Brighton SEO – Dark Patterns – Black Hat user interfaces – Dr Harry Brignull ( @harrybr ) #brightonseo

“Dark Patterns – Black Hat user interfaces” is a talk being held by Dr Harry Brignull – Senior User Experience Designer at Clearleft (http://clearleft.com).

The talk is about the tricks and traps of bad user interfaces that are designed to trick people, usually into paying more for something, or ticking a box they don’t actually need to.

First example up is the NHS donor register and how in the UK you have to opt in to be part of it. In other countries you automatically get entered into donor registration and have to opt out. The result is that the rate of people opting out is much lower than those opting in, resulting in a healthy amount of organ donors. Read on

Has Microsoft got the Budda-BING?

When I first heard that Microsoft was yet again attempting to launch a search service to rival Google, my initial reaction was ‘why bother?’ Google dominate search, always have and probably always will, and they deserve it. They’ve earned it over the last 10 years through developing increasingly complex algorithms and adapting the search engine to respond well to the increasing amount of multimedia content available on the web.

Now Microsoft unveil Bing, their ‘decision’ engine and plough the field of marketing with a $100 million campaign, in the hope that money and semantics might challenge Google for the top spot in search. But have they considered the consequences of delivering more accurate results through the categorisation for generic search terms, such as hiking up the cost of keywords? Or perhaps it means that all us lowly search engine optimizers will have to adapt our analysis and implementation skills.

But I wouldn’t worry, the only reported merit of Bing so far is its cosmetics and the ad revenue opportunities the design might open up to Microsoft. The Guardian recently published some interesting data from user experience research agency User Centric who used eye-tracking software to monitor where people looked on the page when using Bing and Google. The results showed that users searching with Bing paid more attention to the ads on the search engine results page. In the study they conducted, on average 42% of Bing users looked at the sponsored links, compared to only 25% with those using Google.

However this didn’t translate to the actual click-through rates on the ads, as this number was actually similar for both search engines. And there are further discrepancies, Bing’s three column design may be more ad-friendly but the nature of these results from User Centric could only be down to the fact that Bing is new, therefore the users were more likely to take a general look around the search engine results page.

I don’t imagine people will be Binging over Googling any time soon, but what do you think? Is it high time for an alternative to Google?

New Facebook page layout has ruined my fan base!

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about a successful little campaign using Facebook pages, which I think is the best post I’ve read about Facebook pages- you should read it;-)

Then last week, as Jennie reported in this post, Facebook went and gave their Pages a redesign, around the same time they rolled out a new profile page design which led to comments on the Facebook blog such as these-

“Dear Facebook,
I used to love you, but now I have to go, you’re ugly now, and bloated with useless information, I’m embarrassed to be seen with you in public. In fact to even mention that i ever liked you is repulsive to me, a reproach on my on sanity. You were fun once. I used to log on 10-20 times a day, yesterday I got on once, in the hope that you would change…but i know better…the only person i can change is me…”

To be fair to Facebook they get this kind of reaction whenever they do a redesign.

Anyway since the new Facebook Pages (business pages) were launched on the 11th March the number of new fans my page has been getting has dropped from about 80-100 to under 20. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Check out the stats…

Read on

Common problems with blog usability

A while back I did a post on some of the common conflicts between usability & SEO on websites. That sparked some interesting questions in particular around the use of blogging in SEO and some of the common usability problems I see with blogs.

photo credit: soapbeard

Firstly a few caveats…

I’m aware that many of you reading this will be bloggers and regular blog readers yourself, therefore I would urge you to put yourself in the shoes of someone you know who’s not so social media minded. I use my Mum, she uses the internet every day at work and home but she’s never been on a blog and if she had to guess she’d say del.icio.us was a chocy biscuit!. Read on

When SEO & Usability Go Head To Head

At Ai Digital we’ve been relaunching our usability and conversion marketing services and I’ve been thinking a lot about how usability best practice and SEO go hand in hand. For me generally the 2 go together like peas and carrots, they’re both based on the guiding principle of making a better site.

photo credit: tashmahal

However at times what’s best for the user doesn’t always seem to be what’s best for the search engine and vice versa so compromises have to be made. I’ve gone over here some of the most common flash points between usability and SEO best practice I see.

Read on