What is web usability testing? DIY Usability Testing Secrets

8th February, 2010

What is web usability testing? <span>DIY Usability Testing Secrets</span>

What is usability testing?

Usability testing is a technique developed to evaluate products by testing them on users, while observers watch, listen and write down their observations. Test subjects can be anything from consumer products and documents, to websites and web applications.

What is the goal of usability testing?

Before conducting a usability test, identify your specific concerns and know what you would like to achieve. Tailor your test to meet those goals and objectives.

In a standard usability test, you may want to:
• Identify any usability problems the product may have
• Gather quantitative data on your participants’ performance
• Establish your participants’ satisfaction with the product

When should usability testing be applied?

Usability testing is vital to success, and should be incorporated as soon as a project starts. The more you test, the quicker you can identify concerns and prevent future disaster. Fixing problems early will also save you money later on, especially if your project revolves around building a website. Initiating website design changes can be difficult and expensive, so prevent rather than fix.
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Get Noticed – Social Media Applications That Guarantee Success

4th February, 2010

Get Noticed – Social Media Applications <span>That Guarantee Success</span>

We live in a world that is quickly changing in every possible way. This includes the Internet, as well as social media. From experience, we all know that today’s publishing and marketing techniques are no longer restricted to simple email messages, but now involve a large number of highly effective applications. These applications can be used on their own, or in combination.

The following social media applications have been tried, and proven to be extremely successful.

Control the conversation!

Every website and online business owner wants to stand out, and one of the best ways to achieve that goal is to engage in conversation with your following. Live up to your reputation and talk to your customers through blogs, emails, articles, etc. Share information, ideas, plans for company expansion, and whatever else may be of interest to your audience. Be specific, yet be different from the rest of your industry.

Live up to your reputation

Reputation counts as much online as it does in the real world, maybe even more. In the real world, it takes a while for news to spread, but in cyber space, all it takes is a click of a button or mouse, and praise or slander spreads like a wildfire. You, as a social media mediator, have the power to control pesky rumors by being upfront and honest about your business. Prevent social suicide by creating multiple posts stating the real facts. If necessary, add proof.
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Web Usability and Design: The Fifteen Biggest Mistakes in Web Design

3rd February, 2010

Web Usability and Design: The <span>Fifteen Biggest Mistakes in Web Design</span>

Most web designers are driven to create killer websites. They want each of their creations to be fresh, innovative, and functional, and most of all they want them spiked with the newest techniques. They know that if they don’t stand out from the pack, their work will not be noted.

Although these intentions are noble and easy to understand, in reality they may have the opposite effect. In other words, what looks good on paper, may not necessarily work in the real world.

The following is a list highlighting some of the worst mistakes a web designer can make.

1. Miscommunicating The Site’s Nature
Different audiences have different needs, but they all want to know what the site they have in front of them is all about. If a visitor cannot figure out what the site is about in the first few seconds, they will quickly move to the next site. Most users do specific searches and do not want to waste time with sites that do not fall into their set criteria.

Conclusion: Clearly state the nature of your site, and display this feature in such a way that it will attract your visitors’ attention as soon as they pull up your web pages.

2. Bad Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Your website search engine visibility can be drastically reduced by typos, plurals, hyphens, slang, and other variants of query terms. Search engines may not pick them up, and not all of your users may consider them. Especially the elderly and new Internet users may be unfamiliar with specific expressions.
In addition, wrong query terms and the misspelling of your products can confuse search engines. As result, you may go down in rankings, your customers may not find you, and you will lose important business.

Conclusion: Do not count on ‘advanced search options’ for users to find you. Do it right from the start and enter the right search terms. It will help your audience to navigate straight to you.
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4 Important Ideas In Web Content Writing That You’ve Never Thought About!

25th January, 2010

4 Important Ideas In Web Content Writing <span>That You’ve Never Thought About!</span>

If you’ve done any sort of research on writing for the web, you might think you know what this article’s going to say. Keep reading anyway … I’ll buy a digital donut for anyone that can guess all four of the points before they read them! You probably already know about tactics like keeping your sentences short and paragraphs even shorter, making sure your content is relevant and contains real, useful information, and utilizing bullet points and internal sub-headings to make content easier to mentally digest. Today we are looking at 4 aspects of writing for the web that are radically different, even fundamentally different, from the idea of writing for print publication.

