Here are a few tips based on our experience of user testing mobile ecommerce sites:

Meet expectations

Don’t disappoint visitors by removing key functionality or services they have experienced on your main site, e.g. reducing the delivery or reservation options. You may have to rethink the design to achieve this, but rethink rather than reduce.

Context of use

Many users have told us that they use their smart phones to check prices when out shopping or to look at reviews of a product. By understanding customers’ behaviours you can support them, e.g. barcode scanners for quick product price comparisons. Ask yourself what you can provide visitors in the different situations mobile opens doors to.

Data entry

“I’d give up now and go on the computer” is what we hear from users faced with too many input fields. Look for ways to reduce the hassle of data entry whenever possible, e.g. the facility to store details to make it easier next time, and providing options with check boxes wherever possible.

Data allowance

“Going back through so many pages is OK on WiFi, but what if I was using my data allowance?” Don’t frustrate customers with unnecessary page loads. Think about interactions that will be most economical.

Security

We find users tend to worry more about security when transacting on mobile sites. Provide appropriate reassurance and link to more information.

One account

A customer’s trolley and address details should be saved no matter which device they login on. Customers might add products to the trolley on a mobile but complete the transaction on a PC.

User test

Do it early and iterate. Paper prototypes, wireframes, interactive prototypes and live sites can all be tested. You’ll learn lots about your customers’ behaviour, how to improve their experience and increase conversion.

Want to know more?

If you’d like to know more about testing on mobile and tablets then why not get in touch with us – drop us an email (more@bunnyfoot.com), a tweet (@bunnyfootsays), whatever suits you.

Card sorting. It’s really as simple as it sounds, but one of the most effective tools in user centred design to understand how your customers navigate to structure your content and name your sections.

I’m going to use this blog post to try and give you an overview of card sorting – what it is, how we use it and why you should make it a part of your next design project.

Why does it matter?

Let’s take a look at an example:

Thom is a handyman and it’s his first time he’s been asked to install a burglar alarm. A friend has told him to choose “Safe as Houses” alarms, so he went to their site. He sees a list of alarms, arranged by code number with a heap of technical information. He just wants to know if it’s suitable for a domestic installation and if it fits his budget!

You see, the problem with building a site structure from within the company is that you know your own products too well. The structure you present to your Managing Director is very different to the one the customer would produce. To provide the best customer experience – navigation, structure and usability must be based on customer needs.

What actually is card sorting then?

Right, yes, back to the main point: card sorting is a user testing technique that splits your top content out onto cards, ready for your customers to sort it into categories that are intuitive to them.

The basic process of card sorting is as follows:

1. you do an audit of the key content that will be on your site
2. you create a card for each section
3. you present the stack of cards to a participant and ask them to sort them into groups that are meaningful to them.

You can do this:

• with a person present to capture qualitative data (moderated),
• online, or without a person present (unmoderated),
• with set headings (closed)
• allow the flexibility to make their own groups and headings (open)

Moderated, open and unmoderated online card sorting styles

How many cards should you use?

Given that the point of the card sort is to see how users would expect your content to be organised, each card represents a piece of this content.

We aim to have no more than 70 cards to sort if the items are easily understood, familiar items or 40-50 if the items for sorting are more technical and less familiar for participants.

If you have a lot of pages or site content that are spread across several levels of pages you might find it more suitable to sort 2nd or 3rd level landing pages rather than the deepest level child pages.

What to put on your cards

Typically, a card sort card will have a label that represents an individual piece of content (e.g. the name of a page) and often a short, non-technical description of the item on the back.

Depending on the nature of the items that need sorting and the audience doing the sorting, you might like to use pictures instead of or alongside the labels. Using pictures also has obvious benefits when testing with participants who have various levels of proficiency in a primary language. This might include participants of different nationalities, participants with learning difficulties or even child participants.

What does it all mean?

The power of card sort analysis is finding the correlations between participants – which cards are consistently grouped together, which are sometimes grouped together and which are never grouped together across all of your participants. These correlations can then be used to derive a proposed content structure for your site based around the way that your client’s users see the content belonging together.

What type of card sort is best?

Choosing the right type of sort for you will largely depend on the requirements and constraints of your project. If, following previous user testing sessions, you also have a fixed high level site structure and you wish to know how to organise content within it then a closed sort would likely be the most appropriate for you. However, if every option is open to you and you have no constraints as to the organisation of the content on your site then an open, moderated sort will offer you a wonderful opportunity to organise that content around your users’ expectations.

