So, we already talked about how you can simply check your design and usability to meet current standards. Another major problem with websites today is that people simply can’t find it. People try and search it via google or any other search engine, and they don’t get your website as a first result, but the one that belongs to one of your competitors. So, how can you check that this is the case?

There are a couple of really simple things. Is your site made in flash? Then I’m 80% sure that it has not been build to suit the needs of the modern search engine. An easy check is to see if the web address changes when you click a link (the “http://www.yourwebsite.nl” thing), if it doesn’t, I’m 95% certain that the search engine cannot index your website. My advice then would be to build a new site using HTML and CSS.

Another thing that’s pretty easy to check is if you are using something called SEO text. You can check this by viewing the HTML source of your web page and check to see if there are any “H1″ HTML tags, or “P” tags. “H1″ tags say the browser it’s a heading while the “p” text says it’s a paragraph. These things are used by search engines to see whats important and what isn’t.

Third thing, check the HTML source again, but this time for the use of “keywords” and “description”. These are both properties of “Meta” tags. The keywords are used by search engines to check the words it should “hit” your website on, while the description will be what is stated underneath the link in the search engine.

So, there you have it. Three simple checks to see if SEO is a big mess. If these things are correct, check the next post about the actual texts. Cheers…

• “We need a social media” –> heard that one from my teachers (it has been said out loud, and, not the once)
• It’s the design isn’t is? We need a new website!
• The content is badly written isn’t it? We need a new website!
• Something about SEO? I don’t get it?!

First things first you “big corporate boss-people”, there is no such thing as “a social media”. Second, most of the time the answer does not need to be that you need a new website.

I’m going to answer all of the questions above with a small little guideline on how you can save money by not doing research, this is part one.

So, what should it be? Generally speaking, a corporate bloke with a semi-scientific background in researching stuff says that they should hire an agency that can find out what is wrong with the website. Earning that company a lot of money in the process. Who is this article for? Well, if you are working on a cutting edge website that has a lot of “new” interface tricks, then it’s probably best if you do the research since you’re getting into new territory. But, if your website is a basic one that just needs to present information or get people to a contact form, then this is the guideline you should follow..

So, I present to you, my top tips for saving money on website research..Part one.. Drumroollll…

It’s the design isn’t it?

Don’t immediately hire a researcher to look at the design of your website. I’m currently referring to the design of the page in from both an optical as a usability point of view.

The internet is your best pal on this one. Let’s see if we can answer the questions above with a simple checklist.

Step 1

Do you see any resemblance to the things on this website?

1. Is your website hosted on “Angelfire“?
2. Is the text on your website moving?
3. Do you have music on the background of your site?
4. Does the background of your site move or jump or snow or blink?

Well, if any of the text above fits your site, it sucks.. Hire a designer, and not your nephew, the neighbor or your sun in law (or the guy that previously designed your website)!!

Step 2

If not, you are in good luck my friend. So now, what is next? Guidelines, guidelines and guidelines. Pretty simple huh? You just grab a couple of websites that state the proper guidelines for the usability of a website, and check to see if they fit your site.

• Despite the fact that the site isn’t a looker, there is a lot of usable information in the pdf’s: link
• Accessible content: link

Step 3

Now, if all of those things match up, there is only one thing that is still part of the design, the actual appearance. This is a bit tricky, but the best thing you can do is post is on a forum filled with web designers, something like this. This way, you should get an honest opinion on how people view your site. If it’s shit, see the last sentence of point 1. Otherwise, you can probably say that it isn’t the design that is putting people off, move on to the next question.

So, this it it for part one, please check in every once in a while, I expect part two to be online next week ..

P.s. Take the time it took you to do this for your site, and multiply that by let’s say €75 (hourly rates of research) and multiply times 0.6 (you are slower then a researcher), then you would have a rough cost estimate on how much a researcher would cost.

