vendredi 29 mai 2015
jeudi 28 mai 2015
Google Confirms "Buy Button" To Appear "Imminently" in SERPs
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2015 Internet Trends
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mercredi 27 mai 2015
Twitter Announces Audience Insights Tool For Advertisers
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Resurrecting Old Websites
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mardi 26 mai 2015
Mobile Is Not Destroying Desktop Traffic
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New and Improved WebmasterWorld.com website.
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vendredi 22 mai 2015
Bing App Indexing SEO
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jeudi 21 mai 2015
Yandex Releases Beta Version Of Its Browser, With Privacy Turned On By Default
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LogJam Encryption Algo May Block Thousands of HTTPS Sites
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mercredi 20 mai 2015
Google Webmaster Tools Renamed to Search Console
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Twitter's Content Now In U.S. Google Mobile SERPs
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mardi 19 mai 2015
Google Confirms Algo Change: "Quality Update"
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Google Rich Snippets Data Dropping Out Of SERPs
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Meta-Moments: Thoughtfulness by Design
Ever had a moment on the internet when you’ve been forced to stop and think about what you’re doing? Maybe you’ve been surprised. Maybe you’ve stumbled across something new. Maybe you’ve come to see things in a different light. I call such experiences meta-moments: tiny moments of reflection that prompt us to think consciously about what we’re experiencing.
Take Google. In the early days, its clean white page helped distinguish it from the pack. While its competitors tripped all over themselves telling you how great they were and how much they had to offer, Google’s quieter strategy seemed bold and distinctive. “Our search experience speaks for itself,” it suggested. No need for spin or a hard sell. Over the years, as Google has continued to develop its search technologies, it has managed to retain that deceptive surface simplicity. I love that its minimal homepage has stayed intact (in spite of incessant doodling). Encouraging a thoughtful moment remains central to Google’s design.
Yet the prevailing wisdom within user experience design (UXD) seems to focus on removing the need for thought. We are so eager for our users to succeed that we try to make everything slick and seamless—to remove even a hint of the possibility of failure. Every new service learns about our movements in order to anticipate our next move. Each new product exists in an ecosystem of services so that even significant actions, such as making a purchase, are made to seem frictionless. The aim is not only to save us time and effort, but to save us from thinking, too.
Steve Krug’s seminal book Don’t Make Me Think! may have helped to shape this approach. This bible of usability is an undisputed cornerstone of UXD. But it can be taken too far. In fact, Krug himself has unofficially rechristened the book Don’t Make Me Think Needlessly! In doing so, he acknowledges that there are times when thoughtful interactions online are worth encouraging. While we shouldn’t need to think about where to find the search tool on a site (top right, please!), we should, of course, be encouraged to think before we purchase something—or, for that matter, before we make any significant commitment.
It’s a question of courtesy, too. When asking for deeper attention, we should feel confident that we’re not wasting people’s time. What we offer should more than repay them for their efforts—though there aren’t many moments when we can guarantee this.
I’m currently working on a project—an online version of a medical self-screening form—that has a valid reason for making users think. Success will involve making sure that users really understand the meaning of each question, and that they take the form seriously—that they take the time to answer honestly and accurately. My teammates and I find ourselves designing a slow experience rather than a fast one.
But what slows people down and makes them more thoughtful? And what is it about a particular design that makes people really invest their attention?
Laying the groundwork for thoughtfulness
In my experience, there seem to be three main strategies for encouraging meta-moments.
Roadblocks
Inbox by Gmail makes you think by confronting you with a barrier. You can’t just try the service. You have to be invited. You can request an invitation (by following the instructions on their site), or a friend can invite you—but you can’t get started right away. Anticipation and excitement about the service has space to gather and develop. And it does. In its first few weeks, invites were going on eBay for $200.
This strategy certainly worked on me. Within moments of landing on the page, I went from being slightly intrigued to a state of I-must-have-it. Following the instructions, I found myself composing an email to inbox@google.com requesting an invitation. “Please invite me. Many thanks, Andrew,” I wrote, knowing full well that no one but me was ever going to read those words. Why hadn’t they simply let me submit my email address somewhere? Why were they deliberately making things hard for me?
Something clever is going on here. Adding a barrier forces us to engage in a deeper, more attentive way: we are encouraged to think. Granted, not everyone will want or need this encouragement, but if a barrier can create a digital experience that is noticed and remembered, then it’s worth talking about.