A good strategy for card sorting is to plan for two sorts at different stages in your project development plan.

The first would be an open, moderated sort and would take place once you had worked out what content you will have on your site. Conducting open, moderated sorts with 10 or so participants provides you with an opportunity to not only find out how to organise content, but also to find out if that’s even the content users would want to see on your site.

Once you feel confident that you have the right content and a user-centric means of organising it a second, closed and unmoderated sort should be conducted to verify the appropriateness of your site structure and content organisation. This sort would present 20 or 30 participants with each of the groups that you came up with following the first sort and ask them to place your content cards within those groups.

It’s often the case that a vague label or technical description has led to a card being difficult to group, resulting in inconsistent categorisation (evidenced by a weak correlation with any particular group). A round of closed, moderated sorting gives a further opportunity to gain insight into users’ understanding about those cards and reveal what needs changing about them in order for them to be easier to categorise.

So there you have it – card sorting in a nutshell.

Hopefully having read this post you’ll feel that you have a better understanding of what card sorting is (the sorting by participants of cards that represent content on your site into groups), why it’s a vital technique (you give your users the chance to guide the organisation of content on your site into a structure that is meaningful to them) and how and when you should go about it (it isn’t just for website testing, you can do it for in store layouts, apps, tablets and more).

Want to know more?

As ever, if you have any question about card sorting or would like to find out more specific details about how you could include within your next project then please do get in touch and ask away. Either drop Eleanor an email (eleanor@bunnyfoot.com) or grab her attention on the tweet-o-sphere @bunnyfootsays– we always love to hear from people so make our day and say hello!

Further reading

Card sorting: a definitive guide
Donna Spencer and Todd Warfel, April 2007

Card sorting: How Many Users to Test
Jakob Nielsen, July 2004

Card sorting: designing usable categories
Donna Spencer, April 2009
Rosenfeld Media. ISBN: 1-933820-02-0

Once a month they hold events and Bunnyfoot had the pleasure of sponsoring the July event on the theme of UX and ROI.

The event sold out in 48 hours and the crowd were treated to the following talks.

Joe Leech – CX Partners
Joe kicked off and reminded us that improving conversion rates is much tougher these days and as an industry we need to be justifying the work we are do. Using metrics is one way to do this.

For a metric to be useful we need to understand the following:

1. Timescale
2. Benchmark
3. A reason to be reported
4. An associated action

But what’s a good conversion? Well, it depends…

How much can I expect my metrics to improve by? Again, it depends…

And this set the scene for the rest of the evening’s talks, proving ROI for UX depends on many different factors…

Jamie Knight + Lion from the BBC
Jamie gave us a timely reminder that as we are an ageing population, accessibility considerations will become even more important. And we’re not only talking about blindness and impaired motor skills; Jamie discussed the importance of designing for mild disabilities e.g. forgetting your glasses or cognitive impairment due to tiredness.

John Mildinhall – Electronic lnk
John Mildinhall talked about the importance of ‘value for money’ rather than ROI and outlined the ‘Value for money framework’:

• Economy: The raw materials – cost
• Efficiency: How well can you convert these raw materials to do the job
• Effectiveness: How well did you solve the problem – outcomes

Using a low, medium or high score for each of these can indicate whether a project proved to be good value for the client and the business.

Ian Worley – Morgan Stanley
To further prove the point that UX and ROI is a complex one to consider, Ian Worley made the point that we can do the best work for the client, but if the product is then built poorly, or the competition beats them to it, the ROI could still be poor which makes proving the ROI very difficult.

Ian took us through many examples of design projects his teams had worked on where the user experience had undoubtedly improved as a result of the work. But increased conversions didn’t always equate to higher margins. Also, what kind of return are you looking for, is it conversions, basket value or satisfaction with your brand?

ROI can be demonstrated and depends very much on each company and each project. With this in mind Ian left us with the following advice:

• Surround yourself with talent
• Get the right process
• Get the right clients
• Balance the needs of the business with those of the user
• And finally, care. Do the right thing for your customers

We won’t argue with any of that.

Thanks to all speakers and organisers for making the night such a success.