1. Upcoming post. Been thinking a lot about the (a) next one. It’s about when to hire researchers to optimize your website, and when to use the internet and your brain. It will be called: “Researching, when to use common sense instead”. I wrote about something related (wireframe prototype testing) earlier.
2. Why I’ve been so darn busy I couldn’t post. Couple of things. First, I moved into a new place. Took me a week to pack up my things and move to my new place (which blocked my brain of clear thinking for weeks). Second, I started a new course in school, in which they ask me to make stuff that I can’t do without actually paying attention to it. It (researching) is very time consuming, and they are letting us research improvements for websites (http://www.kasteel-ammersoyen.nl/), which I could probably specify of in a couple of minutes, but they are letting us spend hours and hours. It might a good way to learn researching, but it is boring as f*ck.
3. I bought myself a new mug. “Stay up all fucking night”. Be sure to check these guys out. Some valuable design lessons. Mug can’t be bought here (can’t find the version I bought, but they do have others).
4. Why don’t people shut the f*ck up in classes when they aren’t doing anything. Show some respect. If you don’t, please leave.. You don’t have to be there if you don’t want to..
5. I kind of promised before, but I’ll try to post more.. Hehe..
6. If something goes wrong with a client, discuss it (immediately). Don’t ignore your gut feeling! (I had to learn that the hard way..).
7. Merry Christmas!

I too recently installed Mac OSX Lion, and found myself with a macbook pro that was overheating badly. When using premiere to render some movie’s it topped 110c.. Which is waaayyy to hot for me.. Now, I was checking my activity monitor just now, and found out that my “Dock” process was using more (yes, more?) than 100% CPU..

While it was doing to my temperatures were around 70c. So, I did a simple “killall Dock”, which restarts the dock process, and now it is around 46c, which is still hotter than it was on Snow Leopard, but it’s better.. ..

Hope this helps..

BUT(1)
I’ve been absolutely cramped with stuff for my study, marketing plans, websites (http://devcenter.rolandpeelen.com/nasim/), web hops.. Etc. So I really haven’t had much time to post here…

BUT(2)
I’ve had some brilliant idea’s and my perfect web shop is now finished. I’ll be posting on both of these things soon, in the meanwhile, check out these things..

http://www.peppr.nl –> We build a new website for our company, and it kicks ass..

http://www.thefancy.com/ –> If you are like me and you like gadgety useless but super expensive stuff, you gotta like this!

http://www.chiefsformen.com/ –> I just bought some of their face wash, and it wakes you up like a kick in the face, I felt like crying the first time, soooo fresh!

So, hang in there for more..

So, how come? Well, prototype usability testing is all about design!

Lets take a look at “mailchimps” website.

I took the liberty of converting this to a usability design.

Now, in my opinion, the red “Sign up now” button does look a lot less important then it did before! It’s just another button.
To be very short, color and design are part of the user experience and should be part of the testing process (right from the start!). In wireframe testing you leave these things out, and might be correcting things that don’t even need correcting when the color and design is laid out.

Real user testing should be done with fully interactive and fully worked out prototypes!

Now, this looks like an easy one to tackle; just make everything the same. But how do you go about setting up the information? A microwave doesn’t have mp3 functionality, and for an mp3 player you don’t need to know how many “Watts” it is. So the moment I started thinking about this, it became more complicated then I initially thought.

First of all, many web shops are doing this wrong, get all the information you can get about a product. Don’t filter on what you think is useful, let the user decide!

I think the solution lies in using categories with shared properties and arranging them in a way that is always the same. Something like this:

Title | Price | Rating

General introduction

General category properties 01

Specific category properties 02

Dimensions

So, if you apply this to comparing two sets of headphones, you’ll get the some sort of “general audio” property  for the general category. This can then later be applied to a multitude of products. The “general audio” property can be applied to speakers, dolby surround systems etc. Next to that, you have the specific category, which then can be something like “headphones“. In this category all of the possible properties for a certain product are integrated. For both these categories there should be a standard format in which the properties are shown so you can exactly compare the two. This might be the most important part!

After you have the comparison, I thing there should be some sort of a button in which you can eliminate matching properties. So you only have the differences between the objects.

Now, I think this post, although (very) short, describes a big annoyance under consumers. I know I find myself wanting to compare two product only to go on the internet to find all of the properties since the web shop doesn’t have them. How do you experience this?

