My Blog

WK 13: Choosing Keywords

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Fong) — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 09:51:00 +0000

Choosing Keywords
Keywords are words that people use to find your website. Keywords are the words entered into the search field of a Search Engine to search for website pages related to or including those words. For example, if you are looking for blue shoes, you would type “blue shoes” into a Search Engine and find websites related to “blue shoes”. The phrase “blue shoes” is called a keyword phrase. To increase your Search Engine traffic you should choose a 1-3 word keyword phrase for each individual page of your website. You also should choose two or three keyword phrases that constitute the overall theme of your website.

Methods of Choosing Keywords
a. Google® Sandbox Tool will return a list of words it believes are related words. Other websites including, NicheBot, and Wordtracker offers a similar service as well.

b. Look at your competitors websites, and determine what keywords they are targeting. One method of doing this is to take a look at their keywords meta tag. In Internet explorer you can do this by:
1. Clicking on the top pulldown menu “View”.
2. Scrolling down and click on the menu item “Source”.

Once you have your list of keywords it's time to find out if anyone searches for them. You can do this by using the Overture® search term suggestion tool. The Overture® search term suggestion tool shows you how many times a certain keyword was searched for the previous month. You can use this tool to find out how many times people search for keywords related to your website. For example, go to the Overture® search term suggestion tool and type in “dinosaur”. Then click the button to the right. You will now see a screen that shows a big table of keyword phrases that include the word dinosaur. Here is an example snippet of the list for September 2004:
109644 dinosaur
15899 dinosaur picture
8433 dinosaur costume
5548 dinosaur game
5419 barney the dinosaur
5018 dinosaur fossil
4575 dinosaur toy
The number to the left is the number of times people searched for a particular keyword. The words to the right of the numbers are the keyword phrases that were searched for.

Reference site: http://www.outsourceseo.in/choosing-keywords.htm
http://www.free-seo-news.com/newsletter148.htm
http://www.webpronews.com/ebusiness/sitepromotion/wpn-3-20040826WhatisTheGoogleSandboxEffect.html

WK12: Understand the Black Hat SEO

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Fong) — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 09:27:00 +0000

Black Hat SEO methods:
1. Hidden or invisible text - "alt", "no frame" and "no script" sections.
2. Keyword stuffing - insertion of hidden, random text on a webpage to raise the keyword density or ratio of keywords to other words on the page.
3. Repeating keywords in the Meta tags, and using keywords that are unrelated to the site's content
4. Gateway or doorway pages
Creating low-quality web pages that contain very little content but are instead stuffed with very similar key words and phrases. They are designed to rank highly within the search results. A doorway page will generally have "click here to enter" in the middle of it.
5. Scraper sites
Scraper sites, also known as Made for AdSense sites, are created using various programs designed to 'scrape' search engine results pages or other sources of content and create 'content' for a website. These types of websites are generally full of advertising, or redirect the user to other sites.

6. Link farms
Involves creating tightly-knit communities of pages referencing each other, also known humorously as mutual admiration societies
7. Hidden links
Putting links where visitors will not see them in order to increase link popularity.
8. Sybil attack
This is the forging of multiple identities for malicious intent, named after the famous schizophrenia patient Shirley Ardell Mason. A spammer may create multiple web sites at different domain names that all link to each other, such as fake blogs known as spam blogs.
9. Wiki spam
Using the open editability of wiki systems to place links from the wiki site to the spam site. Often, the subject of the spam site is totally unrelated to the page on the wiki where the link is added. While many powerful tool exist to filter or block email spam, there are very few tools for blocking wikispam.
10. Page hijacking is a form of spamming the index of a search engine (spamdexing). It is achieved by creating a rogue copy of a popular website which shows contents similar to the original to a web crawler, but redirects web surfers to unrelated or malicious websites. Spammers can use this technique to achieve high rankings in result pages for certain key words.
11. Referer spam is a kind of spamdexing (spamming aimed at search engines). The technique involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referer url pointing to a spam-advertised site. Sites that publicize their access logs, including referer statistics, will then end up linking to the spammer's site.
12. Buying expired domains
Some link spammers monitor DNS records for domains that will expire soon, then buy them when they expire and replace the pages with links to their pages.

Reference link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing
http://seo.goto.gr/how-to-not-hire-seo-company.html

WK11: CSS can do datasheet and table like.

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Fong) — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 16:23:00 +0000

Scenario
You want to let users view, enter, or edit multiple records of the same type. You would like to use the least space possible, without compromising usability.
A conventional way of showing multiple similar rows is the datasheet. It takes the labels for fields and records to the extremes (column and row headers), allowing for a very compact format.