You can also read highlights on Twitter under the hashtag #uxroi

Nick

I wasn’t just there to sell our service. Yes, I wanted people to know we exist and end the sleepless nights I used to have over design, but mostly I was  interested in the challenges marketers face these days. When we were asked “what is usability” our first reaction was to ask “well, what do you do and I will tell you how we can help”. This is what we learned:

You want to reduce drop outs across channels

There are so many channels these days, marketers are keeping their fingers crossed that customers are able to make a smooth transition between all communications to a sale. To add to the complication, there are online and offline teams and it’s just so hard to keep focus.

Personas are a tool which will help you focus on the client across teams and across the business. User testing, starting from multiple entry points, will help you to find improvement areas that will make the journey smoother for the customer, and get them to that shopping basket and beyond!

Your are nervous about entering international markets

We heard a few people talk about their thoughts and feelings about being in charge of launching into a new market. It’s understandably nerve wracking! You want to make this a success the first time, especially as the costs will be high.

International testing is not as hard as it may sound. We have built up a network or partnerships to make in country testing quick and simple. Technology even allows us to test internationally from right here in the UK.

You are looking for advice on how to design apps

We expected quite a surge of people being set to launch apps and mobile sites, but what we found was that many marketers are waiting for best practice to emerge as they want their app to be immediately adopted.

Make your own best practice with mobile usability testing. Start simple with some sketches and wireframes and test at every stage. You will find that your audience not only validate your designs, but bring in new ideas for features they would like.

Intranets are the biggest, scariest projects you face

I found a guy in the aisle, looking absolutely bewildered. When I asked what was wrong he told me he had an intranet to build and he had no idea where to start looking for help. Just the amount of people who had to use it, their abilities, their different roles. How was he going to make sure it was useful enough to be adopted?

I  talked to him about all the work we have done on intranets. How we have helped with the information architecture, facilitated the workshops, worked with the designers and tested at every stage to make sure it would be adopted. Well…I thought he was going to cry with happiness. That’s the look I aim for at these shows!

There is more of a need for user centred design than ever

Marketers have more responsibility than ever, and yet more demands on them to provide bigger and better experiences.

Although usability and user centred design have been around for over 10 years now, it’s still a service that surprises and delights marketers when they hear about it. Knowing there is a support for structuring content, language and design before it gets to market takes a huge weight off the marketing shoulders.

There’s still a lot of work to be done on communicating our service to the world. The massive range of services we offer are usually far too great to distil into a quick pitch – that’s why we want to hear from you! Drop us a line, let us know what keeps you awake at night and I am sure we can help.

They are a key part of ensuring you stick to your user centred design principles. This post will hopefully give you a bit of an overview of what a persona is and isn’t, how we’ve used them and why you should too. There are also some suggestions for further reading at the end if you’d like to get your teeth sunk a little deeper into this topic.

What are personas?

To the main point then and probably the question you’d most like answering: what are personas?

In essence, personas are simply short profiles of archetypal users. They will have a name, age, gender, probably a bit of a family or home context and, most importantly a set of motivations and goals for using whatever service is being designed for their use.

Take a moment to think of your Facebook profile.

That has a name, a picture and maybe a bit of a background on where you work and what you do. Most importantly, it also includes your status and wall posts which are likely to betray your expectations, frustrations, hopes, motivations and apprehensions about your daily life.

A persona is basically a bit like a Facebook profile for a representative, typical user, where all the status updates relate to the context within which the new website, service or product, is going to be used (e.g. their job, their home, their plans to book a holiday, etc).

What are they not?

Ah, now we get to the interesting stuff. We’ve come across lots of myths and misunderstandings about personas over the years – all of them reasonable assumptions but sadly missing the point (and thus the value) of personas.

The most important thing to state when discussing what personas are not is that personas are not made up.

For a persona to have any value in influencing and guiding the design process it is imperative that they are based on data collected about real users.

This data can come from a number of sources –  interviews and observation sessions with existing and potential users or even carefully crafted surveys, user testing sessions and also the experience that project stakeholders have had with customers.

These experiences of real users are collected and collated with the intention of finding patterns of behaviour and/or motivation that can start to describe different “types” of user. Each type of user then goes on to form a persona – an entity with a name, age, context and the behaviours and motivations that define that particular user type.

Another common misconception that needs addressing is that personas are not market segments with a name and photo.

Market segmentation is a valuable tool within the marketing profession for categorising a market by demographic and forecasting likelihood to buy and, therefore, the commercial viability of a proposed product or service.

