Designing for the Scent of Information: Pulling Users to their Content

If your users can’t find the content they are seeking, your site will fail. One of the biggest secrets of successful web sites is that they design for Scent.

In recent research, we've uncovered that users know when they are on the right track to finding their content—they follow the Scent of Information. With the right scent, we’ve seen users confidently work their way through web sites to find what they’re seeking.

Scent explains why users consistently fail to find their desired content. If your site’s content doesn’t have good scent, everything you're doing could be at great risk. By understanding how users pick up and keep the scent, you can design more usable web sites.

We'll demonstrate how the successful sites provide a strong scent and what happens when they don't. Using the results from hundreds of usability tests, we’ll show you how users follow a scent trail and the different ways your design could be blocking scent. We’ll also discuss how the quality of links, page length, page density, and graphics affect whether users find the content they’re looking for.

The Scent of a Web Page: Five Types of Navigation Pages

You work hard providing top-notch content on your site. Will your users find it? If they don't find it, all that effort is for nothing. What can you do to guarantee that users find the content they've come looking for? You’ll come away with the most up-to-the-minute research on how users actually navigate sites.

As users traverse through a web site, they encounter different types of pages, each with unique functions. The designers of the best sites understand the special functions of each type of page on a web site, and design the pages individually based on their specific purpose.

Our research has uncovered three ways to predict when users will fail finding the content they desire. We’ll show you what these three predictors are and how to counter the effects in your design.

We will share the secrets behind successful designs including Lands' End, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, CNN, and the BBC. You’ll learn why trigger words are critical to users successfully finding their content, why the best sites prevent users from using Search, how exposing a site's hierarchy can increase the success of the user, how designing longer pages helps users find what they seek, and how to best use lateral links and breadcrumbs.

Unpacking the Usability Toolbox

Design teams have many tools in their usability toolbox, each designed to help them create usable sites: usability testing, personas, focus groups, surveys, web log analysis, and field studies, to just name a few. Unfortunately, these same teams have limited resources. You can’t use every tool in every project. Sometimes, the most important thing you can know is how to pick the right tool for your current situation.

Successfully incorporating these techniques into the development process requires that teams know each tool’s benefits and appropriateness for every design scenario. Choosing the wrong tool for the wrong job will waste precious resources and produce results that can set your efforts back.

Over the years, UIE has studied how the most successful organizations move their designs from concept to launch. We’ve analyzed how they choose the right technique from their toolbox and how they use each one. For the first time, you’ll have an opportunity to learn the strategies of these successful organizations.

You’ll learn when cheap-and-dirty usability testing will work just fine and when you need to stick to a rigorous scientific methodology, collecting precise data for meticulous analysis and reporting. You’ll hear how to use 5-second tests, inherent value tests, surrogate tests, and field studies to fill in the gaps in your knowledge of your users.

Effective Dissemination: Best Techniques for Getting Teams Onboard

Usability testing, field studies, and other techniques produce massive amounts of information. The design team needs this information to make the right decisions. Disseminating the information teams collect is one of the biggest problems they face today.

Over the last few years, UIE has been interviewing teams about their techniques for ensuring everyone on the design team has the necessary information. Our studies show reports are still the most common result from usability testing. While they can be useful for communicating an immediate list of recommendations or priorities from a specific study, they often fail to help teams gain insights useful in future design efforts.

Do you create a large report or a small one? A written document or a PowerPoint presentation? How do you back up your recommendations? What’s the best way to prioritize the findings? You’ll see how different teams approached each of these problems and learn what is most effective for your situation.

Personas are becoming a popular amongst many teams. Recent research shows there are a variety of approaches to creating and using persona information in the design process, from very formal to very informal. You’ll learn the pros and cons of each approach.

UIE’s research shows many teams have tried style guides, templates, and design guidelines, but have rarely achieved their objective of creating uniform designs. We’ll discuss the common failure points of these techniques and explore a new technique we see gaining traction: design pattern libraries. You’ll see the experience organizations are having with design patterns and learn strategies for introducing them into your design process.