Reference link
Datasheet like CSS: http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/datasheet.cfm
Table like CS:S http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/tabular_list.cfm

WK 8: Is Google Advertising Evil?

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Fong) — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 06:55:00 +0000

Google is not Google
What kind of company is Google? Ask most people this question and the answer you'll likely get is "search." While it is true that Google is a company focused on search, they don't survive through search. Instead, like all companies, they are judged on their profits. And as John Gruber points out, they don't profit from search, they profit by selling advertisements. This in turn makes Google an advertising company. That's more profound than you might suspect.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's talk about usability for a second. I'm going to explain that Google's necessary focus on advertising can teach us a lot about playing the usability game. Specifically, this article will characterize a dilemma that is tied to Google's advice to publishers on how to place advertisements. The dilemma is resolved through usability, which in turn will teach us a lot about how to mix business and the user experience.

Mental Models and Expectation Violation
People develop mental models. As you move and act, and as you live your life, you create your own understanding of the world. Every web site you visit influences you. The benefit is that your mental models help you get things done faster. Life is easier if you can follow the same process. Habits and automaticity yield a decreased cognitive load, which frees you up for things that matter more.
However, there is a downside. Unfortunately, there are times where your mental model doesn't reflect reality. Still other times, your mental model seems to be exactly right but someone has broken the rules. You expect X but you get Y. This disconnect is called expectation violation.
From a usability point of view, expectation violation is troublesome. It yields a poor user experience. We want people to get what they expect and what they want. In the case of games, puzzles, or art, this might not be true but generally we try to minimize expectation violation. It's a thorn we try to remove through testing, analysis, and solid design.

The Pain of Advertising

Users do not enjoy advertising, Super Bowl advertising notwithstanding. It is an annoyance to reading, learning, acting, clicking, thinking, and everything else tied to web activity. However, to compensate for the annoyances, humans have developed advertising blindness. We ignore it. The catch is that we want to ignore advertising but still let the good stuff through. To make the magic happen, we've developed mental models to help us separate the wheat from the chaff. In plain terms, we expect advertising in certain places but not in others.
This line of thinking is not new or unique, especially in the world of usability. Shaihk and Lenz (2006) did research demonstrating exactly where users expect web objects like search and advertising to appear. Not surprisingly, and as you can see from the graphic below, users expect advertisements on the edges of the page, particularly in the right column of the page and top row of the page. At the same time, it is important to note that users do not expect advertising in the left column or, more importantly, the body of the page.

Explicit Guidance from Google on Violating User Expectations?
Google is keenly aware of the research that I've outlined above. They know what users expect. However, they also care about profits and they don't mind actively encouraging content publishers to (seemingly!) violate user expectations. In fact, they've provided explicit guidance on this.

That's right folks, Google actively encourages content providers to place advertising in the middle of the page where users normally expect to see content. At the same time, they actively discourage publishers from putting advertising in the right column where users expect advertising.
For what it is worth, Pete Freitag blogged a webinar where Google stated that the more you blend in with the site, the less chance that ad blindness will occur. This should astonish you because it appears to break the Google mantra of Do No Evil.

The Escape, Including the Usability Insights
Google is telling publishers to place advertisements right in the middle of pages, blended with content. This would imply that Google is being evil because they seem to be asking publishers to violate user expectations. Magically, they dodge this bullet. They aren't being evil, publishers are happy, users are happy, and Google makes gobs and gobs of money.
They do it by augmenting the user experience. The advertisements that Google serves up through publishers have high usability. Putting this another way, the advertising is timely, relevant, and meaningful. Users actually appreciate the advertising. To them, Google ads are another type of content on a page with high value.
Instead of violating user expectations, Google has reversed the expected flow. The potential backlash is instead gratitude in the form of satisfied users. Amazing, but at the same time, completely understandable when viewed through the lens of usability.
Most advertising is low value. It is generally not wanted. But, when done well, as with Google advertising, uses get exactly what they want in the way of answers, solutions, and ideas. The technology behind Google that matches the current content with available relevant advertising is the usability special sauce. Users and publishers unknowingly rely on this highly usable technology and Google delivers. Brilliant technology, brilliant user experience.
Once again, this demonstrates that Google prays at the altar of usability. They care about users, content providers, and advertisers. Because their technology is focused on delivering relevant results, they profit handsomely while helping all possible users involved. We’re all happy with the solution.This is a one of the most beautiful intersections of technology, business, and the user experience I have ever seen.

