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12 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Weeks 13-17, 2011)

2011-05-03
By: James Royal-Lawson

For your reading pleasure this time, a collection of links (with summaries) including articles related to: web strategy, UX, search, web developement.

Web strategy & User experience

All the kings are dead. Long live the ecosystem.

Nothing is king. Everything is king! Here’s a quote taken from my Beantin Manifesto: “Until we stop arguing about which discipline lies at the top (or bottom) of the pyramid (“xxx is king”), until we start linking these skills horizontally, until we stop boxing ourselves in and closing the lid, our organisations and clients will fail to get the best out of this fantastic medium.”

Hard economic lessons for news

The internet has disrupted a number of industries. Some have take it in their stride, others have fought long and bloody battles to hold it back. News and newspapers still need to wake up and smell the coffee. What use in a newspaper? I wrote at the end of last year. I just love the rules of business models in this post by Jeff. “Tradition is not a business model”.

How to Build the Perfect Facebook Fan Page, 2011 Edition

This is quite a nice little guide to the new look Facebook pages – especially if you’re familiar to how the old ones looked and worked.

Opening the floodgates

In my February newsletter I wrote about how Flattr had all the right pieces but in the wrong order. They needed, amongst other things, so reconsider their user acquisition strategy. They’ve taken a step in the right direction and now you can receive micropayments for your content without being forced to make micropayments to others.

The fall and rise of user experience

Well considered, well observed, thought provoking, inspirational, damning – I’ll stop now and leave you to read Cennydd’s transcript of his speech at IA Summit 2011.

11 articles about An Event Apart Seattle 2011

Over in Seattle at the end of March An Event Apart took place. Luke Wroblewski published his conference notes in the form of 10 blog posts. Lots of UX, design & strategy goodness.

Search

How Google Instant’s Autocomplete Suggestions Work

If you hadn’t already realised, Google’s autocomplete suggestions are complex things. They take into account location (so specific as to what part of town you’re in), language, browsing history, trending topics, legal judgements, sensitive topics, and more.

Hoppande resultat i början av sökmotoroptimeringen

Magnus has written a whole load of posts this week, but I wanted to share this one. I’ve had a few conversations recently where I’ve brough up the affect of “freshness” (grace period) and “trending topics” (QDF – Query Deserves Freshness) on new pages – it deserves a little bit of understanding.

Holistic SEO for the Data driven web

Yet another good post from Jesper – search optimising has always been a balancing act – man and machine. Giving the machines the right (meta)data so that people can find it – using the search mechanisms that they prefer. As the web becomes more semantic and increasingly social, search (behaviour) follows.

Google adding other social sources to realtime, social efforts evolve

Until now it’s been pretty much only Twitter that has appeared in Google’s real-time search (and blended SERPs) but other sources are now starting to appear. So far, I’ve only seen other sources (such as Friendfeed and Facebook) via Google.com.

Intranet

The 13 hats of an internal community manager

Quite a good list from Steve Radick of what’s required from an internal community manager. The specifics will very from organisation to organisation, but generally this covers the role well.

Web developement

The Cicada Principle and Why It Matters to Web Designers

Beautiful. The geek in me wept with enjoyment at this fascinating mix of nature, web design and mathematics.

Coping with Over Four Hundred Devices: How Netflix Uses HTML5 to Deliver Amazing User Interfaces

Step into the world of web management with Netflix, where they are maintaining a cross platform presence using HTML5 (instead of native apps) and some serious split-testing methodology. A relatively small team, A more manageable code base, quicker development – and potentially a more consistent user experience.

13 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 6-7, 2011)

2011-02-20
By: James Royal-Lawson

This time, a collection of links (and summaries) including articles related to: Social media and social search, web strategy and web management, Optimisation, usability testing and Eye tracking.

Social media & social search

Google Search Finally Going Fully Social With Shared Twitter Links And Even Quora Data

More Google (social) search news. Adding “shared” information to SERPs is a sensible way of making use of open data. It’s basically recommendations for search results. As I’ve written about, certain results shared by certain people (or combinations of people) seem to get a bump up your (personalised) search results.

How To Target Social Tribes On Facebook

Pressing the right psychological buttons is always centre to marketing, but the ease at which you can tribalise a brand varies a lot from sector to sector and product to product.

Web strategy & web management

Erase and rewind

The BBC is going to close and remove a number of old websites. This has generated an interesting and worthy debate about historical content and how it should be archived rather than destroyed. The cost (and difficulty) of keeping such archived content is hardly worth mentioning. The similarity has been raised between this wiping policy and the same one the BBC had for video tapes back in the 60s and 70s – resulting in programmes and performances being lost forever.

