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CUA of the Month – August, 2011
Frontend Engineer
Two Rivers Marketing
Even Robots Need Usability
by Sheldon Kreger
Usability analysts understand that users have specific needs. However, this piece of knowledge is not unique to the UX profession. In fact, Keith Kmett came to this realization while working as part of an advertising startup business in the early millennium.
"I was a self-taught HTML designer, and I started working at Two Rivers Marketing just after graduating college. That was eleven years ago."
Like many usability analysts, Keith ran into usability issues in his work. This is what sparked his interest in the field.
"Working in marketing and developing pushed me to see that I needed to make usable applications. After studying journalism in college, my passion was to deliver to the audience – that's what brought me to usability."
Keith quickly caught on to the skills required to be a UX professional. His success early on was very exciting, and provided motivation to develop his expertise.
"My wife told me about the Usability Professionals' Association, and she had met people who had been certified. I went to one of the meetings, and HFI had a representative there. That was about three years ago. Soon after that, I was elected as the president of the UPA Des Moines, Iowa chapter. This position really motivated me to become certified."
In Des Moines, Iowa, Keith is very close to the headquarters of Human Factors International. This afforded him the opportunity to interact with top usability experts face-to-face early in his career.
"In Des Moines, I got to sit with HCI PhDs and have usability discussions. Of course, I was just the fly on the wall, because I didn't have the background. But it was extremely enlightening to hear the perspective of these professionals. That really encouraged me to pursue a usability career. Nothing motivates you more than having six different formulas for calculating usability return on investment explained to you by leading experts!"
Two Rivers Marketing has discovered that utilizing usability practices in their projects provides a powerful advantage in the advertising business.
"If you can do some of the up-front planning and user analysis first, you increase your odds of succeeding. As an organization, we prioritize integrating these processes into our projects at every step."
However, that's not to say that Keith's work isn't challenging. As a jack-of-all-trades, he finds that knowledge in usability is practical in many aspects of his work.
"Since we cater to so many different clients, we have to be flexible and meet many needs."
"I often work directly with clients. I develop marketing plans, complete preliminary research, digital strategies, and so on. I consult with clients on usability, search engine optimization, social media – all kinds of things. I'm also a front-end engineer, designing user interfaces, working with code, and putting my advice into practice for the clients."
Keith isn't worried only about his human clients, either. As an expert in search engine optimization, he applies UX fundamentals to the way robots interact with the sites he designs.
"For me, there are two aspects of search engine optimization. There are users who provide search terms and queries, and the bots who index the web. I created a google-bot persona to explain the latters' needs. Robots are active users that interact with your website. They have a unique user experience, just like any human does. Even though we usually focus on people who interact with sites, I find it's useful to use a similar line of thought for machines."
Even with such a deep understanding and unique perspective, Keith often finds himself returning to the basics. Sometimes designers try to use too many features or make things too complex. This can affect the performance of websites in a negative way.
"We had a client whose website used a Flash map on the front interface. The animation required that you had a cookie to get to it. Anytime you tried to access pages on their site, you were forwarded to this Flash map. Search engine crawlers couldn't get through it because it didn't degrade properly. There were no hyperlinks, and this created a brick wall around the content of the site. This, of course, affected their search engine rankings in a very negative way. My proposal was a design solution which went back to HTML hyperlinks. It was a simplification that proved to be very effective."
Two Rivers Marketing has been an Iowa business for more than a decade. It is clear that Keith's work has helped contribute to its success.
Each month we highlight the successes and achievements of a different member of our CUA community. If you are a Certified Usability Analyst and would like to be considered for CUA of the Month recognition, please send a brief professional bio to hfi@humanfactors.com
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Reviewed: 18 Mar 2014
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Reviewed: 18 Mar 2014
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