How do you pitch to an online brokerage that combines investing with social networking? On a social networking site, of course. Doing an entire presentation on Facebook might have seemed like a risky move, but it paid off. And now Gyro SF is the agency-of-record for Zecco Holdings, Inc. — handling their brand strategy and integrated marketing communications. Like us, Zecco is a young company with big ideas and a hot desire to shake things up. This new partnership has us tickled pink.

Dr. Nielsen founded the “discount usability engineering” movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation. He holds 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.

New user testing of site maps shows that they are still useful as a secondary navigation aide, and that they’re much easier to use than they were during our research 7 years ago.

One of the oldest hypertext usability principles is to offer a visual representation of the information space in order to help users understand where they can go. Site maps can provide such a visualization, offering a useful supplement to the primary navigation features on a website or intranet.

A site map’s main benefit is to give users an overview of the site’s areas in a single glance. It does this by dedicating an entire page to a visualization of the information architecture (IA). If designed well, this overview can include several levels of hierarchy, and yet not be so big that users lose their grasp of the map as a whole.

We define a site map as a page intended to act as a website guide. The site maps we studied took a variety of forms, including alphabetical site indexes, dynamic diagrams, and two-dimensional lists. The term “site map” here thus encompasses a wide array of features, appearances, and names, including “guide,” “overview,” “index,” and “directory.”

Two Research Studies

To find out how people use site maps, we conducted two rounds of usability research, testing a range of site map designs with users as they performed representative tasks. A total of 30 users participated in our site map testing, with 15 in each of the two research rounds.

We tested the following 20 websites, which included a mix of e-commerce and marketing-oriented sites, high-tech companies, B2B sites, content sites, non-profit organizations, and government agencies.

In both studies, we first took users to a site’s homepage and gave them a task without any special mention of the site map. This part of the research assessed the extent to which users naturally turn to site maps. Later in each study, we specifically asked users to go to the site map if they hadn’t already gone there on their own.

Study 1 was conducted 7 years ago. Comparing the two studies thus allows us to assess long-term trends in site map usability.

Site Maps are Used Rarely

People rarely use site maps. In Study 2, only 7% of users turned to the site map when asked to learn about a site’s structure. This is down from 27% of users in Study 1.The good news is that users can actually find the site map in those few cases where they want to. In Study 2, 67% of the users successfully found the site map when we asked them to “Find a page that lists every part of the website.”

Keep It Simple

The two main usability guidelines for site maps are:

• Call it “Site Map” and use this label to consistently link to the site map throughout the site.
• Use a static design. Don’t offer users interactive site map widgets. The site map should give users a quick visualization without requiring further interaction (except scrolling, if necessary).

These guidelines are unchanged from the report’s first edition. Dynamic or interactive site maps caused horrible failures 7 years ago, and they still caused trouble in Study 2. The site map’s goal is to give users a single overview of the information space. If users have to work to reveal different parts of the map, they lose that benefit. A site map is, after all, a map; it should not be a navigational challenge of its own.

As we’ve found repeatedly, users hate non-standard user interfaces that force them to learn a special way of doing things for the sake of a single website. Site maps should be simple, compact layouts of links, and they should show everything in a single view.

The one small complexity we recommend is to use a multi-column layout. In Study 2, users easily succeeded with 61% of tasks involving multi-column site maps compared to 47% of tasks with single-column site maps.

Multi-column site maps worked better because users needed less scrolling to get an overview of the site’s structure. People were more likely to become lost within long, scrolling site maps. They typically scrolled up and down the map multiple times, often accidentally or purposefully skipping content. In fact, users often started with one quick scan of high-level categories, then scrolled back up and did a more detailed search, sometimes repeating this process multiple times with more and more focus each time. In contrast, multi-column site maps made it easier for users to quickly glance at all categories and subcategories, and thereby get a lay of the land before digging deeper.

Why Have a Site Map?

Seven years ago, 48% of the 50 websites we surveyed had site maps. Today, 71% of the 150 websites we surveyed had site maps and 59% of the 56 intranets analyzed in our report on Intranet Information Architecture had site maps. Also, most site maps have become somewhat more usable during the time between our two research rounds.Despite the prevalence of good site maps these days, users don’t use them very much. So why bother making a site map for your website? Because it can help users understand your site and what it offers.

I still recommend site maps because they’re the only feature that gives users a true overview of everything on a site. One could argue that a site’s navigation serves the same purpose. For example, some navigation offers drop-down menus that let users see the options available in each site section. But even with these menus, users can see only one section of content at a time.

A site map lets users see all available content areas on one page, and gives them instant access to those site pages. Site maps can also help users find information on a cluttered site, providing a clean, simple view of the user interface and the available content. Site maps are not a cure-all, however. No site map can fix problems inherent in a site’s structure, such as poor navigational organization, poorly named sections, or poorly coordinated subsites.

If site maps required a major investment to design, they wouldn’t offer sufficient ROI to be worth doing. But because all of our guidelines call for site map simplicity, making a good one doesn’t require a lot of work, and it will help some of your users. More importantly, it will help users at a critical time: When they are lost and might abandon your site if they don’t get that last piece of assistance to find their way around.

Site maps are a secondary navigation feature — a humble role that they share with breadcrumbs. Indeed, the arguments in favor of site maps are the same as the arguments for breadcrumbs:

• They don’t hurt people who don’t use them.
• They do help a few people.
• They incur very little cost.