New idea #1: Keyword inclusion
Print authors don’t need to worry so much about having their book found via keywords – the only place that occurs is a library. Magazine authors and newspaper journalists don’t need to worry about this at all. However, when you’re writing for the web you cannot ignore the keywords for your page. You shouldn’t use them unnaturally – but be aware of places where you can easily substitute a keyword for a related word, without the text sounding forced and contorted. Keywords help your SEO.

New Idea #2: Writing for selfish readers
On the web, users can cherry-pick information to a higher degree than ever before. If your site tries to push its own agenda too overtly, or if it is too focused on itself, readers will click off and look for something more relevant to them.

In print, the opposite is true. People read from the start to the end of a magazine article or newspaper section … and they definitely read books from start to finish! They want the author to construct their experience, and they have quite a bit of patience with the time it might take to do so.
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Google’s Real Time Search – Changing SEO Reality

25th January, 2010

Google’s Real Time Search – <span>Changing SEO Reality </span>

Google stated back in July 2009 that real-time search was going to be their greatest challenge. It seemed that Bing had knocked out the internet giant with a tiny little rock for a while, when Microsoft announced a partnership between Bing, Facebook and Twitter to deliver real-time search results for the popular social networking sites. Now Google has caught up and jumped on the wagon – and they certainly rocked it around a bit in the process! Today we’re exploring Google’s real time search.

Google’s real time search was launched early in December, but not all users would have noticed the effect immediately. When you search for a topic that is trending on Twitter or elsewhere on the web, you may get the real time search results box – or you may not. If you search for results with the ‘Any Time’ option selected, you will usually only get real time results on ultra-hot topics. If you specifically want real-time results, you can go to ‘Show Options’ (just underneath the Google logo on the left hand side of a results page), and select ‘Latest’ instead of ‘Any Time’. If you do, you’ll notice that the entire results page keeps constantly updating itself, and most results in here will be from news sites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc.

Google’s offering seems to go beyond Microsoft’s in that they say they have improved their crawlers to offer a huge range of results in real time, not only status updates from Twitter and Facebook. Another qualification to the real-time search offering is that rather than simply being a stream of data, the real-time search results are filtered of spam and other irrelevant information. Google orders the results using these criteria:
• Author quality – which is likely linked to Pagerank
• Probability of relevance
• Query popularity

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The Pain of Thought: Web Usability 101

25th January, 2010

The Pain of Thought: <span>Web Usability 101</span>

“Ooow, my brain! Don’t do that to me!”

When we’re on the web, thinking hurts. It is this principle that is behind Steve Krug’s seminal work on web usability, ‘Don’t Make Me Think!’. The nature of the net is to proliferate information, and our brains have a hard time processing all the new ways to present the same old thing. Making something usable on the web means making it obvious … and not making your visitors think too much. Today we’re looking at how to do that in practical terms.

Jakob Nielsen says that usability is comprised of five components, measured by both physical processes and a visitor’s mental state. They are:
• Learnability: Is it easy for people to figure out what they need to do to accomplish their tasks?
• Efficiency: Once they know what to do, can they accomplish most tasks quickly?
• Memorability: Will visitors remember what to do next time they visit the site?
• Errors: Do people make many mistakes on site, how severe are they, and can they easily recover from them?
• Satisfaction: Do visitors enjoy using the website?

Another key component which runs alongside usability, but is not technically part of it, is utility. Does a site give you what you need? If you’ve ever found those expired domain names pages that have none of the information Google told you was there, and a bunch of irrelevant links, you’ll understand why this is mentioned!
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How to invest your marketing dollars wisely in 2010

15th January, 2010

How to invest your marketing dollars <span>wisely in 2010</span>

Newspapers and magazines around the globe have been complaining for quite some time now that subscriptions are down. Readers are no longer interested in dragging around tons of paper, especially when they can satisfy all their reading needs online. As a result, the advertising industry has been shifting towards the Internet, following their fans.

Geoff Ramsey, CEO and cofounder of eMarketer, predicted that online marketing spending will increase by 9 % in 2010. According to Ramsey, the raise will occur due to a readjustment of the overall marketing budgets. On other words, entrepreneurs will pull out money previously spent on traditional media outlets and pump it into the digital world instead.

