The other day, I listened to a fascinating interview that John Jantsch conducted with Vanessa Fox, author of Marketing In The Age of Google. Listening to her, I got this idea about links like “Products”, which we see on a lot of corporate sites. Vanessa was talking about these words from an SEO perspective, explaining [...]

The search log, an often over-looked part of our site analytics, can offer a wealth of great information about how people interact with our design. We know, for example, that users often search for a keyword they don’t find on the screen, in essence creating their own link. Inspecting the search log can tell us [...]

Tagging has been around for more than 8 years. The technique, also called folksonomy, is simple: users apply their own words or phrases to content they uncover, leaving a trail back for themselves and for future content seekers. Each tag conveys meaning, giving a path to discovering new content that traditional navigation can’t. Since their [...]

In this podcast, Jared Spool sits down with Peter Morville to answer many excellent questions from the recent Leveraging Search and Discovery Patterns virtual seminar. Even if you did not attend, there’s a lot of great information in this podcast.

Join us January 12 for our next webinar: Leveraging Search & Discovery Patterns For Great Online Experiences, with Peter Morville and Mark Burrell.

We published a lot of great articles during 2009. We featured guest writers, published interviews, and wrote numerous articles on the research we’ve done. At year’s end, it’s common to reflect and revisit what you’ve done. We thought about the articles that had the biggest impact and really got people thinking. Even if some readers [...]

How is a search result like a thoughtful gift? The outcome exceeds the expectation. Ok, that’s kind of a lame riddle, but it’s accurate nonetheless. When we get a wrapped present, we hope the unwrapping will produce something that delights us. The same is true clicking on a search result. We anticipate it will serve [...]

Your organization spends considerable resources to get people to come to your site. Does your site do what it needs to once they get there? Your users’ experience is a fluid event that frequently starts someplace like Google and, if you’re lucky, ends with them accomplishing their objective at your site. The goal is to [...]

“On a web site, the design is represented by two separate yet equally important components. The content users and the links they use. These are their stories.” Doink-Doink. Ok, really it’s just the story of the links. (We’ll talk about the content later, I promise.) About 10 years ago, we started looking at how users [...]

A few weeks back we held a UIE Virtual Seminar with Pete Bell and Daniel Tunkelang of Endeca. These guys are the experts we go to when talking about designing for facets. As always, we had a number of excellent questions from the live audience that we couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so I got together with Pete and Daniel to record this podcast and cover a number of those remaining questions.