Search Engine Optimization can help improve the findability of your website

How you organize the structure of your website’s content as well as how you implement web standards and conventions is important for search engine optimization (SEO) because search engines can only react to standard representations. In addition, the organization of your interface design affects its SEO ranking. Considering that search engines are arguably the most commonly used online tool, a website’s search ranking can potentially make or break a website. Simply put, search engine optimization is the art of science of increasing traffic to a given website. This is done by optimizing structure, text content, photos and videos to increase a website’s visibility on search engines and other web 2.0 portals such as Facebook. Another way of doing this is through interface design whereby a website appears the same in different web browsers, and without errors. After all what good is it to create a wonderful interface design if it may appear broken to a significant number of users. Using a number of different portals to generate more inbound traffic from different sources also results in higher search engine rankings which begets more traffic. Other considerations of SEO, even though they don’t necessarily have much to do with interface design proper, include incorporating particular keywords and key phrases even and recoding a website to make it more crawl-able by search engines.

Usability tests can help determine the findability of your site content

As mentioned in part 1 of this blog, the best way to determine the findability of your interface design’s content is to conduct iterative usability testing. One usability method that is particularly helpful when evaluating and optimizing findability is tree testing. The information architecture of interface designs is in most cases organized in hierarchies. These are referred to as trees (with subsections “branching” out). Tree testing, also known as card-based classification or reverse card sorting, seeks to find out how well users are able to find information within a website’s hierarchy. Remember, tree testing differs from traditional usability testing in that it is not done on a wireframe prototype or the website itself but on using cards (or software) of a simplified text version of the site structure. A typical tree test is as follows:

1.    Users are given a “find it” task (e.g. look for the breakfast menu).
2.    Users are then shown a list of the top topics on the website (as they might appear in the main navigation)
3.    They choose one and then are shown a list of subtopics (such as in a sub-menu of a navigation)
4.    They continue choosing, backtracking if necessary, until they have found a topic that completes their task.
5.    The test conductor has the user repeat this process several times with several different tasks
6.    After several users have completed the tree test, the results are analyzed by the design and development team.

For the reasons mentioned above, findability should be an important consideration of every interface designer.

What is findability?

Findability, in computer science, refers to a user’s ability to identify and then navigate the interface designs of websites or web-apps. It encompasses aspects of information architecture, user interface design, accessibility and search engine optimization. The term findability is credited to Peter Morville who remarked that “findability precedes usability. In the alphabet and on the Web. You can’t use what you can’t find.” In this vein findability is two-pronged, on one hand dealing with users finding a website. On the other hand it deals with how users find things that they are looking for, such as the help section or contact details etc., on a given website. According to Neilson Online currently there are more than 1,733,993,741 internet users generating and interacting with vast streams of data. Findability helps ensure your website doesn’t get lost in the mix and, when found, not to be deserted by frustrated users who in all likelihood won’t return, barring a thorough reworking of the interface design.
If you are developing a website with a new user interface and are interested in optimizing your website’s ability to be located by prospective users on the internet, then it is important to infuse your design process with adequate research about the above mentioned topics.

Issues affecting findability on a website
Findability concerns itself with the effort to make a user interface design easily navigable or usable and to ensure that the interface design process is fully integrated and effective. Key to findability is the organization and representation of a user interface design.  This refers to among others, the layout, the use of breadcrumbs and local navigation. Are users able to easily navigate a website and find the services they were looking for? If they found themselves in the middle of a website (which happens often as people share direct links) would they be able to figure out where in the hierarchy they were?  These issues can easily be revolved by adhering to web standards and through iterative usability testing of wireframe prototypes created with the use of wireframe tools such as pidoco. Another important issue affecting findability is the qualities of your web-site’s content and how it is geared towards search engine optimization.

While it is no doubt an excellent idea to reinvigorate a user interface (especially when you make an images interface all about the images), the changes to Google Images are not necessarily new per se.  Google’s new interface design is strikingly similar to Bing.com’s Images user interface design—in fact it is almost uncanny.

