At the start of this year, I changed the design of ViNull.com. I was tired of the old design, but I also felt the old design was bad on usability. I know it’s odd to think of usability for a blog, but if you want to encourage people to explore more of your site then you need to think about it’s design.
Before I can talk about the design, or the stats I know you’ve skipped ahead to read, we need to talk experience. Experience (UX) differs from interface (UI) in story. Interface describes the location of buttons on a form, the experience describes the mood and thoughts of the user – more to the point – the mood and thoughts we want the user to have. So what is the ViNull.com story?
The primary user is the google developer, Geoff. Geoff doesn’t work for Google (big “G”), but instead works in a cube writing code as a mid level developer and googles (little “g”) his way out of a problem. Geoff will never see the homepage, and hopefully my SEO will start him out at in the right place (the post that answers his query). Now, I want to get Geoff to take a look at more of my site, and not just bounce (a term meaning views one page then leaves). Hopefully Geoff will read a few more posts, and then make the ultimate “purchase” on the site: subscribe to the RSS feed.
To give Geoff a better experience, I created tags that linked to other articles (I try to keep a meaningful, small set of tags), and list 5 related articles down the right-hand side with a few words from the start of the article to draw him in. I removed just about everything else from the old site that would distract Geoff from seeing the content (gone are the Amazon sidebar ads; I still however link to Amazon when mentioning a book). Hopefully he never needs it, but I’ve also given Geoff a search box as well.
Breaking down the numbers; these stats look at the first (almost) four months of this year, compared with the first (almost) four months of last. Visits are flat, mostly due to a lack of blogging. This is actually a good thing here, because it let’s us see the impact of the design change without needing to adjust for traffic levels. Other negatives is new visits are down slightly (I’m not attracting as many new readers as I did before), and the bounce rate is only slightly reduced.
Pageviews, Pages per Visit, and Average Time on Site are all way up. Geoff is spending more time on the site, and looking at more pages. I’d love to add in RSS subscription numbers here, to see if they continue the trend, but I wasn’t tracking RSS last year and this year Google has screwed all meaningful data out of feedburner, so I can’t trust the numbers even if the report would load. I can always improve, but I would call the design change a success.
The point of all this wasn’t to post my stats, but to introduce you to thinking about experience. It’s not enough just to know what Google’s golden triangle is or how to use proper fields on a form. You need to think about what the user is looking for, where they are when they are looking, and what state of mind they are in. Creating a profile behind the users, and giving them names (like Geoff) help you to think in a more human way about the problem.
If you are interested in reading more on this approach to designing for user experience, I recommend starting with "Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?" by Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Lisa Davis. I’ve talked about this book in the past, and still consider it a must read.
Posted By Mike On Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Filed under blog seo design developer |
Comments (2)
Nathan Blevins
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Tuesday, April 28, 2009
8:46:49 AM
I have to agree w/ you that the UX is a key component that is often overlooked or underplayed when it comes to SEO. I know that that is certainly the case for me, which is a good indicator of why my bounce rate is so high, lol. Although you did not directly mention it (but still practiced it), one of the best ways to get me to browse a site is to do a lot of self-linking of related / relevant topics. I have found myself browsing a site for hours due to this.
RSS is a factor that makes UX work pretty difficult. Once the user stops coming to your site (or when they only come to leave a comment), you lose many chances to tell them of your other content. This paired w/ the fact that Feedburner's stats are crap right now makes measuring your RSS crowd very difficult.
Metrics I always struggle with:
1) How do you measure the success of a blog post (and not end up beating yourself up when you don't hit that)? Typically some of my most informative and planned out posts are the ones that get very little noise.
2) How do you handle / measure the RSS crowd, which is, typically, your largest group?
Great post! It makes me want to rewrite / restructure my site now... ;)
Mike
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Tuesday, April 28, 2009
9:14:16 AM
Self linking is good, in moderation - don't follow jeff atwood and self link 99% of the time. Also, his bad SEO urls (codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001258.html) don't let you hover over the link and get a clue of the content.
Title is key to a blog post. As much as I'm the worst offender here, catchy titles don't get hits. A dull, direct, clear title is a better UX and for SEO. The best title uses the words Geoff will type into google when your post is the answer.
I don't worry over the RSS crowd - they are reading or at least seeing the posts. Odds are good at some point they will click through and comment, or forward a link to someone else.