Personas, on the other hand, help inform what it is that this proposed product or service should actually do, based on the recognised needs of the user.

Let’s try and put this within a real-world context: Imagine a high street store has conducted some research and discovered 30 million people in the UK might like a new mobile app to help them with food shopping.

You are no doubt encouraged that your idea is so popular however without knowing the context within which your potential users go about buying their food, how they struggle to buy fresh food and what problems they need a mobile app to solve. There is little to inform the design of this service to ensure that it is relevant to the users’ needs and, therefore, stands a chance of being adopted by those millions of eager beavers.

What are personas used for?

In essence, personas are used as a key focus in user centred design. But, in reality, they can go a lot deeper than that.

Involving key project stakeholders in the development of personas can have a hugely positive impact on the involvement of those stakeholders within the project. Helping to write the personas gives them an opportunity to share their experience and expertise and become engaged in the design process in a way that they can easily relate to. This is particularly beneficial when the project in question is internal to an organisation – for example the development of a company intranet – as engaging users throughout the design process can aid adoption of the new system by producing advocates for it within the target user group.

However, perhaps the most frequent use for personas is to help guide the design of a product, service or solution, keeping the needs of the target users at the forefront, and not the ideas of the designers and developers.

Having design teams refer to the needs, motivations, behaviours and constraints of agreed personas help ensure that content, interfaces and the like are designed to satisfy those users’ requirements. Moreover, referring to these personas can help overcome disputes within design teams or between stakeholders over particular design decisions. Rather than the dispute being focussed on the wants and the needs of the stakeholders, the design decision can be assessed against the needs of the persona – would making this decision be of benefit or detriment to “Thom”? If it makes Thom’s life better, keep it in. If it’s going to make Thom’s life harder it gets dropped.

What if we have more than one type of user?

When there are more than one types of user identified multiple personas can be created. Depending on what is suitable for the solution being designed (and on available resources), you might find that it is appropriate to build several interfaces or pieces of content, etc, to address the different needs of each persona.

Ideally, however, a primary persona would be selected – whose wants and needs are shared by most or all personas and are therefore always satisfied first. Just because Thom prefers fresh food, doesn’t mean you can’t have a dried food section to meet Sally’s needs, but the fresh food emphasis will be stronger.

Why you should use personas

Personas are fantastic tools to be used in the user centred design of any product, solution or service. They help to create cohesion within and between teams of designers and stakeholders and they help to keep the focus of design on the needs of real users which, in turn, helps to ensure that the product you design is relevant and has the best chance of success.

The key to successful personas really comes down to two things – for personas to be successful:

1. They need to be realistic – based on real data from real users, gathered through real encounters such as interviews and observations.
2. Everyone in the project team – from designers, users, managers – needs to buy in to them. Having their involvement in the creation of the persona from the beginning will really help with this and can go a long way to raising the credibility of the personas and its value as a reference point for making difficult business and design decisions.

Want to know more?

If you’d like to know more about personas (and believe me, there is plenty more to be learned!) then why not get in touch with us – drop us an email (more@bunnyfoot.com), a tweet (@bunnyfootsays), whatever suits you.

Or, if you’d like to do some lunchtime reading, here are some useful articles from the web:

http://www.uie.com/articles/personas/
http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_personas/index.html
http://www.cooper.com/journal/2002/03/reconciling_market_segments_an.html

Finally, for those of you who really want to get further into this topic, here are some great books for you to get your hands on:

About Face: The essentials of user interface design
Alan Cooper 

The inmates are running the asylum
Alan Cooper

The User Is Always Right
A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web
by Steve Mulder with Ziv Yaar

There are many types of mobile usability testing rig, how do you choose?

When you are comparing mobile usability testing solutions, here are a few things to look for to achieve the best results:

• Is it natural? Can it be held in one hand, for long times, without an obscured view, etc
• Is it adaptable? Does it allow for different mobile types – Smartphones, Blackberries, Keypads, Sliding, etc
• Is it personal? Can you use the participant’s own technology so the handset usability doesn’t interfere with results?
• Is it the full experience? Are you recording screen, face, fingers and comments to get a complete picture?
• Is it viewable? Can it be recorded and even watched live?

Our first iteration: “Look, but don’t touch”

Verdict 1/10: Quick and simple to test the initial stages of layout and language, but not good beyond this stage.