Of course it would be unfair to call Google unoriginal in its interface design choices.  After all, it’s the details of an interface design that matter in the world of good usability.  In this case, Google seems to have picked up a good interface design idea and improved it through yet a more prominent display of the images through their larger size.  Everything that rises out of the creative world is influenced by what came before it.  Good ideas are infectious and if Google took a page from Bing’s website then that means they obviously liked what they saw.  That is the give and take in the world of interface design, painting, even literature.  Variations of what is working well for someone else.  Still, time will tell how well Google’s users respond to the new changes.  But for now, Google continues to surf the wave of internet success, being authentic in many instances, but also not afraid to concede and adopt good interface design solutions.

Further changes to the Images interface include the way Google allows users to view selected pictures. Users can now click on the desired image and it will be blown up with the website of origin shown as faded in the background.  Google will also be phasing out text ads and replacing them with image ads to further improve the usability and clarity of its interface design.

OnLive’s greatest challenge to date is keeping the lag down to a minimum of micro seconds. When streaming video, buffering time of 3 seconds is manageable. While playing a video game, 3 seconds could well mean game over. OnLive feels to me like a service intended for use two years from now (ready for use in Japan). The service is currently only available in the US where only 25% of broadband connections are faster than the 5 Mbps threshold needed to use it. Despite this, the service holds promise, working and sporting the same interface design on multiple formats such as PC, Mac, Linux, TV and even the iPad, which may make it a triumph of interface design.

OnLive is a new service that seeks to turn the gaming world upside down with a decidedly disruptive Web 2.0 approach. Thus far video games have been largely an affair of hardware, localized at that. You (which usually meant mum or dad) would buy a game console or a PC with the best possible graphics card etc… Once that business was out of the way all that was left was to buy the games. This meant buying a piece of plastic with data on it. With the advent of ubiquitous internet, downloading games directly to your local hard drive became possible through services such as Steam. However one needed compatible hardware to be able to run the software. OnLive’s premise is to harness the cloud and a web-browser for gaming. The games run on servers in a remote data center and the audiovisual output is streamed to your computer in exchange for your controller inputs. This means that as long as you have a good internet connection, the hardware settings of your computer do not matter. All very nice so far.

Competing in this setting, the new Safari boasts some great interface design features that increase the usability of the browser considerably. Safari borrows heavily from iTunes’ interface design even going as far as replicating Cover Flow and thus allowing users to view bookmarks and history visually as they would a photo album or album covers. Top Sites allows users to see their most visited websites at a glance in a cinematic interface design showing previews of the sites. These features of Safari’s new interface design lead to great usability. A photo preview of a website is recognised much more intuitively and faster than a list of URLs. Safari also scores usability points for its Full History Search which allows users to search for webpages using words or phrases from a website they visited, rendering it obsolete to remember complex URLs.

Users with a WizeHive account can now log in with their Google account. This enables them to access Google Docs from within WizeHive’s interface design and link the appropriate documents to specific workspaces. Data can also now be tagged thus adding to the usability of the software tool offering users a way of organizing information in way that is meaningful to them. In addition to these changes, WizeHive has released a free iPhone app that manages to cram as much of the functionality of the web-app into an interface design that fits the iPhone’s smaller screen real estate. Changes such as these further underscore WizeHive’s easy-to-use collaborative interface design concept and point into a future direction of pushing aspects like collaboration and mobility even further.

Overall, the interface design changes seem to have a positive effect on the usability of the application and they may be a good example for other tools to follow.

What has changed in the interface design?

Perhaps the most notable change to WizeHive’s interface design is that the new interface design is now much more streamlined, thus saving users time when they work with WizeHive, which may potentially bring down costs.  As before the interface design displays recent activity within an activity stream like Twitter, but now up to five workspaces can be added to clickable tabs at the top of the screen for easy access in addition to a ‘More Workspaces’ tab to access other workspaces that are not displayed by an individual tab within the interface design. There are further little improvements that all seem to add to the usability and clarity of the program.