Are marketing images damaging your website?

Banners that don’t match the task a visitor is trying to complete and “filler” marketing images and being shown time and time again to be either ignored, or as Gerry points out there – even detrimental to the trustworthiness of a site and the chances of goal completion. Worth re-reading this Nielsen Alertbox article too

Linking Google Analytics to Webmaster Tools

A long awaited improvement. I’m of the opinion now that even if you are running another statistics gathering script on your page, you probably should make sure GA is there too.

How to read the RSS feed of any Facebook page

Cross-feeding updates from one social media site to another, or back to your corporate website is an increasingly important aspect of a web presence. For some organisations (such as Swedish Councils) archiving these updates is a requirement. Pulling out status updates from a Facebook page as an RSS web feed is possible, but how you do it is not widely known. This post explains how.

Information architecture

Guide to Website Navigation Design Patterns

A good quick overview of a number of navigation design patterns. Be careful with some of the drawbacks though, as some of them aren’t fundamental drawbacks of the particular navigation type. The Bible for anyone interested in this subject is James Kalbach’s Designing Web Navigation.

Intranet & Collaboration

The Social Business Employee Manifesto

Here’s another manifesto – from May last year – outlining the ground rules for the business employee relationship in the era of social business.

Why Yammer Failed

A little intranet story showing again how important it is to have management buy in. At the end of the day, someone above you can stamp on pretty much anything they want should they want to – no matter how well planned, justified, and implemented.

Optimisation, Usability testing & eye tracking

Appsumo reveals its A/B testing secret: only 1 out of 8 tests produce results

Not every A/B test will give you a strong result, as this article explains you might end up with an awful lot of non-results. Take-homes – Weekly iterations, patience, persistence, focus on the big.

A guide to carrying out usability reviews

A DIY usability review kit – including a scorecard template. Have a little play on your own website.

To Track or Not To Track

For me, it’s a no-brainer. Eye tracking combined with retrospective think aloud interviews gives you data and insight that other usability testing can’t. Make sure you read the comments on this post.

The value of eye tracking vs. observation and mouse tracking

Tommy expands on his comment to the “To Track of Not To Track” blog post above by showing the extra value that eye tracking can give compared to traditional usability testing (or mouse tracking). The post is quite technical in places, but ultimately what it explains is that eye tracking testing in this case highlighted issues that otherwise wouldn’t have been spotted.

20 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 3-5, 2011)

2011-02-06
By: James Royal-Lawson

This edition’s collection of links includes posts related to: Eye tracking and user testing, Intranets, UX, usability and web strategy, SEO, and web development.

User experience, usability & web strategy

Good usability makes a website

This one quote from the article pretty much says enough: “Usability testing is no longer a nice to have but essential to the success of any website.” – if anything, design is the “nice to have” if you are forced to choose.

Should web writers and UX designers use “click here”?

From a usability perspective, we’ve been trying to get web editors to avoid “read more” and “click here” for years. But, for sales links (rather than “resource links”) you get more clicks – which means potentially more conversions.

If you were going to design Flattr’s sign-up process, is this how you’d do it?

Via his blog post and the comments Harry Brignull has, in effect, crowd-sourced the improvement of not only Flattr’s website (their tactics), but also the entire way they are going about building their business (their strategy). This blog post could be the point where Flattr’s tide turned….

A Dead-Simple Change That Increased Our Conversion Rate by Over 250%

Forget your big-bang entire-site redesigns. Let’s tinker more. Small changes can make massive differences; with often very little cost or negative impact on other aspects of your site. In this example, just the wording on a button was changed.

The Right Way to Introduce a New Feature

There are some really bad examples of how to highlight a new feature, but this example from LinkedIn is one of the good one; as Erin explains in blog post.

FAQs as “Lucky Bags”… how not to improve the marketing power of your website

If a question is frequently asked, then obviously it’s important to your users and deserves more loving care than to be consigned to the depths of a FAQ dumped in a lonely corner of your site.

Social media

Guide to Twitter

This blog post in Swedish by Helen Alfvegren is an excellent and exhaustive guide to Twitter. If you are Swedish and thinking of diving in (as a company or an individual), or if you have dabbled but not really got into it – then take a look at this guide.

The Pros and Cons of Merging Your Facebook Page and Place

Some pros and cons with merging a Facebook Place with a Facebook Page. Note that we’re talking about merging here, not associating. You should associate all of your places with your business – but not necessarily merge them.

Search engine optimisation

Findability, SEO, And The Searcher Experience

Although lots of SEO is aimed at optimising for machines, you’ve got to remember the human side too – the search experience.