When mobile testing started, we used an emulator on screen to track designs just as we would a website. This is cheap, simple and effective for eye tracking and giving proof of information architecture and labelling. It can be recorded, viewed remotely and even eye tracked. However, it just isn’t natural. You’re not getting an idea of how the handset itself will affect the usability and not capturing the experience of trying to complete the task on a small screen with fingers and thumbs.

Second iteration: Getting heavy

Final score: 4/10: Lighter materials and more grip on the clip and this setup would be a winner.

For our first truly mobile rig, we clipped a soft-clip poseable camera to the top of any phone, focused on the screen. This allowed people to use their own phones and hold them naturally as they move around.  The weight of the clipped rig was the only issue – making it heavy to hold the phone and would make the whole rig shift occasionally during testing, losing sight of what is happening.  Participants can be perturbed by you attaching a big, heavy clip to their precious, delicate technology!

Third Iteration: The glasses cam

Final Score: 7/10 Participants loved it, but caused extreme motion sickness amongst viewers.

We had a project come in for the iPad, which forced us to rethink the solution. We went for a camera attached to a pair of glasses, which meant we could track exactly where the participant was looking on the screen and what they touched plus a fixed camera on the desk to record their facial expressions. It worked really well for the participant, but left viewers feeling motion sick.

Fourth iteration: Our most recent baby

Final score: 8/10 Well adopted and natural to hold, but could still be lighter and should remove tray sides.

We took the clip set up from our first design, knocked some weight off, added some stability and attached it to a plastic tray that the phone just sits in to avoid slip. We added a second camera to the face and an audio clip to capture reactions.  The cameras fed into  a picture-in-picture control box and converted to 1024×768 VGA, big enough to view remotely on screen and be recorded. The tray accommodated all types of modern phones and helped the participants adopt it nicely, but the tray sides stop people holding the phone as they normally would.

Fourth Iteration: The Dream Rig

We’re planning to take the sides off the tray to make it more of a smooth sledge with little interruption to the natural feel of the phone. We’re happy with a cameras and an audio clip, but we need to make the device arm as lighter, so we’re constantly sourcing and testing new equipment. The facial expressions camera being on the table captures more, let’s them move more and captures both body and face, so that’s here to stay. Making the connection wireless would mean we could test in the field, allowing people to use their phones as naturally as possible in all situations.

Of course, a design that was virtually invisible would be the dream – but this is probably a long way off…

The options we dismissed and why

Screen Recording Applications: These you just download onto a phone to record the interaction

There are actually a few screen recording applications out there but they all have the same disadvantages. There is no app which will support all the different mobile platforms and devices. The results they deliver aren’t great; the video files do often have lagging issues and just a few mobile screen recorders actually record the touch points on smart phone screen.

Generally, people were upset enough about us clipping a camera onto their mobile, I can’t imagine they would react kindly to us wanting to download software onto their phone.

A static document camera: Fixed on the table, records interaction from above

This is lovely for getting a clear view of the interaction, but in that case the phone must be held at a flat angle or lay on a desk and the participants must keep within the camera range, which is not a natural way for people to interact with their mobile. Take a look at the image of how Google have been testing on their mobile – the document camera is quite intrusive when you have to lean over to see the screen as it is.

We’re aiming to bring as natural a feel as possible to testing, so we are always aiming to make solutions that allow us to test mobile websites or mock-ups in the urban field, their natural habitat. So, in the future, static cameras are also not our weapon of choice.

Further reading:

This presentation includes all the testing rigs that are out there – it’s more for people looking to build their own rig, but can give you some good insight as someone looking to test about what to look for in your mobile usability solution.

http://www.slideshare.net/beleniq/do-it-yourself-mobile-usabilitytesting-at-euroia-2010

Here’s some really nice, lightweight looking trays that can be made for a fiver. They’re still not perfect, we prefer the poseable camera, but they look smart and are a great way of cheaply making your own.

http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2010/05/07/quick-tip-make-your-own-iphone-usability-testing-sled-for-5/
http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2010/11/15/more-mobile-usability-testing-sleds/

Work

JotNot turns your iPhone into a document scanner, so you can save documents, receipts and whiteboards in a readable format.

iPro Recorder helps you to get the best quality recordings and categorise them for later playbacks from your iPhone.

Logmein.com allows remote access of any computer, anywhere. We have used it for IT and remote International testing.

