along with a redesign of their site, I developed the information architecture and conducted user testing to figure out in which direction we should go.

So using what we'd I'd learned through user research and developing an intuitive site flow, the site was redesigned.

The day the site launched, they started getting 2-3 requests for estimate per DAY, and now, 4 months later, they're STILL getting that many. It's become a vital part of their sales process, and their job estimator works almost exclusively on web requests.

The effectiveness of this site - or any site for that matter - isn't due to fancy graphic design (the design is nice, but nothing super special) - it's due to taking the business objectives, finding out what users wanted, and crafting the site around that desired experience.

How much of your content do people read?

June 14, 2010 | 1 Comment →

Brian Cray has a great blog post on "Estimated reading time in web design". In it he references Jakob Nielsen's article last year on how much people actually read on the web, and I was blown away. Visitors to your site (on average) read only 20% of your content!! Wow!! This is a really important metric that we all - especially bloggers and copywriters - need to keep in mind at all times! (hint: bullet points!)

In the light of this (somewhat) depressing statistic, Brian came up with a great idea: give your users an idea of how long it will take to read your content. Simple yet brilliant. If users see "Reading time: about 1 min 14 sec", they're much more likely to go ahead and read it all because, hey - what's ONE minute, right? It's also a great way for you long-winded writers out  there to reign yourselves in (please, please reign yourselves in!). Unfortunately, there's no research on exactly what the tipping point is at which people WON'T read - is it 5 min? 3 min? Who knows (although for me it's probably around 3 minutes). It also varies based upon too many factors to count, but it's still a great way to nudge users on to read your brilliant insights. Why is this important? Simple: the more eyeballs, the more influence.

(Oh, and I've implemented his great php code snippet to calculate the reading time on all blog posts - the code is included in his post on the subject)

Great UX Design = Surprise Them!

June 12, 2010 | Leave a comment →

Providing your website visitors with a wonderful experience is way more than great usability, proper information architecture, or just beautiful design. The best thing you can do on a website is to make users smile. That's good UX design. One great way to do that is to surprise users from time to time. NO - not the "Oh, what a surprise, the navigation's moved to the other side of the screen" type of surprise, I mean little things thrown in there that not even everyone will notice, but everyone who does will love.

Case in point: www.silverbackapp.com - go there and slowly resize your browser window & see what happens to the vines hanging down. Go ahead - I'll wait…

-------------

Good - you're back. Admit it - you smiled, didn't you! That's what I'm talking about. It doesn't change or add to the functionality of the site at all, but it DEFINITELY adds loads to the users' experience, and a happy user is MUCH more willing to pull out their wallet, no?  The man who designed that site, Paul Annett, has been playing around with other fun CSS trickery - check out his cool "channel 4" logo. It's another great example of how something small can be big in UX. (by the way, he's now available for freelance work)

Website Usability – Why & How to DIY

June 11, 2010 | 5 Comments →

Last night I had the honor of speaking to the Fort Collins Internet Pros group about Web usability - what, why, and how to do it yourself. It was a packed house, and I think a fun time was had by all (everyone especially liked the flames in my Keynote presentation :) ) - oh, and everyone learned a lot!  I had a lot of requests in person, via Twitter, and email to put my slides up somewhere for all to see - so here you go!

FYI - This is a Quicktime video exported from Keynote. You can click on the video itself to advance the slides. If it doesn't act right, wait a bit for the whole thing to load (it's about 15MB total) and you'll be good to go.

Should you want to download the FULL RESOLUTION of the slides in all their fiery glory, click here to download (42MB total)

I'd love to hear what everyone thought about the presentation - leave a comment!!

  • What I Do…

    • User Experience Design
    • User Testing
    • Web Usability Consulting
    • Information Architecture
    • Web Project Management

  • People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. — Steve Jobs