7 ways to make SMO work in the post-Google age

Ok, I know the writer is just trying to practice what he’s preaching, but “post-Google age” and “SEO is fading away”. Oh please. If you ignore silliness, this article is a good read. SEO isn’t going away, neither is Google any time soon – and SMO (Social media optimisation) and SEO are partners, not enemies.

BBC to cut online budget by 25%

A 25% cut is never fun, lots of things will have to disappear… But let’s focus on the positives. Buried away at the bottom of this article is the gem: “The corporation also said it wanted to double the number of referrals to external websites to 22 million each month by 2013/14.” The more link-love available from the BBC the better for the rest of us I say!

Intranet

What would you want from an introduction to Intranets book?

Kristian has kicked-off a collaborative project to write a book that gives you an introduction to intranets. The list of topics suggested would take the book well beyond an introduction, but refined and produced in multiple languages it could be a really good resource. Plenty of internationally respected names within the world of Intranets have commented on the post. The introduction to intranets site officially launches tomorrow.

What is a social intranet or an intranet 2.0 ?

Some common sense thrown onto the social intranet hype. Quote: “Forget the word social intranet or intranet 2.0. It’s an intranet. Period. The place where the whole organization can meet, exchange, work.”

How NOT to use Yammer: Ragan offers prime example

An amusing insight into Ragan’s first day of using Yammer. I don’t agree with all of the “tips”. What you see here is a reflection of their company culture; not Yammer/whatever social collaboration platform you fancy. Too many rules will kill it off. It’s a cultural change; manage that change – don’t write a rule book.

Survey of 10,000 Yammer Users Reveals Benefits of Enterprise Social Networking

Yes it’s a Yammer survey of Yammer users – but if you can just replace “Yammer” with “Social collaboration” and the figures will still ring true. Yammer is just an example of how such collaborative tools and features as part of a company’s intranet can change behaviour and, ultimately, how effective an organisation is.

Mobile devices are personal devices (and what this means for enterprise apps)

James points out that mobile devices are personal devices – in the context of intranets this not only gives us a whole load of exciting (and useful) opportunities, but also a few challenges – the way we deal with content and services internally needs to change (you even could say “grow up”) in order to make the most of what mobile intranets can offer.

How to Make Paper Communication Productive With QR Codes

Printing in the work-place isn’t going to vanish any time soon – QR Codes though could really help link the paper world with the digital work. There’s lots of potential uses in a working environment, many of them outlines in this post.

Web dev

Google APIs & Developer Products periodic table

Geek-heaven. A periodic table of Google API and developer products. You could lose yourself in this for years. Even non-geeks can do nothing to help be impressed by the sheer range and quantity of what Google offers.

Eye tracking & user testing

User testing: How to recruit the right participants, as it won’t happen by chance!

Recruiting people to take part in testing is an art-form. One of my least favourite tasks. Here’s some tips from James Breeze and the objective Digital crew down under.

AGENCY GUIDE: How to Implement Eye Tracking & Usability

A partcularly useful post this one – some tips from Simple Usability on how to go about including usability testing (and Eye tracking in particular) in your projects – and some tips on how to sell it in to clients.

16 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Weeks 1-2, 2011)

2011-01-14
By: James Royal-Lawson

This edition’s collection of links includes posts related to: Intranets, UX, Web design and web development, web strategy and web tactics, Analysis and eye tracking.

Intranet

Round-Up of Intranet Trends for 2011

To save you visiting several blogs to get a grip of what’s hot within the world of Intranets, this article conveniently groups it all together for you in one post.

New BBC Site Search

Just before Christmas the BBC has launched a new enhanced site search. This is a detailed write up of what they’ve done and why. There’s a lot of useful information here that could be applied to intranet and enterprise search solutions.

Thoughts on a mobile phone enhanced intranet

A blog post talking about mobiles, intranet, QR codes, and location based services was bound to get my juices flowing. Kristian outlines a number of interesting possible applications for the enhanced mobile intranet of the not too distant future.

Silo-busting & customization in the digital workplace

Jane starts a discussion about breaking down Silos by using customization. This sparked a great discussion in the comments between Kristian Norling (featured in my previous recommendation above), myself, and Martin Risgaard on how to break down the geographical silo.

User experience, Web design, and web development

RSS Is Dying Being Ignored, and You Should Be Very Worried

Long post about the death of RSS. I don’t agree. Completely. Yes, RSS and the browser is a dying combination – but with tablets and the age of curation, RSS has a healthy future as part of the wiring beneath the scenes. Non-techies/non-curators can blissfully ignore it but still reap the benefits. This week Kroc followed up his post with this constructive reply.