Dropbox is for cloud style document sharing and back up, we use it every day and it’s changed our working lives.

share.axure.com is a hosting site for sharing interactive prototypes – we couldn’t live without it

Doris is a dead-simple task manager that helps you see what you need to get done, and then check them off your list.  She’s pretty new to the scene and has slightly limited features, but she’s already very charming.

WordPress – There is a free version – which you can host on your own domain. It has awesome community support, is continually improving based on user-feedback, has ‘plug-ins’ that let you tailor it to you needs so it doesn’t constrain you in the same way that other blogging software does (Blogger) and lets you demonstrate your creativity. Most importantly, it doesn’t require your blog readers to log-in before commenting (like Blogger).

kuler.adobe.com – highly addictive and useful tool to help you to choose colour palettes. Create your own or review the favourites.

Panosfx.com is a site of tips and tricks for Photoshop users. Useful and occasionally inspiring.

Travel

Navigation app on Android – we’d be lost without it! Boom boom

Met Office app, sooo much better than the iPhone one, I mean, they just make it up!

traintimes.org.uk/map/tube/ – because it’s hypnotic and cool

National Rail app – yeah it was £4.99, but it tells me whether I should change at Reading or Didcot on my way home from London and I’m always grateful for the extra 10 minutes it saves me.

British Rail app – even though it sometime brings bad news!

Lunchtime Fun

http://www.27bslash6.com/ - hilariously inappropriate, but you can’t stop reading. Loving the fact he has a “complain about this page” link, although I suspect you do so at your own peril.

 http://damnyouautocorrect.com/ - just a funny list of misunderstanding caused by the autocorrect function on text messages

 http://www.engrish.com/ - I’m not saying for a second I could even attempt to write things in other languages, but gosh it can be funny reading other languages trying to write in ours!

www.icanhascheezburger.com – never fails to amuse, even when my boundless rage is all-consuming!

www.lmgtfy.com – Let Me Google That For You. Pointless, yet the ONLY way to effectively patronise end users

Angry Birds – train journeys have never been so short. The Xmas expansion was bloody hard though!

Entertainment

Spotify It has however increased my CD spending rather than reducing it. They are in cahoots with Amazon leaving me financially poorer, but ultimately much richer.

Last.fm for finding new stuff to listen to on Spotify and therefore buy on Amazon, further depleting the cash stocks

Hipstamatic for taking lovely pictures

Instagram and Camera Bag for making pictures that I’ve already taken a bit lovelier

AirVideo for watching videos stored on my computer at home on my iPhone or iPad when I’m commuting for a meeting

YouTube – ditto (my favourites is full of epic guitar performances from the archives, most of which I’d never ever have had the chance to see, improved still further by the endless ‘This sux!” comments from all the 14-year-old internet hard men underneath them!)

Ebook Reader – on the go book loveliness

News

The Unofficial Apple Weblog for all my apple geek

Smashing magazine for design ideas and good, basic understanding of all the shizzle

Read Later – there is so much to read in our profession, Read Later means I can do so when it suits me (usually on that train back from London)

Instapaper is what I use instead of Read Later and it’s also very good – you add a little bookmarklet to your toolbar, click on it when you see something you want to keep for later and then you access it via your PC, iPhone, iPad, whatever for a graphics-stripped-out text-only version that is very small and therefore easy to download on the train, etc, for reading later. AND you can scroll through the page by tilting your phone!

RSA Vision – for making me feel deeply inadequate in an entertaining way

Hobbies

I love my Bosch cordless drill – not used for ucd yet although I have been tempted several times

Love birds app (?!) – There are quite a few things about RSPB website that are very frustrating, but being able to access the identifier and listen to the bird songs on my phone when out and about instead of carrying a heavy book is brilliant. If only they would bring out a bird identifier app (including sound) so it is easier to use on a mobile. There doesn’t seem to be  UK bird identifier app out there at the moment.

http://questfortherest.com – Art and animation so lovely it sort of makes me NOT want to punch Flash in the face

www.deviantart.com – where else could you find a range of art from the sublime to the ridiculous, from professional to (very) amateur, all thrown together in one glorious, un-edited mess…

www.epilogue.net – for the good stuff. Very hard to get art accepted, and a brilliant forum of artists who are free (and honest) with criticism and encouragement (http://www.epilogue.net/cgi/database/art/list.pl?gallery=8516  by the way!

www.zazzle.co.uk – make some money out of your artistry by letting people upload it onto tshirts, mugs and allsorts in the name of unique fashion.

