Conference Buddies

March 11, 2009 8:30am – 10:00am
Speaker: James Hobart

Summary/Topics:

• Navigation/Taxonomy Basics
• Menu/Hierarchical Design Patterns
• Alternative Navigation Design
• Complex Taxonomy Case Study

UI Design Basics

• Consistency
• Clarity
• Terminology
• Provide clear feedback
• Correct “Mental Model”
• Task Alignment
• Enjoyable

Key Thoughts

• Avoid deep level hierarchy when possible (no more than 3 levels deep)
• Lower efficiency costs – shorten the amount of steps to do something
  Example:
  Google allows searches for movie times and stock quotes. Instead of going to Fandango or Scottrade, a user can just type their search in Google.
• Provide real-time feedback
• Present possibilities to help with selection
• Discovery engines can add value
• Help distinguish best choices – the buy now button on e-commerce sites are generally the largest call to action

Note: 18% of users automatically go straight to search rather than using a navigation system, as such, a search should always be available on a global level.

Definitions

Taxonomy – metadata – information about information
Navigation Models – basis for creating components to allow users to move around and find information

Navigation Examples

Hierarchical Tree View

An abstract view for navigation – users may not understand hierarchy. It’s been tested to show that if users do not find what they are looking for upon expanding on a tree view, they start over and go down the hierarchy again. This increases efficiency cost.

Tree/List View Combination

Similar to Tree View, but provides more information. Microsoft Outlook is a popular example of this structure. It has been proven successful for power users.

Menu Navigation Guidelines

• Choose a consistent global navigation scheme
• Sub-navigation should be tied to global navigation
• Beware of complex sidebar navigation
• Avoid fly-out menus with more than 3 levels (also be aware of horizontal and vertical spacing – horizontal space should not be too wide, and vertical margins should provide adequate spacing)

Menu Information Layering

• Set distinct layer thresholds (pick out the essential items to list and for any non-essential items, add a “more” link)
• Follow a 1-2-3 step to get users where they want

Folksonomy-Based Consumer Search/Taxonomy

Hierarchical structures based on user driven data, such as:

• Product reviews
• User driven tags
• User ratings

Note: Pitfall is that you must monitor the data. User driven data needs to factor in that users can drive the data differently in that some users may tag something as “hiking boots” and others as “hiker boots” or “hiking shoes.”

Remember…

• Taxonomies getting more complex
• Adapt navigation strategies to meet new information challenges
• Shield users from complexity
• Lower efficiency cost of navigation
• Leverage design patterns to repeat success

Writing Good Use Case – SD West 2009

March 11, 2009

Speaker: Terry Quatrani (UML Evangelist, IBM)

Conference Notes:

Keep a use case high level and don’t have it bogged down with features and details. The main function of a use case is to clearly communicate:

• the main justification for the software
• who will be using it
• the end goal for the actor/ user
• a  happy day scenario
• other main listed alternatives
• high risk identifiers

Use case should be in plan language giving the reader enough information to understand the justification and main purpose of the software without being lost in the details.

More information should follow in a technical UI document that flushes out the detail requirements. A good use case is high level and provides enough information.  Do not list out all details, alternative scenarios, risk factors, or “what if statements” – just focus on the major key areas.

Personas, Profiles, Actors, & Roles: Modeling Users To Target Successful Product Design – SD West 2009

March 11, 2009

Speaker: Jeff Patton (Architect, Interaction Designers, AgileProductDesign)

Conference Notes:
Building personas, profiles, actors & roles are key to understanding:

1. Who will be using the software
2. What is the profile of the target user – skills, user experience, levels of interaction
3. What is the function of the software
4. What is the responsibility of the user in relation to the software

This often starts by brain storming. More data is often available from market data, marketing departments, and UI studies.

Use of images of what your target personas is often helpful for people to connect with the attributes.  Keep attributes short and easy to remember.

David Hubbard’s Best of Miva Merchant – Miva Merchant 2009

Speaker: David Hubbard is the one of the owners of Hostasaurus and one of the foremost experts on using Miva Merchant and third party modules. David will walk you through his favorite modules, what they do and the impact they have on your online business. He’ll also show you pitfalls to avoid and provide you a list of things to do to make your store run great.

