SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Why It Works Best With Quality Writing

Attracting the attention of Google and other search engines is crucial for bringing visitors to your website. To achieve this effectively, search engine optimised copy should run parallel with good website construction.

Ward, Merlin. Webcredible (2008). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Search Engine Optimization

Accessibility as Part of The Search Engine Marketing Strategy

In traditional marketing you're looking to define your targeted audience for your business or organisation. In Internet marketing things work in the same way. Unfortunately, with the growing popularity of the Internet in the past years and with the growing number of people building sites, a certain part of the online audience has been overlooked.

Big Mouth Media (2004). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Search Engine Optimization

Secret Benefits of Accessibility Part 2: Better Search Ranking

One of the main benefits of Web accessibility is that a Website that's more accessible to people is also usually more accessible to search engines. The more accessible your site is to search engines, the more confidently they can guess what the site's about, giving your site a better chance at the top spot in the search engine rankings.

Moss, Trenton. SitePoint (2004). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Search Engine Optimization

Can Wikipedia Be Trusted?

The intention of this article is to open the readers eyes to the issues with trusting user edited content. Over time, the Wikipedia may balance out. Eventually, or possibly even now, user tests are being performed to see how much content is credible. Also, the academic communities could step up and decide unanimously that the Wikipedia is not a trusted body of information to use for research. Once this happens the Wikipedia will have to change the way information within their pages is handled to maintain existence.

Hall, Lawrence. Content Matters (2006). Articles>Research>Online>Wikis

Making Decisions About User Research

We know that we should do user research for projects. All the user-centred design material says so, we talk about it at conferences, we put it in proposals. We just know that it is a good thing to do. But when I talk to people about their actual projects, I find that very few people actually do user research. There are many many reasons (no time, no money, already know what users need etc etc etc). I think that part of the reason it doesn’t happen is also that we don’t have good tools to tell us just how much research to do, and even when it isn’t necessary at all to do research.

Spencer, Donna. DonnaM (2008). Articles>Research>Usability>User Centered Design

Implications for Design  

Although ethnography has become a common approach in HCI research and design, considerable confusion still attends both ethnographic practice and the metrics by which it should be evaluated in HCI. Often, ethnography is seen as an approach to field investigation that can generate requirements for systems development; by that token, the major evaluative criterion for an ethnographic studies is the implications it can provide for design. Exploring the nature of ethnographic inquiry, this paper suggests that “implications for design” may not be the best metric for evaluation and may, indeed, fail to capture the value of ethnographic investigations.

Dourish, Paul. University of California Irvine (2002). Articles>Research>Human Computer Interaction>Ethnographies

Metadata and Search

The 2003 Dublin Core Conference took as its basic premise that "Metadata is fundamental to persons, organizations, machines, and an array of enterprises that are increasingly turning to the Web and electronic communication for disseminating and accessing information." One of the reasons metadata is receiving such attention is its role in facilitating information seeking.

Crystal, Abe and Paula Land. Dublin Core (2003). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Search

Metadata: Seven Tips for Writing Better Keywords

The shift in how search engines treat keywords is significant. They tend to ignore the keyword metatag and rather look for keywords in the actual page content. This means that you need to figure out your keywords before you write any content. Then, you include them throughout your content, particularly in headings and summaries.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2004). Articles>Web Design>Metadata>Search Engine Optimization

Web Search: How the Web Has Changed Information Retrieval

Topical metadata have been used to indicate the subject of Web pages. They have been simultaneously hailed as building blocks of the semantic Web and derogated as spam. At this time major Web browsers avoid harvesting topical metadata. This paper suggests that the significance of the topical metadata controversy depends on the technological appropriateness of adding them to Web pages. This paper surveys Web technology with an eye on assessing the appropriateness of Web pages as hosts for topical metadata. The survey reveals Web pages to be both transient and volatile: poor hosts of topical metadata. The closed Web is considered to be a more supportive environment for the use of topical metadata. The closed Web is built on communities of trust where the structure and meaning of Web pages can be anticipated. The vast majority of Web pages, however, exist in the open Web, an environment that challenges the application of legacy information retrieval concepts and methods.

Brooks, Terrence A. Information Research (2003). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search

Be a White Hat SEO for Your Intranet: It's Good for Accessibility

The SEOs with white hats conduct legitimate optimising of web pages to make the site come up appropriately in the Search Engine Results Pages (also called SERPs). The back hat SEOs implement tricks to appear high in the results pages even if the web site is not necessarily relevant. The range of tricks is astonishing. But most of the techniques used by white hat SEOs were similar if not identical to the guidelines given by accessibility experts.

NetStrategy-JMC (2006). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Search Engine Optimization

Nine Ways to Fix Intranet Search

Search is often the greatest source of frustration on intranets. Irrelevant results, hard to read results pages and ‘untitled document’ entries plague many intranet searches. With the size and scope of most intranets, search is a key tool used by staff to find information. While the expectation is that it should be quick and easy to find information on the intranet, this is often not the case. Beyond generating staff frustration, these problems can reduce trust and confidence in the search tool.

Robertson, James. Step Two (2006). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Search

Search Should Work Like Magic

Thanks to Google, intranet users expect to be able to type in a word (or two) and find the page they are looking for, preferably in the first few results. This is not an unreasonable expectation. At the most fundamental level, search on an intranet is supposed to make it quick and easy for staff to find things, thereby saving them time and improving their productivity. This can be distilled down to a very simple concept: search should work like magic. As much as is possible, search should always give staff the information they need, somewhere in the first few results.