Friends 

Skype – for enabling me to keep in proper touch with friends in forrin parts

Occasions app - though now my seemingly uncanny knack for remembering friends and family birthdays will be diminished)

Facebook – love or hate it. I love it, as a way of passively keeping in touch with people who I’m fond of but who aren’t close friends, and who would otherwise drift away if I had to actually actively decide to get in touch!

Shopping

Ebay! – my old Star Trek collection bought most of the furniture in my new house! That chicken coop I’ve got my eye on currently better not go up much more though!

Tesco clubcard app – it doesn’t do much, but considering I am always losing my clubcard, it’s a Godsend!

Let’s think about how both accessibility and SEO work. Accessibility is catering for people with different skills, abilities, access needs and devices. SEO is all about helping search engines understand who you are, so they can suggest you to searchers. A big part of this is marking up elements so they can be interpreted by assistive technologies, such as screen readers and search engine spiders so that you can be found, understood and ultimately clicked on.

Titles

Page title is the text at the top of the browser window, also referred to as the <title> tag. Title text is also what customers see when your page comes up in search engine results.  Titles are probably the toughest element of the page to get right as they are so important, yet need to convey so much in so few characters.

Good titles are a key navigation tool, serving as breadcrumbs to remind users where they are in the site structure. This is probably more important to screen reader users, for whom the title is the first thing read out as the page loads. Search engine spiders go to the title first and rank it as the most important area to look for keywords to assess your relevance in the query.

Even if your page ranks very highly in search engine results, your title needs to be accurate and punchy to convince the user to click on your result and not your competitor’s. The trick is to ensure that as well as being accurate, keyword rich and useful for orientation – they also need to be short. Everything beyond 65 characters is cropped in search engine results, and probably given less weight.

When we do user testing we commonly start from a search page to test how good the signposting is. Asking an impartial audience is the best way to ensure you have chosen relevant and meaningful phrases from your keywords. It can take a while for the spiders to find your new title, so it can make it a long process to test multiple phrases. Consider a card sorting exercise on your audience to see how they group your products and what they call them to give you an idea of a good structure and meaningful titles for them.

Title Tips:

• Think SEO: Use strong keywords in the title
• Think accessibility: The keywords need to be descriptive of the page content and easy to understand alone
• Think searcher: Test in different search engines to see how your title is displayed
• Think testing: Test your titles on an audience to make sure your users find them relevant and catchy

Images

Images can have different purposes on your page . It could be that you are trying to show a product, make text look more interesting and arty, or even display information in an infographic – but it is often the most overlooked element where you can be improving accessibility and search.

A great image uses not only the picture displayed, but is also described. Search engines use a combination of alt text (alternative text descriptions of images), file name and surrounding text to decide the relevance of an image. Often the rules for proper descriptions of images are ignored and as a result a meaningless string of filenames is read out to screen reader users and an opportunity to rank well in image search is missed.

Naming images sensibly with relevant keywords will help improve your site’s position in image, or blended search (some search engines return news, blog, video and images in their results, this is “blended search”). The filename should be short, keyword loaded and not fluffy. Alt text gives you an excellent opportunity to further describe the image in more words.

Accessibility testing will help massively here. If you read our blog, “Content is King” you will understand how screen reader users can benefit massively with descriptive text because this is how they literally get a feel for the product. With Screwfix we did picture based card sorting which helped us not only with grouping, but with the terms people used to describe the products and how they would expect to find them.

Image Tips:

• Think SEO: Using keywords in alt text, file name and surrounding text will help your search engine ranking and your blended search
• Think accessibility: Help the user to get a feel for the product by using descriptive alt text remembering that alt text should be different depending on the purpose of the image
• Think searcher: Understand the language your customers use to search for items
• Think testing: Accessibility testing and picture based card sorting will help uncover the best terms

Links

Links within the copy of a page are a great way of helping customers to find their way towards the much-desired conversion. Used well, such links are both helpful and can set you apart from the competition by making your customer’s journey through the site smoother. From the SEO perspective, links are a great way to pass importance (sometimes referred to as ‘link juice’) to the page being linked to.  A page with too many links, however, is overwhelming for both, users and search engines.

A good link is the one that contains keywords both within it and the surrounding text and describes its destination accurately enough to be understood without the surrounding context. There’s a lot of guesswork for both, users and search engines as to what’s really important on a page with hundreds of links. Stacking links like an overcrowded supermarket shelf can lead to decision paralysis and missed opportunities.

