Google ranking to be affected by users?!

Clicktale is a nice product that creates a video type screencast of actual users on your website. I’ve used it for a client’s website before and think it’s a great tool. It gives you a good sense of how users interactive with a site and a reasonable understanding of their intent (better than log files would do yet not as good as user sessions would).

Anyway, having access to a wide variety of their customer sites has allowed them to do an interesting study into website scrolling behaviors and what they term scroll reach and visitor attention. It’s makes interesting reading.

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For large sites, and even small ones, having a fully standards compliant website may seem a Utopian dream, especially in Agile development environments where elements of an overall interface are approached piecemeal. So it’s fair to think why bother trying at all? Well you don’t have to be fully compliant to enjoy the benefits that web standards offers. Getting close to full compliance will still mean you enjoy the majority of business benefits they offer. So I’ve put together an overview of how the design, development and testing disciplines can incrementally work towards web standards.

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This is a great article by Luke Wroblewski on common visual design misconceptions.

He makes some salient points in his typical succinct and eloquent way. I’m not so sure I agree with his suggested distinction of visual design though. I realise I may be going into murky waters here but in regards to the example in his first point, I see the positioning and layout of elements on the page falling into the field of interaction design, not visual design.

I see visual design as assisting (and I use the word assisting because interaction design overlaps):

• in the usability of an interface: by reinforcing or balancing visual priorities, directing focus and using visual languages to convey meanings (e.g. icons)
• in the communication of brand values (personality): through the use of imagery, shapes, colours, textures and typography
• in the communication of meaning or feelings: an image can convey meaning or emotion a lot quicker than words

I’ve found this distinction works well with stakeholders/clients as at the interaction design stage (wire-framing) you can keep them focussed on (what I consider to be) the more important design issues (like layout and priority of elements in an interface) without distracting their focus to imagery, shapes, textures, colours and fonts.