Putting up a “roadblock,” though, seems like a risky way to encourage a meta-moment. Stopping people in their tracks may make them simply turn around or try another road. For the roadblock to be effective (and not just annoying), there has to be enough interest to want to continue in spite of the obstacle. When I encounter a paywall, for example, I need to be clear on the benefits of parting with my money—and the decision to pay or subscribe shouldn’t be a no-brainer, especially if you’re hoping for my long-term commitment. iTunes’s micropayments, Amazon’s “Buy now with 1-Click,” and eBay’s impulse bidding all represent a trend toward disengaging with our purchases. And in my own purchasing patterns, things bought this way tend not to mean as much.
Smartphone apps have a similar impact on me. Most of the time, it seems that their only aim is to provide me with enough fleeting interest to make me part with a tiny upfront cost. As a result, I tend to download apps and throw them away soon afterward. Is it wrong to hope for a less disposable experience?
In-app purchases employ a kind of roadblock strategy. You’re usually allowed to explore the app for free within certain limitations. Your interest grows, or it doesn’t. You decide to pay, or you don’t. The point is that space is provided for you to really consider the value of paying. So you give it some proper thought, and the app has to do far more to demonstrate that it deserves your money. FiftyThree’s Paper, my favorite iPad app, lets you have a blast for free and includes some lovely in-app promotional videos to show you exactly why you should pay.
Roadblocks come in many shapes and sizes, but they always enforce a conscious consideration of how best to proceed. Navigating around them gives us something to accomplish, and a story to tell. This is great for longer-term engagement—and it’s why digital craftspeople need to shift their thinking away from removing barriers and instead toward designing them.
Speed bumps
Speed bumps are less dramatic than roadblocks, but they still encourage thought. They aim to slow you down just enough so that you can pay attention to the bits you need to pay attention to. Let’s say you’re about to make an important decision—maybe of a legal, medical, financial, or personal nature. You shouldn’t proceed too quickly and risk misunderstanding what you’re getting yourself into.
A change in layout, content, or style is often all that is required to make users slow down. You can’t be too subtle about this, though. People have grown used to filtering out huge amounts of noise on the internet; they can become blind to anything they view as a possible distraction.
Online, speed bumps can help prepare us mentally before we start something. You might be about to renew your vehicle tax, for instance, and you see a message that says: “Hold up! Make sure you have your 16-digit reference number…” You know that this is useful information, that it’ll save you time to prepare properly, but you might find yourself getting a little frustrated by the need to slow down.
Although most of us find speed bumps irritating, we grudgingly accept that they are there to help us avoid the possibility of more painful consequences. For example, when you fire up an application for the first time, you may see some onboarding tooltips flash up. Part of you hates this—you just want to get going, to play—and yet the product seems to choose this moment to have a little conversation with you so that it can point out one or two essentials. It feels a little unnatural, like your flow has been broken. You’ve been given a meta-moment before being let loose.
Of course, onboarding experiences can be designed in delightful ways that minimize the annoyance of the interruption of our desired flow. Ultimately, if they save us time in the long run, they prove their worth. We are grateful, as long as we don’t feel nagged.
In spite of the importance of speed bumps online, we tend not to come across them very often. We are urged to carry on at speed, even when we should be paying attention. When we’re presented with Terms and Conditions to agree to, we almost never get a speed bump. It’d be wonderful to have an opportunity to digest a clear and simple summary of what we’re signing up for. Instead, we’re faced with reams of legalese, set in unreadable type. Our reaction, understandably, is to close our eyes and accelerate.
Diversions
Online diversions deliberately move us away from conventional paths. Like speed bumps, they make us slow down and take notice. We drive more thoughtfully on unfamiliar roads; sometimes we even welcome the opportunity to understand the space between A and B in a new way. This time, we are quietly prodded into a meta-moment by being shown a new way forward.
A diversion doesn’t have to be pronounced to make you think. The hugely successful UK drinks company Innocent uses microcopy to make an impact. You find yourself reading every single bit of their packaging because there are jokes hidden everywhere. You usually expect ingredients or serving instructions to be boring and functional. But Innocent uses these little spaces as a stage for quirky, silly fun. You end up considering the team behind the product, as well as the product itself, in a new light.
