Interface design terms explained: Findability and its significance for website design – Part 2

In part 2 of this 2-part blog post I shall look at Search Engine Optimization and tree-testing in relation to findability.

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.