NetApp creates large data management solutions for enterprise. These solutions are quite complex, with a myriad moving parts, all affecting the bottom line costs. NetApp needed to empower ground-level IT managers with the data they needed to convince their CTOs that NetApp was the right solution but this meant lengthy consultations to work out all the options.

We created a self-service tool, hosted online, that allows anyone to enter a set of numbers to see how NetApp’s solutions will work for their particular installation. The tool then generates a nice email package, ready to plop on a CTOs desk. It is possible to easily try out multiple scenarios and to visualize how changing certain parameters will affect TCO, price, storage, savings, etc.

The “Dedupe Calc,” as it has become known, has gotten rave reviews both from end-users, and from the NetApp sales force. To date it has been localized in six languages and a new version is in the works.

But don’t take our word for it, check out the client love:

“Even though we set up the calculator to be more of a soft-sell tool, it has generated over 500 leads for us with 238 of those coming from North America. Of those 238 North American leads 5% have turned into opportunities.”
Hope that helps, let me know if you have any questions.

Check it out.

He just got back from Portugal, where he, two of his buddies, and three women managed to get themselves lost while kayaking. The six of them ended up having to spend the night on a deserted embankment in the middle of nowhere with nothing but some booze and each other for company. Luckily, Gyronauts are cut from hardy stock - he managed to pull through.

Welcome Kris!

Web 2.0 is not a new version of the World Wide Web but an improvement of existing methodologies by utilizing the strengths of the web as a platform. The expansion of Web technologies has made it easier for people to interact by uploading and downloading content, with sites such as YouTube, eBay and Google.

Over the last 5+ years we have gradually seen the introduction of several web based technologies such as social bookmarking, social software, podcasts, wikis and RSS feeds. Each of these technologies has sought to improve the users experience and what it means to use the web, thus allowing the user to take more control.

The original perception of the “web” was as a one-way information superhighway with little or no interaction with the user and only served to interlink documents. Web 2.0 sites allow the user to do more than simply retrieve information. The user becomes the architect for that site by participating and generating content.

Improvements in web technologies have seen the introduction of Rich Internet Applications. It is possible that you have heard phrases such as “Ajax” and “Silverlight” thrown around. These are techniques that have evolved and have the potential to improve the user experience on a browser based application…

By improving the user experience of a site you can drive in more traffic. The introduction of Web 2.0 applications has seen the birth of a whole new economy. The obvious example here would be eBay but with huge amounts of traffic being directed towards commercially driven sites, many more companies are reaping the rewards of the revenue generated by users wanting to share their lives with the web!

- Mark Grassick, Lead Web Developer at Bluhalo (Part of the Mighty Mouse Digital Network: Gyro Digital)

The New York Times needed to update its online media kit to become a more-dynamic place where media buyers would could not only get specs and rates, but also ideas on innovative new advertising formats and in-depth information about the Times’ unique audience.

Our challenge was to create a space where viewers could explore without becoming overwhelmed, while still providing easy access to hundreds of pages of specific content.

The Times client was particularly receptive and open to change.

This is the result.

Our client Borland is announcing its new software product that changes the way companies manage the delivery of high-value apps.

Our brief was to underscore the revolutionary nature of this new approach and to drum up excitement about the technology solutions.

Unlock the black box now.

Below is a cut-down version of the final product. Or you can check out the full version with complete audio.

Pictured here with something in his ear, Young is an amateur photographer in his spare time and he has a weakness for sugar.

1 WEB 2.0 STYLE REDESIGN

Make sure your site is fully designed in CSS. If your website hasn’t been redesigned in 12 months, it needs an update! Internet trends have changed, business to business or business to consumer websites are all changing in design. Not sure what the heckWeb 2.0 looks like? Here’s a good summary.

2 ADD A TAG CLOUD TO YOUR SITE’S SEARCH

Sites are now using tagging more and more as a way to label up content. All the resulting articles or products from a search can be tagged by you or your website customers.

3 ADD A FAT FOOTER

Add a fat footer to your website to increase usability, they are simple to build. They’re very en vogue and encourage clickthroughs around your website. Scroll down to the bottom of digg’s site for an example.

4 ADD A PODCAST

They are no longer a gimmick but a valuable business tool. Want customers to listen to you talk about your products or services? Podcasts can be played through your website as well as itunes and emailed to your customers directly to deliver regular updates.

5 GET A SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY

Ensure your customers can add your content to their social bookmarking sites! Its not only good for your natural search results but also good for syndicating out your content.

6 RSS AND ATOM NEWS FEEDS

Are you making sure your website content is easily available for distribution? This allows you audience to subscribe directly to your site’s content. Best of all it’s really easy to implement, but remember that you must update your content frequently for maximum effectiveness. Wikipedia has a great summary of all the pros and cons of using news feeds.

7 ADD A BLOG TODAY

Google likes websites whose content is updated regularly through news and blogs. It takes about two days for Google to update Wordpress and Blogger.com blog stories. If you aren’t doing this you are missing out on essentially free listings in Google search results!

8 CREATE A SHOWREEL

Moving image has gone from a nice-to-have on the Web to something that people look for. You don’t need to create a Hollywood masterpiece. A quick 15-second video will go a long way.

9 CREATE A FIRST-PHASE MOBILE WEBSITE

Get your content onto a mobile site, regardless of whether or not the iphone and Opera revolution will negate the need to a mobile sites in the future, there is nothing to say. This is now.

10 HTML NEWSLETTERS

If you do are not currently sending your customers at least one nicely designed HTML email a month because you don’t have the time, then let us do it for you.