Conference Notes:

Emporium Plus – Tool Kit = Extends Miva Merchant with additional features/tools ($30).
Example:

show partial product description that links to the full description

LATU – Wow Wow Widgets = Define a widget (i.e. Daily special)
Example:

Category Mode in Template Mode you can insert widget code (to insert daily specials)
Site Seal Code since you might display it in the various places
You can easily activate/deactive in one place

Sebenza – Category Page Templates = Helps in page layout design

Power Search – Emporium Plus = Can allow to search manuf field

Mini Basket – Emporium Plus = Show basket contents

ADS – ImageXtra = Additional Image Features for Multiple Image Views

Sebenza – Ultimate Coupons = Coupon Module (add free product without others to see, free shipping, discount before checkout, etc.)

UltraBatch from TruXoft for better batch processing but not avaible for MM5

Misc:

Mail Manager to customize email

Note: Emporium Plus (if you have more than one of his modules you can skip re-installing same files i.e. logging module).

If you turn SEO friendly option on:

SEO friendly URL code
Change string in Templates: Category, Page, and Search Results Template
Must change in all places

Search Engine Optimization 301 – Miva Merchant 2009

Speakers:
Nikki Patrick, Tampa-SEO.com
Gillian Muessig, SEOMoz.org

Inner Linking for SEO success

Nikki Patrick
Nikki@Tampa-SEO.com

If Content is King then Linking is Queen

Inner linking is taking keyword rich text and linking to to another page on your site with the content of your website. This allows the Search Engine spider to easily spider all the pages of your site.

Don’t over do it! You want to add a few links withi the content of each page that link to other pages that may be related. Only do this if it makes sense.

Google doesn’t like to see more than 100 links per page, including your navigation.

Inner Linking:

• Search engines place more value on links within the content than links from your navigation
• Use the bold tag around your anchor text to add value to the link, do not style it in the CSS. Don’t overdue it on the same keyword.
• Your home page should have links to category pages to push link juice to them.

Add a SEO friendly site map to your website. Use both HTML and XML
www.xml-sitemaps.com
www.sitemappro.com

A well structured inner linking campaign will give you those indented listing in the SERP’s as well as the internal pages

Page Sculpting

Page sculpting is the art of pushing link juice or value to certain pages of your site for increased rankings. Each link is assigned a certain amount of value.

The search engines don’t need to index every page of your site. Add the rel=”nofollow” tag inside of a link if you don’t want the search engine spiders to follow it.

You want to “nofollow: pages like

• shopping cart, checkout pages
• abous us, contact us, company info

You DO want to follow category pages, product pages, resource pages, affiliate pages, and the home page

You can also add rel=”follow” to tell the spiders to follow those links

Be careful when page sculpting. It is an advanced technique that can hurt your rankings if not done correctly.

SEO Tip: Use the no follow tag for “more info” link and buttons to give more link juice for keyword rich anchor text

Advanced Linkbuilding

So Juicy, You’ll Need a Napkin!

Gillian Muessig
SEOMoz.org

Pull Marketing
Push Marketing (Ads to your website)
Mold the two

How to perform searches that will result in high quality link acquisition targets:

The Obvious:

Seek permutations of keywords from top 100 ranking sites:
snowboard equipment (with quotes, no quotes, etc.)

Reciprocal Linking Tactic that Works

• Email sites or people you want to trade links with
• Offer to link to a piece of conte on their website an articel a grpph a tool a blog post
• In exchange, ask them to find something they like about your website,
• Write something review to them and visa versa

Creating a mobile stylesheet has more than just usability benefits. There are hundres of directories on the webs that list mobile/PDA-friendly websites

Image links on Steroids

Use a CSS image replacement so the link looks like HTML

Tickle the Blogger

• Compel bloggers
• Comment
• Write about them, then alert them

Unbelievable link sources:

Certain blog sections at Amazon
Check out pages examples on Amazon like:

• Jennifer Wilson Witch Books
• Blogging with MSN Saces
• How to Profit from Art

Search Engine Optimization 201 – Miva Merchant 2009
Speaker: Mark Simon, Miva Merchant

Where on miva to put SEO?