Companies like Apple aim for more than a temporary diversion. They create entirely new experience motorways. With Apple Watch, we’re seeing the introduction of a whole new lexicon. New concepts such as “Digital Touch,” “Heartbeat,” “Sketch,” “Digital Crown,” “Force Touch,” “Short Look,” and “Glances” are deployed to shape our understanding of exactly what this new thing will do. Over the course of the next few years, you can expect at least some of these terms to pass into everyday language. By that time, they will no longer feel like diversions. For now, though, such words have the power to make us pause, anticipate, and imagine what life will be like with these new powers.
The magic of meta-moments
Meta-moments can provide us with space to interpret, understand, and add meaning to our experiences. A little friction in our flow is all we need. A roadblock must be overcome. A speed bump must be negotiated. A diversion must be navigated. Each of these cases involves our attention in a thoughtful way. Our level of engagement deepens. We have an experience we can remember.
A user journey without friction is a bit like a story without intrigue—boring! In fact, a recent study into the first hour of computer game experiences concludes that intrigue might be more important than enjoyment for fostering engagement. We need something a little challenging or complex; we need to be the one who gains mastery and control. We want to triumph in the end.
Our design practices don’t encourage this, though. We distract our users more than we intrigue them. We provide the constant possibility of better options elsewhere, so that users never have to think: “Okay, what next?” Our attention is always directed outward, not inward. And it—not the technology itself, but how we design our interactions with it—makes us dumb.
UXD strives toward frictionless flow: removing impediments to immediate action and looking to increase conversions at all costs. This approach delivers some great results, but it doesn’t always consider the wider story of how we can design and build things that sustain a lasting relationship. With all the focus on usability and conversions, we can forget to ask ourselves whether our online experiences are also enriching and fulfilling.
Designing just one or two meta-moments in our digital experiences could help fix this. Each would be a little place for our users to stop or slow down, giving them space to think for themselves. There’s no point pretending that this will be easy. After many years dedicated to encouraging flow, it will feel strange to set out to disrupt users. We’d be playing with user expectations instead of aiming to meet and exceed them. We’d be finding little ways to surprise people, rather than trying to make them feel at ease at all times. We might tell them they need to come back later, rather than bend over backwards to satisfy them right away. We might delegate more responsibility to them rather than try to do everything for them. We might deliberately design failures rather than seek to eradicate them.
How will we test that we’ve achieved the desired effect and not just exasperated our users? Usability testing probably won’t cut it, because it’ll be tricky to get beyond the immediate responses to each set task. We might need longer-term methods, like diary studies, in order to capture how our meta-moments are working. Our UXD methods may need to shift: from looking at atoms of experience (pages, interactions, or tasks), to looking at systems of experience (learning, becoming, or adopting).
It will be a challenge to get people behind the idea of adding meta-moments, and a challenge to test them. The next time we create a design solution, let’s add just one small barrier, bump, or quirk. Let’s consider that the best approach may be a slow one. And let’s remember that removing needless thought should never end up removing all need for thought. Putting thought into things is only part of a designer’s responsibility; we also have to create space for users to put their own thought in. Their personalities and imaginations need that space to live and breathe. We need to encourage meta-moments carefully and then defend them. Because they are where magic happens.
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lundi 18 mai 2015
Report: Google to Test Buy Buttons In Mobile SERPs
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vendredi 15 mai 2015
Report: Mobile Networks In Europe Set To Block Google Ads
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jeudi 14 mai 2015
Bing to Roll Out Mobile Friendly Algorithm
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Google Decides What to Remove in the EU's "Right to be Forgotten"
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Google Patent on Determining Site Quality Score
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mercredi 13 mai 2015
Microsoft has just announced all the different versions of Windows 10
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Panda and Penguin NOT In Real Time
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Microsoft Edge Browser: Enhanced Security Built In
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Practicing Empathy With Teams
Empathy, as it’s been talked about recently, is most often framed as something important to practice for our users. It’s important to make sure we’re helping our users get the content they desire or get through the flow of our site to do what’s important to them.
What is getting lost, though, is that empathy is just as important for us to practice as we interact with our team members—all of us, developers, designers, writers, and project managers, can practice empathy as we work with our teammates. Empathy is just as much about our interactions with each other while we build our sites, as it is about how we treat our users.
As I’ve thought more about this, I’ve come up with a few ways to practice empathy with my teammates.
