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CUA of the Month – April, 2009

Thanh Nguyen
"Usability and SEO go hand in hand – what's good for the users is good for the spiders. Many clients say they want SEO and actually mean usability."
Thanh Nguyen
Director of Usability
BusinessOnLine

The Search for Usability Finding a User-Centered Approach to SEO Design

by Doug Gorney

For Thanh Nguyen, it's all about the search.

When we caught up with Thanh, she and her colleagues at BusinessOnLine were hard at work on a redesign of givelife.org, the American Red Cross website. "We're integrating keyword research into the site structure – massaging the links not only in terms of what users look for, but what the search engines look for. It's an essential element of web design – where usability and SEO meet and guide the user from the information-seeking phase to actually accomplishing their goals. This approach to integrating User-Experience, Web design, and SEO is what sets my firm apart. No one else does it."

"I love working at something I was trained to do," says Thanh, who comes to usability from the field of cognitive science. While at the University of California, San Diego, Thanh specialized in human-computer interaction, conducting ethnographic research and contextual inquiries. Usability had become Thanh's passion by the time she graduated and began work as a developer and designer at BusinessOnLine, an online marketing agency.

"As a developer it was my job to code and develop page layout, but I used my experience and knowledge from my studies to take it a step further and really build solutions that were intuitive and took the user's needs into consideration. My passion for the user and the results we achieved by designing with users in mind prompted BusinessOnLine to create a position dedicated to this aspect. I moved away from coding and focused exclusively on ensuring that minimum standards, best-practices, and learned conventions of usability were being employed in every website we delivered." At that point, Thanh realized it the position was going to be challenging. "There was no usability department here," she noted. "They wanted me to build it!"

Thanh was going to be a real usability pioneer. She was charged with defining BusinessOnLine's usability process and creating the direction for the department. And, she realized that for BusinessOnLine, usability would mean much more than simply creating user-centered web designs.

"BusinessOnLine is an online marketing agency and User-Experience is one of our core competencies along with Web Design, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media, and Analytics. The challenge for me was to integrate usability across departments. To make all of it user-centered really meant institutionalizing usability from the start. I wanted to make sure, usability was a process, not a stop gap solution that comes at the end of a website development."

Rail Europe is a good example. Operated by the French National Railroads for American travelers, Rail Europe engaged BusinessOnLine for a website redesign to improve the user-experience and hopefully increase conversions. Working with her designers at BusinessOnLine, Thanh and her department made wireframes of the new site and conducted user interviews and research studies to test elements including what appeared to be highly effective new search terms.

"It looked like everything was on track," says Thanh. "But if there's one thing you learn in usability, it's not to make assumptions." Thanh and her team pressed on with a card-sorting analysis, digging deeper and they realized that many of their American test users were using "train" as a search term – not "rail". "That one piece of contextual usability – finding the right search term for this market – made all the difference in how the site would be structured that would optimally benefit users and spiders.

And because Thanh kept SEO in the background through the entire development process, search engine spiders (applications that keep search engines up-to-date) did not have to take weeks to figure out the new Rail Europe site, as they usually do. On top of that, their Google rankings did not suffer either.

"A lot of clients don't really know what usability is," says Thanh. "Being a Certified Usability Analyst adds credibility to our practice, and creates a sense of trust with our clients. I make it a point to discuss usability principles with clients and to articulate how implementing these concepts can have tangible results, including lifts in conversion, leads, and revenue."

Thanh took all four of HFI's certification-track usability courses and received her certification in 2006. "Even though I'd had a lot of user-centered design experience by that time, I learned a lot of new design and research techniques. What really made those courses valuable, though, is how they put research into practice. They show you heuristics, then, go into the research that supports them. When you've grounded design methodology in cognitive psychology and HCI (human-computer interaction) research, that's solid proof."

Thanh always keeps the binders from her HFI courses right next to her in her office. "Any time I'm at a loss for an idea, or I need validation, I'll pull them out."

Demand for user experience design has boomed with the advent of Web 2.0, Thanh notes. Many clients are coming to BusinessOnLine because today's digital business strategies demand an understanding of the users, their preferences, and the way they use the web to accomplish goals. That's turned Thanh into something of a usability evangelist. She is regularly invited to speak at design, marketing, and usability conferences; including the Online Marketing Summit, MarketingProfs, and Online Marketing World, and her client work has been featured as a MarketingSherpa case study. Additionally, she is a published author contributing articles and resources to various industry publications. Attendees always ask her for materials and white papers, and in addition to the ones she authors, she often refers them to humanfactors.com.

She also spread the usability gospel at BusinessOnLine, integrating the contents of her HFI binders into the training materials of new hires. "If you're on a search for usability, I tell them, then, this is a great way to start."

CUA of the Month

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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