Overview:

• First complete your keyword research
• Identify page for each keyword
• Focus on one keyword phrase per page
• Where to put keyword on your page
• Domain considerations
• Adhering to standards
• Avoiding penalties

Keyword Placement:

• Meta tags – Title, Desc, Keywords
• Header tags – H1 to H6
• URLs & Filenames
• Content – Text on the page (CSS content before image. 400 words min.)
• Links to the page from other pages on your site
• Links to the page from other sites (deep linking)
• Links to other sites
• Alt tags (alt and title tag on images, title tag on links, used for accessibility)

YellowTee.com examples:

1. <title>&mvt:store:name:; &mvt:product:name;</title>
2. <title>&mvt:product:name; - &mvt:store:name;</title>
3. <title>&mvt:product:name; - Custom Catchy Title With Keywords</title>

Have product name first then catchy title with keywords.
Use Miva code to dynamically pull in category and product names for keywords
#3 will render the product name and keywords into the product page title.

Use hyphen, then underscore, bar/pipe, but avoid commas in title tag (harder to read and screws things up)

Similar code for H1 Tags too

Miva:

Product Code & Category Code = If possible (if it doesn’t break any of your business practices) put in keyword (i.e. corporate-golf-tees). 50 character limit.

In Miva Admin Interface:

To create SEO friendly links in Miva Merchant: Global Settings -> Domain Settings -> SEO settings

Domain Considerations:

• WHOIS information: Domain age, expiration (at least 2 to 3 years out), owner, IP
• Sitemap – HTML and XML sitemap
• Custom 404 page – Helps people robots find your site from bad links (link
• Who else is on your IP and IP block

Evaluating Your Site – Standards

• Is your site accessible & crawlable?
• Are you subject to duplicate content?
• Are you a good neighbor?

Avoiding the Penalty Box

• Nobody Likes Spam – Even the Search Engines
• Keyword Stuffing
• Multiple title tags, meta tags, h1 tags (use only 1 h1 tag)
• Hidden content & invisible text (don’t use invisible text)
• Cloaking, Redirection (don’t fool or spoof the user)
• Large spike in links

Resources:

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Yahoo! Site Explorer Tools
• Live Webmaster Tools
• Whois.DomainTools.com
• Sitemappro.com
• Ranksense.com
• SEOMoz.org
• MivaMerchant.com/blog
• W3c.org

301 Redirect long URLs to new URL
Change links in templates

Example:

Polyvore.com customer example site on fashion / user generated content (fashion collage)

<mvt:if expr="1.settings:product:code XYZ">
<title> XYZ </title>
<mvt:elseif >
<title> XYZ </title>
<mvt:else >


Utilizing Social Media and Web 2.0 to Market Your Business – Miva Merchant 2009
Speaker: Hal Lublin, President, BuzzBuilderz

Conference Notes:

• Social Media = People driven, social, collaborative
• Estimated search engine marketing spend is $11B in 2010 = SEM (Search Engine Marketing Professional)
• 65% of people feel constantly bombarded with too much marketing and advertising and consider to be out of control (Forrester)
• Average person receives 70 spam emails a day (McAfee)
• Become Part of the Community
• Physical networking is being replaced by social marketing
• Create a professional profile
• Frolleagues = colleagues who send friendship requests
• Plaxo = Professional Profile
• Facebook = Personal Profile + fan page for business
• MySpace
• Yelp = Local businesses
• LinkedIn = Professional Profile
• BLIP.fm = Music Social Network
• Seesmic = Video
• BriteKite = GeoTagging
• Flikr = photo sharing (shared to twitter and blog)
• 12seconds.tv = Video (documentally = funny)

Twitter Corporate Voice Examples:

• Better Homes and Gardens
• BHGrealestate
• WholeFoods
• TravelChannel
• Comcast Cares

A Few Twitter Tools:

Twirl, TweetDeck, SocialTool, Twengager, TwitterFeed.com (blog)

Other Social Examples:

Coke Cola Blog
AMEX Open Network (Small businesses)
Miamism.com (Miami Blog)

Reputation Management Cycles:

Profile -> Identity -> Reputation -> Trust

What are you posting and sharing:

Digg, Reddit, Delicious, StumbleUpon

Social Tips:

• Claim your handle
• Create a profile that can be replicated across several platforms
• Be Genuine
• Be Consistent
• Have Fun
• Listen & Read First
• Try things – You cannot break the Internet

Other Tools:

Checkusername.com = check if your username is taken across other social media sites
squarespace = blog service