Reference link:
Google Ads. Evil: http://www.apogeehk.com/articles/Is_Google_Advertising_Evil.html
Google Ads. Advice: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=17954

WK 7: Does the Intrusiveness of an Online Advertisement Influence User Recall and Recognition?

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Fong) — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 16:33:00 +0000

Summary: This study investigated the effect of the type (banner ad, pop-up ad and floating ad) and state (animated and non-animated) of online advertisements on recall and recognition of the advertisements. It was hypothesized that floating ads, pop-up ads, and animated ads would be easier to recall due to their intrusive nature. Results showed that participants in the pop-up ad and floating ad condition had better recall of the presence of the ad as well as better recognition. Animation did not significantly influence any of these measures

There are several types of online advertisements. Floating ads (Figure 1) are seen to be the most intrusive in nature because, apart from being information dense, they obstruct the content of the webpage. Pop-up ads (Figure 2) also obstruct the content of the webpage but they are easier to get rid of by simply closing the pop-up window. Banner ads (Figure 3) can be considered the least intrusive in nature. Even though animation can make banner ads information dense, they do not obstruct the content of the webpage.

Method
Participants
Sixty Wichita State University students were recruited for their voluntary participation in the study. There were 13 male (21.7%) and 47 female (78.3%) participants. Their ages ranged from 18 to 55.
Apparatus and Materials
The study used a Pentium 4 powered computer displaying at resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels on a 17? flat screen monitor. Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6.0 with Macromedia Flash plug-in version 7 was used. Six forms of identical-sized advertisements (static banner ad, animated banner ad, static pop-up ad, animated pop-up ad, static floating ad, and animated floating ad) were placed approximately one-fourth of the way from the top of the left-aligned pages. The structure and layout of all six pages type were identical in layout and content and differed only in the type and state of the advertisement. The advertisement was for a fictitious restaurant.

Procedure

A questionnaire was used to gather background information prior to the participation in the study. The participants were randomly assigned to one of six conditions (static banner ad, animated banner ad, static pop-up ad, animated pop-up ad, static floating ad, and animated floating ad) and were shown a web page that contained a weather glossary and the assigned advertisement for the restaurant. They were asked to complete six information search tasks on that page and record their answers on paper. This was done to allow for adequate exposure to the ad. Participants were lead to believe that the purpose of the study was to evaluate the usability of the webpage only. They were not told that they would have to recall any portion of the web page following the search tasks.

After the completion of the search tasks, the participants were asked to recall the type of the advertisement, animation state of the advertisement, and its content. They were then asked to identify the advertisements that they were presented from a page with five other distracter advertisements. Finally, they were asked to complete a satisfaction questionnaire regarding the web page and the advertisement they just viewed.

Discussion
Results showed that the type of the ad displayed significantly influenced its recall and recognition. Participants in the pop-up and floating ad condition recalled seeing an ad more than those in the banner ad condition. Participants were able to recall the location of the floating ad the most. Recognition was best for the pop-up ad condition closely followed by the floating ad condition. The banner ad condition had a much lower recognition. Animation was found not to significantly influence recall or recognition. These results question the labor intensive, cost ineffective and, more importantly, bandwidth inefficient animations used in the ads.

Results from this study also showed that satisfaction was significantly lower for the animated ads as compared to the static ads. Of the nine participants who remembered exactly what the ad was for, five of them viewed an animated ad. Ten participants in the floating ad condition said that the ad bothered them while just one participant in the banner ad condition said the same, but again, recall and recognition were significantly higher for floating ads than for banner ads. So clearly, if user satisfaction could be ignored, floating ads appear to be the best type of ad to use but how that impacts the user expectations of a website still needs to be studied. If the ad revenue generated obstructs the true purpose of the website, or distracts the user, then the viability of the company itself may be at stake. Further research should investigate exactly what level of intrusion provides the best balance.

Reference: http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/81/OnlineAds.htm

WK5: Reference Link

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Fong) — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 09:47:00 +0000

Reference Link: http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2002/nt_2002_01_14_redesign.htm

Wk 5: Think twice before re-designing your website

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Fong) — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 07:06:00 +0000

The desire to 're-design' your website just because it looks 'out-of-date' may not simply be unnecessary but may also be counterproductive. Your most loyal customers will have got used to the layout and structure of your website. Launching a major new design risks confusing and alienating them.

