• by Deb Levin , March 8, 2006

All the people in my family are able to describe their jobs in one word. My father and brother are both doctors, my mother and sister-in-law are teachers, my uncle's a lawyer, my grandfather was a shopkeeper, and, for a very short period of time, my aunt worked as a receptionist in a chocolate factory.

So, as you can imagine, when I decided to go into usability and user-centered design, much confusion abounded.

"I think she makes the Internet," my mother told her friend Helen, who is an accountant.

"Well, at least your son is a doctor," Helen replied.

In actuality, what I do is not all that difficult to understand. My job is to make sure the Web sites we create are intuitive and easy for their target audiences to use. Sort of like cyber-ergonomics, if you will. As a result, I spend a lot of time doing research, observing users' online and offline behaviors to see how they approach key tasks, and crafting Web solutions targeted to more directly meet user needs. This type of work and the ensuing results are directly tied to the work our search-engine marketing group does on a regular basis.

If the user can't find it, the functionality isn't there. Several years ago, I had a button hanging in my cube with that phrase printed on it. At the time, I interpreted it to mean that, in order for a site or software application to be successful, users have to be able to quickly and easily find the desired functionality, or that functionality might as well not exist. Makes sense, right? I mean, why would you spend millions of dollars to build a highly functional word processing application without investing a few grand to ensure users are able to find the "create bulleted list" functionality?

Now that I've had the opportunity to work with Web search professionals, I see that the phrase is even more far-reaching than I initially thought. Forget individual functionalities; if users can't find your site, it doesn't matter how intuitive or usable it is. We usability professionals have to work closely with our search-engine counterparts to ensure that sites are not only usable, but also findable.

So, Deb, how do we do that? Good question. Several months ago, I had an epiphany during a user-research initiative with a new client in the bridal industry. The client had loaded its Web site with the word "bridal," and when "bridal" was entered into a search engine, the site came up third in the search results. Pretty good, right? However, during the actual user research sessions, I discovered that very few participants entered the term "bridal"; they preferred the term "wedding". When "wedding" was entered into the search engine, our client's site didn't appear until page 5 of the search results. Of course, none of the participants made it to page 5 and ended up selecting a competitor's site instead.

What does this tell us? Well, first off, SEM has to be better integrated into our user research initiatives. It's not enough to know what a client thinks is its main keyword; we have to determine what keywords actual users prefer as well.

Next steps. I realize I'm just barely scratching the surface here. Of course, keyword analysis is only one small part of SEM; there are many more opportunities for SEM and usability professionals to work together other than the examples presented here. The bottom line is: in order to create optimal, findable, usable solutions for our clients, we have to put our heads together during all stages of the project-development process and ensure that we've got the best interests of our users, as well as our clients, at heart.

In the meantime, I think I'm going to tell my mother I'm becoming a ballerina.