I sent the address to the blog post announcing the release to some friends I knew would be interested, and quickly they responded with some variation of “Okay, but where is the music?”

The blog post consisted mostly of the cover art for the album, and hidden beneath that, in parentheses, the words “click me”. “Click me” wasn’t clickable, nor were there any text links or other indicators to download the music. People weren’t figuring out that you had to click on the album art to go to the page dedicated to the album. Without meaning to, I had started a miniature usability test.

This problem can always be avoided if you remember to make an effort to include text links with trigger words in them. Ironically, Brian Ibbott of Coverville had written a great trigger-filled link, but didn’t attach a link in it. Here is a screenshot of the entire blog post. I have outlined in blue where the link should be:

For example, this article about a $100 bonus for opening a Chase checking account was from January 2008, but was still attracting many visits. From June 2009 through August 2009, it was 3.3% of the landing pages, which is pretty high for an outdated article from a year and a half ago. Not surprisingly, the bounce rate was around 50%.

The problem is that even though that promotion had ended a long time ago, there were other similar Chase promotions, even ones that were featured on the same blog. So, in a nutshell, the plan I came up with was this:

1. Look at your top Landing Pages, focusing on the high Bounce Rates
2. Read the content of the article, see if it’s out of date
3. Search the site for updated content in the same vein
4. Add a link from the old to the new, make sure it’s clear and obvious

Consumerism Commentary has been running for over seven years, so it might seem like a daunting task to update all your old articles. But that’s the thing: you don’t need to update all of them, just the ones people are paying attention to.

Over the course of a couple hours, we added a little over 20 of these old-to-new links, and from September through November 2009, AdSense Revenue for the updated pages represented 3.5% of the total. Put another way, the site’s revenue is up 3.5% because of a handful of strategically-placed links.

If you don’t feel like you have the time to work up this strategy, or the skill to implement it, or to track it properly, I’ll be happy to help you. Send us a quick message and let’s talk about it.

My knee-jerk reaction was to think, “Uh oh. People are misspelling his name. Are we accounting for that? Should we put the more popular misspelling in the meta keywords? Are people finding the wrong Brian Ibbott?”

But of course, after thinking it through, I remembered that this is what’s happening:

1. People are searching for “brian ibbot”
2. Search engines are attempting to correct the misspelling
3. People ignore the correction and click the thing they want

(Thankfully, Google also attempts to correct the typo “covervillw”, which I admit I find myself typing sometimes.)

So don’t worry if people are misspelling your name: the good search engines are smart enough to know the difference. Of course, if there is a separate Brian Ibbot out there in the world, who also has a music podcast, our strategy might be different.

For more, see Vanessa Fox’s article: Google Misspelling Match: A Tale Of Two Searches.

(Coverville is a well-respected and popular music podcast for which I do some regular traffic analysis. The host has graciously allowed me to share specific findings with you.)

The detailed information for mobile phone accessories appeared as a sort of “data dump”. The information was all there, but it wasn’t being structured in a useful manner. We ran several groups of usability tests with potential customers and found specific issues with the navigation:

Solution

In particular, people had trouble navigating the different categories of accessories (“what are Imaging Products?”), determining whether their phone would be compatible, and most critically, finding the “Buy Now” button.

My visual designer companion and I addressed these and more issues in the following mock up:

We invented the “Is Your Phone Compatible” tool, redesigned the category browsing to expose more detail, and included a task-based navigation, as well.

Particularly noteworthy:

• The payments are always running, unless manually overriden, so I invented a “CD-player style” control scheme near the top of the page
• “Date of Payment” was often referred to as the most critical piece of data, so it gets its own special treatment
• Comments are separated between System and User messages with a monospaced font for the System messages
• Efficiency was a key concern for the system, so I included the option of inserting a comment based on frequently-used comments instead of typing the same thing over and over.

Using the open-source “Bitstream Vera” font set and free icons from FamFamFam, you should have most of your common web page elements covered, including headings, form elements, content management functions, image placeholders, etc.

Download the .zip file if you like what you see:

The home page of the American Airlines main customer-facing site was suffering from an overabundance of options, confusing displays and inaccessible flyout menus, not to mention numerous front-end coding issues, noted on the screenshot below (click for larger version):

Solutions

I combined options wherever possible, made judicious use of “more” links for options that were just as valid but not as popular, used clear displays and labels for ancillary functions, and standardized form input types. The first screenshot below is of the final wire frame made for a new version of the home page, and the second is a designer’s interpretation of what the final result might look like:

Finished IA

Proposed Design