The evolutionary approach had some logic in the early years of the Web when website design was an emerging discipline. Today, websites that are constantly evolving reflect bad planning rather than best practice. The most popular websites, on the other hand, seek to achieve solid architectural foundations that will remain constant over time.Take, for example, Yahoo, which is one of the Web's most popular websites. The basic architecture of the Yahoo website has changed little in seven years. In 1994, when Yahoo launched, it offered the following classifications: Arts, Business, Computers, Economy, Education, Entertainment, etc. By 1996, this had evolved to: Arts, Business & Economy, Computers & Internet, Education, Entertainment, etc. In 2001, the classification was: Arts & Humanities, Business & Economy, Computers & Internet, Education, Entertainment, etc.What is noticeable from Yahoo is how little the basic information architecture has changed over seven years. This is despite the fact that the quantity of content on, and the number of visitors to, Yahoo has grown explosively over that period.

The essential 'look and feel' of Yahoo has remained the same too. Why? Because millions of people are used to it. The behavior of people on the Internet is conservative - they go to less and less websites. Yahoo visitors have invested time and energy learning how to get around Yahoo. This very investment is what keeps many people using Yahoo, rather than going to another portal.

The irony is that the re-design, demanding much effort and expense, can do real damage. The people who use your website most will be among your most valuable customers. Unless the original design was deeply flawed, they will likely hate any changes you make. A new website design means they have to re-learn how to get to parts of the website they regularly visit.

Wk 6: How to avoid the design revision death spiral

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Fong) — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 17:04:00 +0000

Challenges:

The revision death spiral
Subsequent meetings where the client decides that the currently chosen path should be scrapped in favor of a previously abandoned path. If every meeting involves re-considering first assumptions or second-guessing previous decisions, it is impossible to move forward.

Unfocused and unspecific feedback
Many clients have had a hard time focusing on the appropriate level of detail—early in the project they want to discuss the intricacies of one small widget when the design team is trying to come to resolution about the overall interaction framework.

Preconceptions and prejudgments
Without any research to suggest that this functionality satisfies an observed user need, that's a potentially harmful preconception; it can impede progress on designs of functionality that does support user needs and goals. Compromise does not always lead to the best solution

Compromise does not always lead to the best solution
Compromises can undermine this conceptual integrity, reducing the effectiveness of the solution.

No accounting for taste
Client feedback is based upon personal taste, rather than an assessment of the design's potential satisfaction of user and business goals.

Solution:

Manage your communications
When designers were too tired, they walk out leaving the valuable work on the whiteboard. One interaction designer and one design communicator. Where the interaction designer is ultimately responsible for the conceptual integrity and visual renderings of the design solution, the design communicator's primary responsibility is to ensure that our solutions and ideas are clearly communicated among design team members and to our clients.

Get the right people in the room
We attempt to maintain a balance between small design teams and larger cross-functional teams. Initial ideation and framework design is very difficult to do in a large group—this is where conceptual integrity is critical, and while some divergent thinking is crucial for creativity, large groups tend to be uncontrollably divergent, making it impossible to establish momentum or direction.
We are also somewhat hesitant to perform initial design framework development with clients because we've run into situations where very senior client representatives grow quite attached to initial brainstorm ideas that subsequently turned out not to be satisfactory solutions

Collaborate early and often
We should involve our clients as soon as we have something that is substantially coherent. The benefits here are twofold: we have more time to accommodate the feedback, and clients become more committed to solutions that they have been involved in developing, thereby reducing the chance of getting torpedoed at a major milestone check-in.

Use personas and scenarios to provide context
When it comes to client feedback and collaboration, personas help us maintain the proper context for assessing the fitness of a solution. Rather than relying on personal taste or aesthetic judgment, we are able to assess a design on the basis of whether it helps a user achieve her goals, and whether she would find the experience pleasurable or compelling. We typically introduce a design solution by describing a persona going through a scenario where she uses the product to accomplish something.

Develop visual renderings in progressive detail
There's really nothing more frustrating than showing a client what is intended to be a rough sketch of the big picture and having him or her get hung up on the visual style or a specific icon. For this reason, as our design process starts at the big picture and works inwards to define more and more detail, we are very sparing with detail in our high-level sketches

Reference Link:
http://www.cooper.com/content/insights/newsletters/2005_issue02/Early_and_often.asp

WK 4: Usability Impact to Online Store

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Fong) — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 10:12:00 +0000

Online Stores are very popular in Internet and attacts more Customer to purchase.
There are some researches and findings:
1. In a study of 8,600 Web-using households, Forrester Research found that 67% of users cited ease of use and 59% cited download speed as reasons for continuing to return to Web sites.
2. 27% of all Web transactions are abandoned at the payment screen while 75% of shoppers abandon their shopping cart without making a purchase.
3. 40% of people never return to a Web site after a negative user experience.

It reflects ease of use and download speed are the successful factors. However, of all the Web sites studied, 84% had pages that downloaded too slowly.