Remember shared goals
Designers want to build something just as great as I do, but they’re coming at it from a different angle. Spacing, margins, type-size tweaks—they all matter just as much as my clean markup and modular CSS. It’s easy to get annoyed at requests that don’t seem important, but instead, I actively remind myself that every part of a site is important.
Learn something new
To help me understand the perspective of designers, I’ve tried to learn more about design. Learning a bit about what the other folks on your team do and how they may come at the project can be eye opening. The time I’ve spent reading about design, content, JavaScript, and even learning a bit of Python, has helped me a lot. Recently, for example, I read Jason Santa Maria’s book, On Web Typography. I still have a lot more to learn about typography, but gaining a better understanding has helped me see how small changes in type can make a big difference. Even as we specialize in one particular field, it’s helpful to read up on other fields we work with. Instead of being annoyed at changes we’re asked to make, we can better understand the feedback. We’re all trying make things really sing as the final polish is put on.
Listen to each other
When I work with a new team, I start out by listening and observing the system they use to write code. Unless I’ve been brought in specifically to look at a process and make it better, I prefer to just watch, listen, and ask questions so that I can see where they’re coming from, learn the history, and understand why they do things the way they do.
With my current team, I waited a bit and then started asking questions about tools and processes. To my mind, one of the tools they use seemed outdated and a bit painful. But after observing a bit, and then asking about it, I found out their reasons for using it and they’ve changed my mind: I now see it’s the best fit for the team. Those first few weeks working with a new team can be stressful for everyone, but listening and observing for a while can cut down on the stress and friction.
Ask questions
When trying to be more empathetic with team members, I try to ask myself:
- What is the other person’s point of view? Since we all come from different specialities, we have different things we think are important. The old cliché of walking in another’s shoes is applicable here.
- How do my skills fit in with the group and what can I do to make it easier for everyone to understand my point of view? Can I document a process or explain my ideas in a less technical manner for those members that don’t have my expertise?
- What’s the final goal of the project and how does each person contribute to that goal? If I understand that, then I can also understand how I fit into it and how my colleagues do as well.
We each have our own role on a team, so the questions you think about as you work with your team may be different, but being aware of these things is half the battle to reminding yourself that everyone doesn’t think the way that you do and that’s probably a good thing. Hopefully, it means you end up with a better completed project in the end.
These are just a few of the ways I’ve come up with lately to practice empathy with my team. It’s just as important as making sure we are empathetic to our users, and it makes working together easier and more fun. I’d love to hear more ideas on how you think about empathy within your teams too, so please share them in the comments.
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mardi 12 mai 2015
Verizon to Acquire AOL For $4.4 Billion
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vendredi 8 mai 2015
Google Adds Food Ordering Direct From Google Mobile SERPs
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jeudi 7 mai 2015
Google WMT New "Search Analytics" (Beta) to Replace "Search Queries"
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Nishant Kothary on the Human Web: SHOUTERS, Inc.
“I’m going to talk about privilege,” I replied when my wife asked what I’d be publishing for my next column.
And then I stared at the screen for an hour. Thankfully, my Facebook timeline saved me with Dogs Who Fail At Being Dogs.
This process repeated for a few days.
What’s odd about this particular flavor of writer’s block I’ve suffered for years now is that I have no shortage of opinions when it comes to social issues. Ellen Pao. Freddie Gray. Dinesh D’Souza. TSA. Geist. Gun Control. Immigration. India’s daughters. Don’t even get me started.
But ask me to write a few hundred words—something, anything—about one of these social issues, all of which directly or indirectly affect our industry, and me specifically or by association, and I feel paralyzed.
I’m a brown, Indian citizen who moved to the United States at the age of twenty. Even as of this writing, I’ve lived more years in India than I have anywhere else in the world, including the United States. What’s more, I have relevant experience. For instance, I completely Americanized my spoken accent over a summer during my time in Indiana because I felt it would earn me more privilege. It did, and continues to. (As a side note, the show “Fresh Off the Boat” just aired an episode that pretty much sums up my experience.)
Coming back to the point, you would think that it’d be somewhat easier for me—what with having some ability to piece a sentence or two together, having my own little corner on the internet to publish—within reason—whatever suits me, and having a relevant background—to type a few thoughts on the topic from my own inevitably unique perspective.
But evidently it’s not. Because even if my perspective is inwardly impassioned, outwardly it is positively devoid of ALL CAPITAL LETTERS.