Carefully planning out information architecture, internal linking, and gradually drilling down on a specific topic will help avoid too many links on a page. Within links you do use, consider again how you can be using those keywords whilst still making the link easy to understand.

Link tips:

• Think SEO: Carefully plan out internal linking to give important pages their due importance
• Think accessibility: Use a fair amount of descriptive links within a page
• Think searcher: Use links to help a searcher drill down to a specific topic
• Think testing: Competitor analysis, A/B testing of copy, benchmarking and gap analysis are all useful tools we would employ here.

Compromising

There will be situations when accessibility requirements conflict with SEO requirements, but the bottom line is, as search algorithms get more advanced – good standards-compliant design and great user experience will be rewarded.

When you’re in doubt about how an SEO tweak will impact your customer’s experience, get in touch! We offer continuing support to many of our partners, such as Virgin Holidays, beyond the redesign stage to ensure we continue to improve the customer experience.

Compromise tips:

• Think SEO: The first step of your goals is to get people onto your site
• Think accessibility: The second step of your goals is for as many people as possible to be able to use your site
• Think searcher: The third step of your goals is for people to be able to find what they need quickly
• Think testing: The final step is to keep the momentum through continuing to test and improve your conversions

Want to read more?

■ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid a useful technique for making web copy readable and matching customer expectations. Search engines work on a similar principle and there is evidence that keywords and links positioned towards the top of the page get more importance.

■ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_disclosure a technique for helping users find their way along the journey by reducing clutter and revealing content as the user drills down on a specific topic.

■ The Art of SEO by Eric Enge, Rand Fishkin, Stephan Spencer, and Jessie C. Stricchiola – theory and practice behind the way search engines work. A great book if you want to teach yourself SEO.

■ http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-pagerank-works-why-the-original-pr-formula-may-be-flawed a useful article for understanding passing of page importance in the original PageRank formula and beyond.

So what’s the point? How can this technology be applied to provide us with something useful?

For online businesses, developing a virtual sales agent that is capable of motivating the sites visitors into investigating the company or product further by engaging them in a conversation is powerful. This interaction should make a connection with the visitor and provide them with information regarding products and services, in turn creating the opportunity to convert investigating visitors into customers. At Bunnyfoot we have undertaken numerous testing projects involving the use of agents to support the sales journey. The most successful agents support a wide variety of user enquiries and provide the company with valuable information about customer likes, dislikes and behaviour.

There could be an argument around whether there is room within commercial business for this type of technology to flourish and develop. We recently had discussion as part of an ongoing project with a Financial client regarding the use of an avatar within their ‘help’ section; we advised that the technology available to them at this point would not improve their online customer experience. However I feel that avatars and intelligent agents placed within the right application, using the right technology (available) and with the correct user research behind them can assist and enhance the user journey. There is obviously a large cost implication to this type of development but it is an area that Bunnyfoot is excited to have the potential and knowledge to move into.

Virtual Education (azwaldo: flickr)

I believe the benefits extend more importantly to the areas of health and education. Throughout the Health sector virtual worlds and avatars are being used to treat phobias, assist in behavioural therapy and train professionals. The Education sector are creating and implementing virtual environments and programmes to educate children on healthy eating and exercise also with great success. There has been a surge in distance education since it has become more accessible across the country on account of cheaper technology; the need to provide students with a classroom feel has grown. Creating a personalised and socially engaging environment to collaborate within has been shown to increase feelings of community and engagement and decrease that of social isolation and in some cases increase efficiency.

However what are the implications of these increasing virtual interactions? If we are interacting more and more with artificial intelligence in a virtual world what are the consequences on our real-life social interactions?

Companionship (D Sharon Pruitt)

Some argue that this type of technology could be destroying our sense of self and could even be the beginning of the end of society. So are they afraid because it is something new to them or because it could in fact be harmful?

I believe we are social beings who inherently seek to make connections, build communities, and search for companionship. I don’t think that even though these technologies are going to create interactions that mirror and replicate those of real-life, they will never be able to replace them. As with everything there are pros and cons and I believe that the benefits to certain groups of users (autistic children, medical staff, the mentally ill, customers) far out way the negatives. If you have thoughts to the alternative please feel free to post them here and I’ll do my best to respond.