Tag Archives: design

Using robot personas for better SEO

by

Three years ago I joined the National Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) and began attending the local Iowa chapter in Des Moines. During that first year I had the opportunity to present to the group about usability and search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. Now that I’ve been broadening my usability knowledge and vocabulary, I feel like discussing the topic again.

As the usability field expands into persuasion, emotion and trust (PET) design I believe that SEO is closely related to usability. Part of users’ trust is that Google, or whichever search engine they prefer, delivers a list of websites that are relevant to their search term(s). In order for Google to trust a website, it must index and “know” that a site is worthy of presenting to users. Using the process of user-centered analysis, a usability expert can create a persona shaped around a search engine robot. I know this needs more work, but I thought I’d give it a first round trial:

Googlebot Persona Profile

Social Media Buzz

by

As social media expands it still is in its infancy on full support of accessibility. Designing with accessibility in mind usually makes people think, “nothing but text” or “ugly.” The sad fact is, most developers are huge style sheet and DIV layout adapters, but don’t ever use the ‘media’ property in their CSS links.

I’m confused that more F2E folk don’t take the time to add a Braille CSS. It really isn’t any more difficult than setting up a print friendly CSS. I am guilty of not adding this to my sites. But my next site will be accessible to many media. I will post a link once it is live.