Robertson, James. Step Two (2006). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Search

What to Include in Intranet Search Results

Intranet search often fails to meet the needs or expectations of users, with confusing and complex results provided for even the simplest searches.

Robertson, James. Step Two (2005). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Search

Readability, Browsability, Searchability Plus Assistance

Readability, browsability, and searchability do not have to be equally represented in every information system. As your collection of information increases, different aspects of these qualities take on greater significance. Thus, the amount of readability, browsability, and searchability your information system exhibits depends on the type and quality of your collected data, as well as the information needs of your clientele.

Morgan, Eric Lease. Infomotions (2004). Articles>Information Design>Usability>Search

Where's the Search? Re-Examining User Expectations of Web Objects

In 2001, Bernard determined that users were able to form a schema for the location of web objects on informational websites. The current study investigates whether users' expectations have changed since the 2001 study. Changes were found in the expected location of the site search engine, internal links, and advertisements.

Shaikh, A. Dawn and Kelsi Lenz. Usability News (2006). Articles>Web Design>Search>User Centered Design

Ethical and Legal Aspects of Human Subjects Research on the Internet  

Many IRBs recognize their unfamiliarity with the nature of Internet research and their lack of technical expertise needed to review related research protocols. To both protect human subjects and promote innovative and scientifically sound research, it is important to consider the ethical, legal, and technical issues associated with this burgeoning area of research.

AAAS (1999). Articles>Research>Ethics>Online

Online Experiments: Ethically Fair or Foul?  

Online experiments may be helping researchers gather more data faster than ever before, but those advantages are coming with greater ethical challenges--threats to participant confidentiality, questions over whether the participants really understand what they're getting into and the possibility that less scrupulous researchers could steal your ideas.

Azar, Beth. Monitor on Psychology (2000). Articles>Research>Ethics>Online

Acting on User Research

User research offers a learning opportunity that can help you build an understanding of user behavior, but you must resolve discrepancies between research findings and your own beliefs.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2004). Articles>Usability>Research

Optimize Your AdWords Campaigns

Both AdWords and YSM are much more complicated beasts than the old banner networks ever were, and coming to grips with them can be a bit of a headache.

Oxer, Jonathan. Internet Vision Technologies (2008). Articles>Web Design>Marketing>Search Engine Optimization

Self-Education in UX and Working with User Research Data

How you can educate yourself in user experience. The best ways to capture and present user research data.

Six, Janet M. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Education>User Experience>Research

Nondirected Interviews: How to Get More Out of Your Research Questions

As user experience designers, a key component to nearly all the techniques we use in our practice is the one-on-one interview. It’s the basis of requirements gathering, usability testing, and task analysis. In order to remove our personal biases, expectations and opinions from the questions asked, I practice a kind of questioning technique called the nondirected interview.

Kuniavsky, Mike. Adaptive Path (2002). Articles>Interviewing>User Experience>Research

The Mid-Point on a Rating Scale: Is it Desirable?    

This study examined the effect on survey results of having no neutral or mid-point on a Likert scale. Participants in a face-to-face omnibus survey were shown either a five point (with mid -point) or four point (no mid-point) Likert scale of importance on a card and asked to state their opinion about the importance of product labelling (additives, ingredients etc.) on packaged foods. This research provides some evidence that social desirability bias, arising from respondents' desires to please the interviewer or appear helpful or not be seen to give what they perceive to be a socially unacceptable answer, can be minimised by eliminating the mid-point ('neither... nor', uncertain etc.) category from Likert scales. There is also some evidence that the presence or absence of a mid-point on an importance scale produces distortions in the results obtained.

Garland, Ron. Marketing Bulletin (1991). Articles>Research>Methods>Surveys

Ethnographic Research in Business and Technical Writing    

Two widely disseminated approaches impose reductive boundaries on ethnographic research by privileging one context of meaning over other essential contexts. The first, emphasizing statistical validity, privileges the research community by recommending that the ethnographer's data analysis via coding agree with that of other raters from the research community. The second asserts that the ethnographer who comes closest to validity comes closest to presenting only the subject's point of view. Ethnography, however, comprises four essential, overlapping contexts: the phenomenal context (that which is observed/recorded), the site's cultural context (the subjects' outlook), the research community context, and the researcher's interior context, shaped by experience and education. Each of the four vantages has dominating tendencies, but if one does dominate to the exclusion of others, the reductive result is data-centered, thin description; subjects-centered groupthink; research community-centered groupthink; or researcher-centered solipsism. Although all contexts of meaning are important, none should fully eclipse the others.

Cross, Geoffrey A. Journal of Business and Technical Communication (1994). Articles>Business Communication>Research>Ethnographies

The Impact of the Internet and Digital Technologies on Teaching and Research in Technical Communication    

Technical communication practices have been changed dramatically by the increasingly ubiquitous nature of digital technologies. Yet, while those who work in the profession have been living through this dramatic change, our academic discipline has been moving at a slower pace, at times appearing quite unsure about how to proceed. This article focuses on the following three areas of opportunity for change in our discipline in relation to digital technologies: access and expectations, scholarship and community building, and accountability and partnering.

Gurak, Laura J. and Ann Hill Duin. Technical Communication Quarterly (2004). Articles>TC>Research>Online

Jared Spool on User Research Methods

Adaptive Path’s Peter Merholz recently talked to the founder of User Interface Engineering Jared Spool about user research.

Merholtz, Peter. Adaptive Path (2005). Articles>Research>Usability>User Centered Design