Entries Tagged 'user experience' ↓

Importance of Search Engines in User Experience

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Pure Visibility talks about how search engines contribute to the online user experience. Anybody who skims through search engines and referral logs has come across this:

What is also noteworthy is the large drop in other marketing channel efforts, such as referrals and direct traffic. Effectively visitors are relying on Google as their “bookmark” engine, often typing in a keyphrase that got them to the site in the past instead of trying to remember or spell the name of the company or service. This is a huge shift in user patterns. Note also that referral traffic dropped significantly.

These are also called ‘navigation search’ what this article refers to as ‘bookmark’ engine. It’s very hard for people to remember all the important domain names that they use or come across, so instead of bookmarking it in their browser or using social bookmarks they just go to search engines and search for it directly by using the brand name or a name close to domain name.

How you can improve over ‘keyword search’ instead of ‘navigation search’

  • Have a domain name which is very easy to remember or a natural domain name which exactly matches with your brand name. E.g. ICICIbank.com is easy and irctc.co.in is little hard to remember
  • Go for a .com domain first, people do not remember the domain extensions and this may mean redirection to others web site instead of yours
  • Navigational search cannot be avoided and majority of the referrals for you would be through Navigational Search Keywords. What you can do is that treat every section of your web site as the individual home page and work on optimizing that. By doing so, you will create multiple entry points through search engines and even though you will get refferals through navigation search, it won’t be the only referral.

Popularity: 24% [?]

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The Future of User Experience

Users are creating content, they are creating instant mashup application, they are using the social networks in the open and API’d world. You can now see loads of information on the user screen than it was in the past. The user interfaces also needs to evolve rapidly adjusting to this information overload and ReadWriteWeb has some interesting examples of such user interfaces. When you think of user interfaces don’t just think of computer screens and keyboard and mouse based user controls. If you look at the touch based mobile interfaces and motion based wii controls, they are just the start and the future has lot many more interesting need and usage of human computer interactions like giant screens, shadows play, thought control, virtual environment and many more. Related stuff: Richard Ziade points to iPhone Human Interface Guidelines for Web Applications Smashing Magazine had done a similar coverage in the past and talks about gaming, reaction and touch based UX. Jess3 is right ATM machines are boring :) Via Billy Hylton Julia Hanna’s HBS Working Knowledge article, “Radical Design, Radical Results

Popularity: 55% [?]

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