Next up: Check-out & Log-in

Well, there can be a number issues, both on the user (consumer) side, and on the client (web shop) side.

User:

• Search is to general, for example, searching for an electronic appliance in an electronic appliances web shop should get you pretty much all the stuff in the shop.
• Search is to specific and user gets incorrect results
• Search isn’t correctly spelled and user gets incorrect results

The first thing I wanted to improve was the following:

Better way to show products than just small crappy pictures

First of all, I want to show you were this annoyance is coming from.

So, my sister asked me to buy a MP3-player for her birthday, so I started searching the website of a company called “Media Markt“. It’s a company like (correct me if I’m wrong) the radioshack and they weren’t situated within 30 min of travel from my house, so I started searching their website for some products.

After typing “MP3-player” in the searchbox, not only did I get results that are completely useless, (see this), but I noticed that many of the products don’t have pictures. Now, this requires me to do another search, on google, finding the actual product. Next to that, some of the pictures of the products were so small that I couldn’t even see what materials it consists of.

Now, lets find us a solution!

The abstract that I would like to see reflected in web shops is the process of grabbing a product of the shelve, looking at it from all directions, being able to see to products next to each other, feel them etc.
Now, the process of feeling the actual products isn’t possible. But how can we integrate the “shelve” abstract, and try to make them work better?

The answer (imho) is a technique called 3d scanning. A friend of mine has a studio in which he has a couple of 3d scanners. I imagine the future of web shop (that don’t already have the 3d models) to use a scanning service like his to make his their physical models virtual. These virtual models can than be integrated into the website using a viewer that allows the user to zoom in, pan, and walk around the model.
I understand that this is a very costly way of doing things,  since everything has to be scanned in. A solution in between the conventional pictures and the high end 3d solutions (which should be more cost-effective) would be to simple take a series of pictures from the object (in a circle) and past those together so you get a similar effect; a horizontal slidable pan-around of the model.

Now, I’m sure there are already web shops that use these sort of methods, but I haven’t found them yet. If anyone knows websites that use these solutions for their products, please give a hint in the comments!

Next on the agenda is the following: Fine-tuning searches.. The better way!

A couple of things immediately came to mind:

Why do I have to say that my address actually is the shipping address

Why do I have to go trough pretty much all the ordering steps just to find out I can only pay by credit card

I never visit web shops just to “browse“, I’m always searching for stuff, so why does it load products before I have even given it some information on what exactly I’m looking for?

Why is the company branding always so big and bold? I’m searching for products, the website is merely a tool to get there

Why do I find myself fine-tuning my searches and do I need to set three or four property’s before I get any decent result.

So, current web shops suck, that’s the assumption I’m going for. But where should I go to let them stop sucking? I started asking myself how the shopping process goes in actual stores, and how (with the help of modern techniques), we can mirror the positive, and discard the negatives properties. Lets map those.

Positive:

I can clearly look at the product before buying it

The products are grouped

I can easily switch between products and compare the two (or three, four, etc.)

I can feel the texture and weight of the product

Negative

Not al the information of the product is available (need to look on the box or ask employee)

You cannot see which product has been bought the most

You cannot see which product has a good rating

You cannot sort the products to your liking (price, rating, most bought)

You have to walk to the shop (I know I’m lazy, my bad)

If we try to summarize what a web shops properties should be (according to me that is), we need the following

Better way to show products than just small crappy pictures

Don’t show products immediately, let the user perform a search

It’s about the products, not the website or company, so show the products big and bold

Let the user easily fine-tune their searches (no complicated sliders and no drop downs)

Create an easy way for the user to compare products

Create a section in the info that contains vital information about the product (Dimensions, weight, used materials)

Use a standard layout for all the info so the client can immediately search for his most important property

Group stuff together

Make sure that when the user performs a search, he gets good results instantly

Easy check-out system

Very easy log-in system (just let the server automatically generate a password corresponding with your username)

So. Let’s get cracking on that, shall we. Next posts will be about all of the properties that need integration..

Keep out for the next post: Webshop product pictures; the alternatives that don’t suck!