For instance, on the topic of the murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson a few months ago: I am interested in talking about a lot of things. What doesn’t interest me as much is SHOUTING about whether it was motivated (at least partially) by systemic racism in the Ferguson Police Department. To me, it feels like debating the existence of gravity when you consider all the incriminating evidence, neatly topped off by the Department of Justice report on the Ferguson Police Department (a report about the government published by the government). If you’re not in the mood to read the entire report, read the section “Racial Bias” (pgs. 4-5). It starts off with, “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices overwhelmingly impact African Americans,” and only gets more depressing from there.
The problem is that you can’t really write or talk about Ferguson and other social issues without clearly shouting your outrage, either in support of the conclusion that racially-motivated crimes by people in positions of power are still a thing, or in support of the idea that that’s just fiction fabricated by liberal white guilt. If you don’t believe me, go to any comment thread on the internet that has to do with Ferguson, and you’ll see an angry Red Sea parted neatly in the center as if by Moses himself. Let’s not even talk about the very articles that deal with the topic.
This is not to say that shouting with outrage doesn’t have its place. On the contrary, it plays a significant role in not only book-ending every revolution, but also punctuating it. It is the pulse of our collective existence, and quite literally so, if you are to believe Martin Luther King Jr. when he said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
But a sentence is more than the words it starts and ends with. Or the punctuation it comprises. Beyond a degree, there are diminishing returns to being a chest-thumping member of SHOUTERS, Inc. If what you’re interested in is the words that give the sentence its very meaning, then you have to not only be heard without typing in all caps, but also be resilient to abuse. Depending on what you’re saying, and who you are, the personal costs are anything from being, well, shouted at, to having your life threatened.
A few days ago I was re-reading Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s editorial note from almost exactly a year ago when #yesallwomen was trending. Toward the end, she wrote, “We’ll be spending more time talking about sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination, even if it makes some readers uncomfortable.” Yet, even with its hundreds of contributors, columnists, and bloggers, ALA has very little to show for this aspiration in a year (interestingly, what it does have to show was contributed almost entirely by women).
I make this point not to criticize ALA—if anything, as a columnist, I’d be really just pointing a finger at myself because ALA is, ultimately, a platform—but to highlight just how difficult it is to talk about difficult things even when you explicitly and publicly set the goal of doing so. What’s worse is that barely anyone in tech journalism has even set this goal, but that’s a rant for another day.
All that said, I believe in my heart of hearts that most of us not only want to talk about these issues, but we want to do so with the other side. We who’ve felt discriminated against because of our skin color want to hear from our white friends about what they think. We who’ve felt the effects of misogyny want to hear from men about what they think. We who have suffered any injustice because of the Stanford Prison Experiment that is life want to hear from our alleged—as SHOUTERS, Inc. has often led us to incorrectly conclude—foe. Maybe that’s a tall order right now, but I do have the recurring dream.
For now, it feels like the first step to overcoming this paralysis is to acknowledge our fear. As Taylor Swift said, “I think that being fearless is having a lot of fears, but you jump anyway.” Or, more appropriately, as she sang, “Haters gonna hate, hate, hate, baby, I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake it off.”
And since I’ve got the cursor, I’ll go first: SHOUTERS, INC. SCARES ME SHITLESS!
Maybe now I’ll be able to write about privilege.
Baby steps.
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Google To Shut Down Page Speed Service
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mercredi 6 mai 2015
Google Updates and SERP Changes - May 2015
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Google Acquires Time Scheduling System Business, Timeful Inc.
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EU Court Rules Skype Name Cannot Be Registered: Too Similar to Sky UK
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Facebook's Internet.org Platform Opened Up to Developers
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Microsoft Taking a Hard Stance Against Misleading and Malicious Advertisements
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How Much is a Tweet Worth? Valuing Digital Influencers
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Microsoft Confirms The Browser Codenamed "Spartan" Will Be Called Microsoft Edge
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This week's sponsor: Flywheel
Thanks to Flywheel for sponsoring A List Apart this week! Spend less time managing servers with their WordPress hosting for agencies.
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mardi 5 mai 2015
lundi 4 mai 2015
Facebook's Internet.org Platform Opened Up to Developers
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vendredi 1 mai 2015
Microsoft Taking a Hard Stance Against Misleading and Malicious Advertisements
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