The online market is a big place, offering lots of choices to spend your hard-earned advertising funds. Some entrepreneurs feel they won’t need to spend any money for this because they could take care of all the tasks themselves, but we all know that this is virtually impossible. Nobody knows all the nooks and crannies of marketing, and no-one has the time to do all the work on top of running a successful business. Eventually, some of the responsibilities will need to be outsourced.
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The Effect of Yoou-gle’s Personalised Search on SEO?

11th January, 2010

The Effect of Yoou-gle’s Personalised Search on <span>SEO</span>?

Much like the Mayan Calendar (only with less hype and lead time), some companies and bloggers have been predicting the SEO doomsday with the advent of Google’s personalised search. Yes, Google rankings will now change according to what a user has searched for and clicked on before, in addition to changing along with their geographical location and other minor factors. The milder, geo-targeted version of personalised search has been in effect for some time now (with not quite so much accompanying doom and gloom!), and changed SEO tactics only mildly. Today we are looking at why the impact of the new Personalised Search is likely to be equally mild; we check out the precise impacts that the new algorithms are likely to have.

The impact of personalised search

To help quell any myths about the general impact of personalised search on the re-organisation of SERPs, here are some key facts to consider:

  • Only queries that a user has made before (or queries related to the current one) and clicked on a result from will be affected
  • Therefore, the vast majority of possible queries will be unaffected
  • Positions 1-4 have been seen to be only minimally affected by the new personalised search
  • Positions 5-10 have encountered a bit of jostling and re-arrangement, but the URLs in the top ten are mostly the same.
  • Google has been personalising results for signed-in users for some time now – the big change with the new personalisation rollout is that changes will apply to signed-out users als

This means that the core activities of SEO really haven’t changed at all. We still need to make pages accessible, design sites and content that are useful and necessary, target the keywords that people would be using to search for a company, and continue with link building activities.
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Creating Successful Brand Awareness On Facebook

6th January, 2010

Creating Successful Brand Awareness <span>On Facebook</span>

Advertising has changed a lot since it was first introduced to the public through simple media forums like radio or television. Today, merchants have to use more modern techniques such as SEO to reach their audience; this includes using the Internet and new-age Web marketing.

Organising a successful online advertising campaign is not an easy task. Everyone already has enough promotional material to deal with and nobody will go looking for more unless they are absolutely fascinated by it. So, how can you, as an eager entrepreneur, get a train load of fans without being scandalous or intrusive?

Facebook may not seem the first place you think of when you are considering launching a new, enticing marketing drive, but when approached correctly, this global social networking website can deliver amazing results. It is all in the way you charm your audience, use your apps and communicate your content. Use your Facebook page frequently, share from the heart and above all, make your readers feel like friends and family. Before you know it, your fan base will grow beyond your wildest expectations!
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The Six Cornerstones of Viral Marketing

6th January, 2010

The Six Cornerstones of <span>Viral Marketing</span>

The term “viral marketing” is not the most enticing expression in the world, and many who hear it for the first time may think they are dealing with some kind of infectious disease. In a way they are not wrong as “Viral” and “Virus” are indeed related, yet when it comes to marketing, the infection is not spreading through the human body, but rather, through the world of online advertising and promotions!

Like viruses, viral marketing strategies will piggyback on hosts and pre-existing social networks to create increased brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives. That explains a lot, yet not really what “viral marketing” really means.

Definition
Viral marketing describes any marketing and SEO technique that encourages individuals to pass on a promotional message to other users or websites, therefore creating an environment in which message can become more visible and influential.

Viral marketing counts on growth. The quicker a marketing message is passed on by users or participating websites, the more impressive the results. Like viruses, viral marketing messages need rapid multiplication to be able to survive.

A prime example of how successful viral marketing can be is Hotmail.com, a company, now owned by Microsoft. Hotmail is known around the world, because it offers free email accounts and uses its user’s e-mail notes to promote its services and advertisers’ messages. With every email that is sent, these clever ad-ons keep spreading around the globe like a mad wildfire or virus.

For those who like to compare, in the “real” world, this type of advertising would be defined as “word-of-mouth,” “network marketing” or “creating a buzz.”

The Cornerstones of Viral Marketing

What hotmail.com did was genius and very few viral marketing strategies have been able to come up with an equal or bigger success story. Is it tough? Sure! Should it stop you from trying? No!

Accept the fact that viral marketing is not always the easiest way to advertise. Nonetheless, with the help of the six basic elements of viral marketing included in your strategy, your chances for an award winning victory will definitely increase beyond your wildest dreams.
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