I’m finding that what worked before may be losing out to the current fad. One area of constant change is how we interact with the Internet and each other. A few months back I had asked if traditional online forums were going to fade away due to the popularity of social network sites and nearly everyone felt forums would remain.

I don’t think this is true. I think it’s wishful thinking. I can say this because I own a forum and have been watching things. People want to vote on other people. This is how they communicate their opinion without actually stating it with words. Chances are good you have several homes on the Internet that permit you to “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” thread comments. Whether or not you do, the option is there because this is a known favored user interaction device.

Since a forum such as Cre8asiteforums doesn’t incorporate a voting system, I’m now seeing other web sites link to forum threads and in THEIR sites, they can discuss the forum thread and members can vote.

It’s a sign.

SEO and Usability Games

I’ve been watching this too. Call me crazy, but I feel the two practices can share the same house. I think it’s unnaturally limiting to peg one before the other or one without the other.

Search engine optimization is more than about the act of searching, in my opinion. It’s about finding all the ways the Internet enables people to connect so they’ll produce and create something they want or need in a new way.

The way to discover what people want to create is to get far, far beyond how they were taught to search or interact with web pages. Search itself is one small part of an even greater act that we’re all participating in, if we’re invited or enabled to do so.

I haven’t been content to accept the way things were taught because everyone hasn’t had the opportunity to ride the horse. Accessibility and designing for seniors and “baby boomers” remaining an afterthought are just two quick examples.

Can You Understand What You Don’t Know?

Sometimes we build a web site for who we know best. That would be ourselves. We’re not so good at building for invisible people, which essentially, most everyone is. Sure, we have user studies, click tracks, database criteria to play with. But we base design guidelines, business requirements and site enhancements on the words that someone might type back to us or lines in graphs. Data gleaned from video taping users in a lab is another. When was the last time you sat in a lab answering questions or having your mouse movements recorded?

When I look in the mirror, I don’t see a line going up and down. I’m made up of a trillion billion tiny details that no web site designer or search engine marketer could ever know.

Are We Designing For The Human Experience? is a discussion I started in Cre8asiteforums a few days ago, inspired by DUX 2007: A great conference, but fundamentally off the mark.

I wrote:

My own observations and personal feelings are that sooner or later end users will stop basing their experiences on the short-lived thrill of the next roll-out of the “something new”. There’s a movement towards substance and the “integrity of being” as I call it. The impact of the “green” movement tells me that people are ready for experiences that place a strong value and emphasis on their participation and programs that include and welcome them, rather than being a “cog in the wheel”.

Designing for participation can be seen in social media, but despite all these new sites designed to bring us together, I still feel disconnected. The experience of social networking is only going to be based on how much we’re willing to share. Rather than the whole human, we’re more likely to get bits and pieces and believe we’re getting a human experience online. We’re not. (Emphasis mine.)

Consider that playing out right now is the fight over what comes “first” – SEO or usability. The whole argument leaps right over the idea of creating something meaningful.

I’m not alone in my thoughts, as a visit to the discussion will show.

I think some people wanted the chance to look at this too.

Comments

Social media are the new vehicles on the Internet that allow humans to interact with each other. They’re proliferating at an incredible rate. It can be as simple as a commenting system on a blog or voting on videos on YouTube. Most humans are sociable creatures and enjoy such interactions. Not surprisingly social media are becoming more and more popular.

It’s all very human and the normal rules of human behaviour apply. Regrettably people are often drawn to check out an accident or a fire. In the same way, bad news travels much faster than good news.

If proof were needed, a small case in the last two days illustrates the strength of this factor. Lee Odden of TopRankBlog ran a poll on the Best Forums for Search Marketing Tips. The blog post would undoubtedly have drawn a certain amount of traffic. However inadvertently Lee omitted from the poll one of the more popular forums, Cre8asite Forums (of which I am a moderator).

The Cre8asite Fourms have their own special character. When Forum members heard of the omission, they headed across in droves to add their comments and show their support for Cre8asite Forums. Undoubtedly the blog post has seen much more traffic than it otherwise would have seed.

Both the Blog and Cre8asite Forums have probably benefited significantly from this glitch. Lee has acknowledged that he had inadvertently omitted Cre8asite Forums from the list. It clearly was not intended as link-bait. Yet the final result is that it is more successful than it otherwise would have been.

[For those interested, at the time of writing Cre8asite Forums with 25 write-in votes in the Comments almost pipped the front runner in the poll, High Rankings Forum, which has 27 votes.]

It almost makes you wonder whether it is better to include some intriguing mistakes in blog posts rather than seeking perfection. That would be a distressing moral to draw from such incidents.

Comments

While I

He’s convinced that people start companies based on the “education” they receive in forums and that, if I’m understanding his complaints, it’s my job to make sure every post is perfect and correct.

In one example he chose, just to get my goose, he used a thread in which someone wanted a FLASH-based website reviewed by forum community members. We offer, at Cre8asiteforums, something called the “Website Hospital“, that is essentially free user testing. Since anyone can use the website being presented for a review, the responses run from experienced critical feedback to a general opinion.

In the FLASH site thread, the worn out argument against FLASH and SEO or FLASH and usability came up again. Because someone said they don’t like FLASH, you would have thought the sky was falling. I was led to the scene because I guess it’s somehow my job to set everyone straight and explain that FLASH will not kill anybody. If I don’t do that, it’s assumed that by my being the usability oriented person, I hate FLASH.

People must really believe that user centered design folks have nightmares about FLASH, run screaming in terror when a company wants it and faint when presented with marketing a site with FLASH. When I was interviewed by Webpronews for an as yet unreleased video interview, one of the first questions I was asked about was what I thought of FLASH.

I like it. I’ve seen it used in smart ways on websites. Pages with some embedded FLASH can still be optimized for search engines. Persons who browse in strict text only mode, with no bells and whistles options on, can still tolerate a website if some things are added to it, such as “Skip to content” and content that paints the same picture that the FLASH is doing with the visuals. (That same focused, keyword rich content is also sought after by search engines.)

I caught an article today in my feeds about how usability is a waste of time for websites and implementing accessibility and usability destroy creativity.

Poppycock. A favorite part of my work is finding all the cool ways to enhance a client’s website for persuasiveness, credibility, conversions and smooth sailing through the implementation of usability oriented elements. I’m not hired to kill the website or suck the life out of it.

Cool Usability, User Experience Finds

Check out The Usability Test Toolkit by the good folks at User Focus. The price goes up after December, so you may want to inspect it now, rather than later.

Customer Engagement Report by e-consultancy. It’s a 63 page document. From their survey they’ve learned:

Some key findings:
42% are planning to apply user-generated content (UGC) to their websites in the next 12 months; 23% are using it already.35% are planning to use corporate blogs in the next 12 months; 17% are using them already. 33% are planning to use podcasting in the next 12 months; 18% using it already. 35% are planning to use videocasting in the next 12 month; 17% using it already.

Sitepoint’s new publication, The Usability Kit.

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Uability Consultant, Kimberly Krause Berg, is the owner of UsabilityEffect.com, Cre8pc.com, and Cre8asiteForums. Her background in organic search engine optimization, combined with web site usability consulting, offers unique insight into web site development.