As part of my job as an Information Architect at Crayon I have been looking more and more at user behaviour and web analytics, so as a little experiment I have added Amazon Associate and Google AdSense content to the Hungry Browser weblog with an idea to generate a little revenue (we’ll see). I have also been tracking the traffic to the site with Google Analytics for the past few months.
Check it out, some amazing new features in OS X, if any Windows users still think XP/Vista
is better than OS X after watching the tour then you are clearly insane.
So I have had an account on Facebook for about a year and a half now and it has been interesting seeing the changes the site has gone through. I first joined up through an invite from my ex-girlfriend, when the site was still invite-only and mainly used by college students over in the USA.
It’s only in the past 3 or 4 months that Facebook has become a bit of a craze in the UK, even making the national news on the BBC and getting businesses is in tizz about whether they should restrict access to it during work hours. There have also been articles in the papers about City workers who are trying to big themselves up amongst their peers and clients by ‘friending’ as many people as possible. Anyway bankers will always be bankers as they say, but that aside, I have been feeling of late that Facebook is becoming a little bloated.
Back in the day it was all about the wall, photos and messages. Whereas I dig some of the new functionality and the API and applications you can openly develop, I feel things are becoming a little over the top. When I go to some of my friends’ profiles I now have to scroll down quite a few screens just to see their wall, as they have installed super wall, fun wall and all number of pointless apps that appear in the interface before the standard wall.
The result of all these extra apps and functionality, in my opinion is actually reducing the usability and accessibility to some of the content, in the context of the profile. You know have almost an overload of widgets to contend with when looking at a profile, too much user choice and not enough screen real estate to fit everything in.
Another drawback of the apps and notifications associated with them is I am getting spammed with useless Facebook mail now. X is asking me to ‘be a Zombie’, Y is sending me ‘a beer’, Z wants to know my ‘top 10 breakfast cereals’, it is all becoming a little too much.
It is interesting from a user-group perspective, if you compare those that have used Facebook the longest, i.e. the college kids in the States, versus those over here in the UK, then you tend to find that the more mature user-group tends not to have bloated their profiles with all the superfluous crap that my friends here in the UK do, they keep the focus simple, the way I like it.
In my opinion they should revert some of this functionality and go back to the good old days and for me at least I think the user-experience would become more rewarding. So no more requests for ‘zombies versus pirates’ please people, it is boring and all a bit old hat, plus I don’t have the time for it.
Happy social networking!
I was talking to a good mate of mine who works in web dev and we shared a little giggle earlier on, here is an exert from the conversation:
“…I got the best CV sent to me yesterday. This was for an Interface Design position – check out his personal site (that he encouraged me to visit in his covering letter): http://www.nicephotog-jvm.net/ OMFG”.
What is even worse is the fact that he was sent over to my friend by a recruitment agency, if that’s the best they had to offer him then god help us! Here’s a screen shot of the guy’s site:
Unless you have had your head buried under a rock for some time, you should have heard about the rise of Web 2.0 and AJAX-driven web applications.
AJAX is collection of technologies and stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, which in plain English means that you can update part of a web page without having to reload it. The exponential rise of content-rich sites such as Flickr, Google Maps, Google Suggest, YouTube, Facebook and Gmail all employ AJAX technology in varying degrees.
From an advertising point of view this throws a big spanner in the works. Traditionally the staple metrics of internet advertisers were page impressions and unique visitors. Internet properties were valued in terms of the amount of traffic they attracted. Advertising campaigns revolved around CPM (cost per thousand), a model built upon the notion that each time a page was served up your banner/ad would also be served. The problem now is that as the popularity of AJAX increases, both existing and new sites are finding it harder to measure traffic to their sites and in turn maintain advertising revenues.
To quote Julian Zilberbrand, associate director, digital operations, MediaVest, “if you are a publisher that is really focused on user experience, [Ajax] does make sense, but it potentially severely limits the ad opportunities you have” (Media Week, 02/04/2007).
An AP report discussed Nielsen//NetRatings and its measurement future. They are expected to announce an end to rankings based on page views and are “planning to publish a new ‘total time spent’ metric” (Media Week, 02/04/2007). This is a step in the right direction, but Nielsen//NetRatings ‘total time spent’ metric might not give us the whole picture, as there is a notion that web users are becoming more efficient in their online activities, and AJAX applications are fuelling this increase in efficiency. So whereas a web user might have traditionally visited 2 or 3 sites to view content, they can now use a RSS news aggregator to view the same content much faster, without even launching their web browser.
The notion of the page impression is also becoming less important because of the widgetisation of web pages, where small pieces of AJAX functionality are the point of interaction with the user, rather than them clicking on the ‘next page’ link to continue their user journey. This means we need new tools such as ajax metrics to track user behaviour and from an advertising point of view, serve up appropriate content to the right portion of the page.
This is a new challenge to the metrics market place, and there are no hard and fast rules as yet, but expect a shake up of the traditional paradigm over the coming months.
Hand-in-hand with the paid-for advertising is search engine optimisation. AJAX also directly effects how your site is viewed by search engines. By implementing more JavaScript-powered interactivity in your site you are in turn increasing the barriers to your content, (as far as search engines are concerned). But this doesn’t have to be the case, if you employ a web standards and accessible approach to web development then you can still provide the necessary structure for search engines to index your site’s content.
Check out more about web standards and accessibility:
This article was written by Ben Ellis, but was based on discussion and ideas that come out of chats with Simon Price, the search guru here at Crayon.