Let's compare some Online store of famous corporations, HP, PCCW, DELL.
HP and PCCW need longer time than DELL.
HP needs many clicks to reach Online store first page after found the product with difficult.
PCCW and DELL easy to make a Purchase. However, PCCW did not use attactive color for "Add to cart" and other related buttons.

What are the benefits if a Web site with good usability?
a) 31% decrease in rate of exit from the home page
b) 45% decrease in rate of exit from catalog pages
c) 67% increase in number of repeat customers

How to realize the full potential of your site:
- Surveying your customers and prospects to determine what they're coming to your site to find
- Putting the right links in the right places, and making them easily identifiable
- Clearly distinguishing your most important pieces of content
- Making pages readable
- Creating navigation that tells users where they are, how to get where they want to go, how to get back to where they came from
- Keeping contact information and the BUY button in front of users at all times
- Giving your site a consistent look and feel throughout, compatible with the image you want to project to your most valuable customers
- Reducing download time by one second per page to dropped abandonment rate from 30% to 8%.

Reference Link:
Usability Impact to Online Store: http://acroglobal.com/usability.htm?source=Yahoo
Poor HP Online Store: www.hp.com.hk
Better PCCW Online Store: www.pccw.com
Best DELL Online Store : www.dell.com.hk

WK 3: Customer Satisfaction

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Fong) — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 16:06:00 +0000

Everyone knows gathering requirements should be meet customer needs. However, how can we get requirements completely so that customer satisfy us.

According to ISO 9000 standard , Principle 1 Customer focus:
Organizations depend on their customers and therefore should understand current and future customer needs, should meet customer requirements and strive to exceed customer expectations.

If exceed customer expectations, he/she will more satisfy us. For example, we consider to extend web page easily and load the first page fast.

Principle 6 Continual improvement
Continual improvement of the organization's overall performance should be a permanent objective of the organization. Applying the principle of continual improvement typically leads to:
- Providing people with training in the methods and tools of continual improvement.
- Making continual improvement of products, processes and systems an objective for every individual in the organization.
- Establishing goals to guide, and measures to track, continual improvement.
- Recognizing and acknowledging improvements

The tool to measures customer satifaction is Customer Satisfaction Survey, it should be designed to make it easy forcustomers to fill out and easy for you to quickly analyzeyour customer comments.

Myths: A lack of customer complaints means that you have satisfied customers.
Fact: It reflects no customer complaint but does not means "Satisfied".

Reference Links:
ISO Customer Focus and Continous improvement: http://www.iso.org/iso/en/iso9000-14000/understand/qmp.html
ISO Customer Satisfaction Survey: http://www.dnvcert.com/DNV/Certification1/News/NewsLetter/ISOFactxVolume4Issue2/Volume4Issue2/Volume%204%20Issue%202.PDF

WK 2: Better Accessibility

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Fong) — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 16:30:00 +0000

To make Web has better accessibility, most web site provides larger fonts, indexed / categorized information. However, most web sites are designed for PC users but not designed for Mobile Phones /PDA. Common PC screens needs square-look design while PDA or Mobile phone needs narrow design.

Acturally, more and more people use mobiles to online. For example, the number of Internet users in Japan accessing from cell phones exceeded those using it from personal computers in 2005. At the end of the year, 70 million people using the Internet from mobile devices, compared to 66 million conventional PC users. The total mobile Internet commerce market was worth 24 billion .

Finally, if you want to attack more visitors from Japan, you should also design a Web Page for PDA/Mobile Devices. On the other hand, I don't suggest to setup webpage for WAP unless your target customers use WAP to access Internet.

Reference Link:
For PC: www.hko.gov.hk
For PDA/Mobile: http://pda.hko.gov.hk/maine.htm
For WAP: wap.hko.gov.hk
For Japanese Internet visiting habit: http://www.cw.com.hk/computerworldhk/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=353677

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Fong) — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 03:20:00 +0000

What is good Web Design

Let's see and compare HK Government Website:
1. www.info.gov.hk
2. www.esdlife.gov.hk
3. www.gov.hk/tc/residents (The Latest WebPage)

The first webpage shows department information and electronic forms.
The second webpage provide shopping and Electronic public services.
The latest third webpage combines two webpages functions: department information, electronic forms and Electronic public services. This webpage will replace the first two.

The third webpage is required, information is centralized so visitors do not need to select appropriate web sites. The new page used tags to catagorized pages and indexed departments, evrything is clear and tidy.

On the other hand, the first two pages are bad. The info.gov.hk provided too many similar links to select while the ESDLife provided too many information and links.

Now, you may know principles on good webs.