Responsive Web Design: What It Is and How To Use It

If you haven’t yet heard about responsive web design, then this article on Smashing Magazine is a good and information-rich place to start. We’re rapidly moving away from the one-size-fits-all website.

.css{user:agent;}

A tiny bit of javascript (less than 2KB) that gives you the possibility to add user-agent based CSS classes to your code. After reading about responsive web design in the article above, you will probably understand the usefulness of this.

QR Codes Improve Web Access

I love this example of QR codes. It’s a wonderful example of an application of technology that benefits everyone involved. The teacher has more time for teaching (rather than just making sure everyone has typed in the right URL), the kids take to it like fish to water. It also gives a use for QR codes without using mobile phones.

Static Footer Bars – Web Navigation Trend

James gives some calm and thoughtful analysis of fixed position footer toolbars from the viewpoint of web navigation.

Web strategy and web tactics

Future Integrated Communication From A Digital Perspectiv

Yet more wise words from Johan. Even though there are many of us that bang on about how a web site needs to be focused and task based, the corporate world at large is a number of years behind in it’s thinking. We’ll get there. I’d expand upon Johan’s recommendation of moving 10% of your media budget to content by clarifying “content” to include web management – you content needs to be lovingly dealt with.

How does content strategy differ from corporate communications strategy?

Detailed post from Diana, and especially worth reading on the back of Johan’s post above on integrated communication.

The Web Is a Customer Service Medium

Niche walled gardened channels are forming – from Apps to Gaming worlds – but one thing will remain – the web is where people will go to complain.

8 things every marketing technologist should know

I often try to explain to people that the web isn’t simple. Yes, some tools make aspects of the web accessible and easy – but building and running a successfull web presence involves a huge list of competences. There’s hardly a discipline that isn’t touched. This post features a (non-exhausive) list and diagram of skills needed for a marketing technologist (you can switch that term for your web-title of preference)

Därför blir ditt företags webbplats aldrig färdig

Why your company’s website will never be finished. Something worth saving and remembering from this Swedish post is Magnus’s three focus areas he recommends spitting idea’s up into: improvements that bring more visitors, improvements that convert more visits, improvements to your products and services.

What’s the Future of Mobile Search and SEO?

Mobile search is another aspect that we need to consider and work with. Here are some trends from SEOmoz. Don’t agree with the “single set of SERPs” claim. I don’t see, and I don’t see it being a trend either. Quite the opposite.

Analysis and eye tracking

Mouse Eye Tracking – How useful is it?

If any of you have heard me talk about usability testing with eye tracking, you may also have heard me say how worthless mouse tracking is as a substitute for real eye tracking. Here’s an article that backs that up.

12 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 42-43, 2010)

2010-10-31
By: James Royal-Lawson

Information Architecture 101: Techniques and Best Practices

A great “briefing paper” from Six Revisions, intending to raise awareness of the discipline with designers.

Mental Models

The latest Alertbox post covers what users think they know and how that affects their behaviour. Users, designers and developers all have differing mental models. You need to work with conformity not against it, and gently adjust the mental models of your visitors and users.

10 essential usability guidelines for websites

If every website followed the ten points in this list, i’d suddenly have hardly anything to complain about any more. Well, perhaps not *hardly* anything – more like “less”.

How Yammer Won Over 80% of the Fortune 500

Yammer boasts that 80% of the Fortune 500 use Yammer. I wonder how many of those 400 companies have adopted Yammer as their official, or main, collaboration platform?

How I learnt to stop worrying and love enterprise microblogging

Nice case describing how Yammer took flight at AXA Australia in just the few months since August.

Information flow part 3: Why persistent links are important

I’m really enjoying Kristian’s series of posts about aspects of his work over the last couple with the intranet at Region Västra Götland. This particular post goes into the details of how they’ve tried to deal with managing URLs and links across multiple systems.

How we improved our intranet search experience

Luke describes how they implemented and tweaked their Intranet search (using a Google Search Appliance). Some good lessons-learned and insights that anyone dealing with intranet search can make use of.

Report: iPad Is an Enterprise IT Triple-Threat

The headline talks about iPad (and thereby iSO) but the report concludes that Android and HTML5 should also be prioritised. I’m going one step further than Forrester and saying prioritise HTML5 and Android. Plan for mobile/wireless working and plan soon.

How Google tested Google Instant

An insight into how Google tests it’s products (before launch in this case). What I find interesting is that normally Google uses eye tracking whilst testing. It gives them real data to work with. In this case, Google Instant, they chose not to. Why? I suspect they did try, but realised that far too many people were spending too much time looking down at the keyboard whilst typing – and not looking at their instantly-changing search results.