Category Archives: Design

Enterprise Information Architecture

Posted on by David

Lou Rosenfeld will be doing a road show about IA design for large organizations.

I’ll be tackling the frustrating challenge of getting a large, multi-departmental and hugely political web environment to behave like a single, unified, user-centric web site.

I wish I could have taken this course about six months ago! We are in the process of finalizing the IA for a redesign of our main web site. Crafting the information architecture for a non-profit membership association web site is as much a political process as it is a design exercise.

ClickTracks

Posted on by David

I learned about a new web traffic analysis tool, called ClickTracks, via Phil Windley’s weblog.

In a nutshell, this tool superimposes data from your web server logfiles onto your web pages to indicate percentage of traffic clicking on each link on a page. There are additional features for slicing and dicing the data but that’s the core of it. Here is a screen shot of an analysis of a couple days of traffic for High Context. (The percentages are rather low due to the fact that my rss feed is the most requested file on my site.)

Very cool and innovative software. But, how can this visual data be analyzed to improve your web site? Clicktracks doesn’t offer any suggestions on their site (they should for marketing purposes alone).

A couple of thoughts I have on how to use the results:

  • Identifying which regions of your page design tend to get the most clicks;
  • Analyzing click patterns after a user observation session (you would have to isolate the traffic on a test site so other traffic doesn’t get into the data set);
  • Visual display of data for the quantitativiely challenged.

It certainly isn’t a replacement for standard log analysis reports but it could be a useful tool for usability studies and alternate display of data. Might even be worth $495 they are charging for it.

AOL Rediscovers the User

Posted on by David

New Software (and Bosses) at AOL is a great article on the NYT web site today. It discusses how the revamped leadership of the company is moving back to being user-centric in their approach to business as opposed to investor-centric. Here is a snippet about their plans to reduce pop-up ads:

The worst fears of Mr. Leonsis and his colleagues became evident late last year as AOL’s monthly surveys found member satisfaction starting to dip. Mr. Leonsis formed a task force to look at why members were canceling their service. It zeroed in on pop-up advertisements, a longtime feature and to many a longtime annoyance. As revenue began to fall last year, AOL had increased the frequency of pop-ups, and members began to complain louder than usual.

A study showed that when the number of pop-up ads was cut in half for a group of members, their satisfaction improved notably. That led not only to a cutback in the number of pop-ups across the service, but was, according to Mr. Leonsis, the catalyst for a revolution within AOL.

The article also indicates they are trying to refocus on the supporting the community of AOL users. Sounds like they are coming back to reality.

The Click Path

Posted on by David

Found via Column Two:

DonnaM: 3-clicks to anywhere

3-clicks to anywhere

People often ask me whether they should make sure all of their content is available within 3 clicks (“3 clicks from where” is usually my first question). I can’t remember where this ‘rule’ started (Nielsen?), but common-sense would tell you that it is sensible only on smallish sites.

What if those 3 clicks are into the unknown? A user can become lost in 3 clicks as easily as 5, 7 or more.

What is far more important is to get users following the right path. When they know that they are going in the right direction, they stop counting clicks and start getting engaged with the content.

This is a good reminder to question the assumptions upon which you base your rules of thumb. Lots of good links her full entry and comments. Go check it out.

Something to Keep in Mind

Posted on by David

kottke.org on design:

Yeah, remember them? The end users? The ones that you’re building the software for? They don’t care about your damn cross-platform interoperability…they want fast, they want features to help them browse the Web, they want an interface that was designed by someone who knows about interface design, and they want a good user experience.

Found via Shifted Librarian.