Instructors:
Jared M. Spool, User Interface Engineering

Benefits:
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 different functions of each type of page on a web site, and design the pages differently 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.

Origins:
We’ve presented it at previous conferences, including CHI 2006, IA Summit 2006, and the UIE Roadshows.

Features:

Audience: Web Designers & Usability Practitioners

Presentation: Lecture

Instructor Background:
Jared M. Spool, Founding Principal of User Interface Engineering. If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he’s probably the most effective, knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. What you probably don’t know is that he has guided the research agenda and built User Interface Engineering into the largest research organization of its kind in the world. He’s been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term "usability" was ever associated with computers.

Jared spends his time working with the research teams at the company, helps clients understand how to solve their design problems, explains to reporters and industry analysts what the current state of design is all about, and is a top-rated speaker at more than 20 conferences every year. He is also the conference chair and keynote speaker at the annual User Interface Conference, is on the faculty of the Tufts University Gordon Institute, and manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time.