A little on-the-street interview action from Google is a nice reminder of why it’s important not to make assumptions about what your users and customers know or don’t know.

One point I often make in discussing web site design with clients is that your site’s navigation is also part of your brand. On the web “the brand is the experience and the experience is the brand.”*

People trust a site that appears clearly organized.

Recently a potential client in discussing a web site redesign expressed how their content management vendor’s implementation of navigation with multiple levels of fly-out menus caused problems for older alumni (who can’t drive a mouse as well as they used too — this issue it not limited to older individuals, by the way). The vendor is probably no doubt proud of the technical aspects of its menus — it uses them frequently in its online portfolio examples — but this is an example where the technical solution is not the best human solution, and it leaves a bad impression with certain users.

James Kalbach writes in Designing Web Navigation that while the “cost of finding information is high, the cost of not finding information is perhaps higher.”** A site’s navigation plays a role in expressing a brand, it:

Communicates … priorities and values through categories, the order of options, and the tone of the labels. Well-structured navigation also contributes to the overall credibility…. People seem to trust a site that appears clearly organized with an easy-to-use navigational structure.

How you help or hinder your site visitor’s completion of his or her goals and whether you respect or waste a user’s time, feeds the stream of impressions about your institution. In the example above, the message is: We don’t care so much about our older alumni. If your navigation is “cool,” but unusable by persons with disabilities, you are sending a pretty definite message about your institution, and its brand, into the world.

We’re all aware that our brand extends beyond the visual aspects of it. We’re frequently much better at implementing the visual parts — the logo, the stationery package, the publications, the appearance of the website — than we are the physical and experience aspects. But our brand’s story is also informed by physical interactions and by experiences, whether we actively try to mange those aspects or not. An unhelpful employee can damage the impression of your brand for a campus visitor. A campus tour and the appearance of your physical plant can affirm or change your brand impression in the mind of a prospect or a parent. And nothing can telegraph an organization’s thinking about its consumers or audiences quicker than its web site.

In web projects there’s often pressure to get to something visual very quickly, but web design is as much, if not more, about enabling an experience as it is about including the logo and new pictures of the quad. Your site’s navigation, and the information architecture and the back-end technical systems supporting it, are the foundation of the online experience. Design decisions should always consider accessibility, responsiveness, and polite degradability (for assistive technology devices and older browsers) with the goal to leave site visitors with a delightful, as opposed to frustrating, experience. Navigation design should not be left to the IT intern or the default settings of your content management system.

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* Dayal, S., Landesberg, H. and Zeisser, M., “Building Digital Brands,” The McKinsey Quarterly, May 2000: 42-51.

** Kalbach, James, Designing Web Navigation (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2007) 22.

Writing and designing for today’s web is about writing and designing for humans and robots.

Content must not only pique the interest and meet the needs of a site’s human visitors, but it must be equally nutritious to the Pac Man appetites of the search engines of Google, Yahoo, and others. Every search engine has an application — crawler, spider, or bot — that finds and follows the links of your site, sending back a list to a database, which is then analyzed by the search engine’s proprietary algorithm to rank your pages and serve up a search engine results page (or SERP, in the lingo). Optimizing your site for search requires having content, structure, and technology that help both the crawler move over the site and the search engine rank the results.

Search optimization is a mix of science and magic and a continually moving target. Even the search engine optimization (SEO) experts don’t agree on all techniques. And an .edu site is going to have different priorities for SEO than a business site that exists for e-commerce. But since many SEO techniques are easy and actually encourage good organization and content practices, adopting them as part of your site development and maintenance guidelines is not a waste of time, particularly in an era of belt-tightening for traditional marketing budgets. Here are seven tips gleaned from the realm of SEO to get you started:

1. Use descriptive page titles — We’re talking the TITLE tag here, and it’s one of the first things that both humans and robots encounter. Make sure your pages have descriptive titles with keywords. Simply repeating the name of your institution on every page is not sufficient. Each page should have a unique page title, with keywords (but not stuffed with keywords) relevant to the page content, front loaded with the words that matter most. Aim for no more than 66 characters and use title case.

2. Put effort into the most valuable meta tags — The meta description tag deserves your attention, not necessarily for its influence over rankings, but because its content can be what search engines display on SERPs. You want to control that display, not leave it up to the crawler’s best guess. It should be around 160 characters and be unique to each page. The meta keyword tag has been so abused with spamming that it has low to zero influence on search engines. If you use it, it should be different on every page. Simply repeating the same words in the keywords tag on every page of your site may look more spammy than legitimate to a search engine.

3. Use heading tags – Headlines are looked at with more importance by crawlers than body text. The H1, H2, and so on tags are a way to indicate headlines and their relative importance to search engines. In the dark ages before CSS, we were saddled with fixed heading sizes that were often too big or too small or otherwise ugly in the layout, so we sometimes used other tags (or even images, gasp) to style headlines. Now with CSS we can visually style H tags any way we like, and they can be used to add robot-readable structure to a web page. Heads should be both descriptive and have relevant keywords when possible.

4. Write one topic per page – This is a tip followed by most pro content developers. Not only does it help your human readers, but the algorithms that search engine crawlers use work best on one topic at at time. Keeping focused in your writing also makes it easier to come up with keywords and meta descriptions for a page. Since you’re sticking to one topic per page, you can also keep it short and get to to the point quickly, right? Headlines, subheads, and concise paragraphs are good SEO writing, and consistency among those helps search engine crawlers (and humans) understand your content.

5. Don’t be lazy with your links — The anchor text of a link gives descriptive information about the content of the link’s destination page and can influence search engine rankings. Lazily written “click here” links, for example, tell nothing about the destination page, but may get you a top ranking for “click here.” (Search “click here” in Google. Hello, Adobe.) Use keywords in the link text that are relevant to the destination page. And while you’re at it, pay attention to linking to the PDFs, videos, images, and similar assets that are all part of today’s sites. For example, a search engine cannot tell that’s the spring commencement video unless the link to it says “spring commencement video,” and it is placed next to text in the page about spring commencement. And, by the way, for similar reasons make sure all your images (including logos and images used as buttons) have appropriate text in their ALT tags.

6. Understand the search implications of technologies – This is a whole topic unto itself, but be aware of search implications of your technical choices. Flash for example, has improved in its ability to be indexed and to allow search engines to find the content and links embedded within Flash objects. But it’s unlikely that search engines will open themselves up to full compatibility with Flash, because that would also open the door to being gamed by an unethical optimizer. Current search engines don’t generally index Flash content on par with HTML. HTML pages will get ranked higher.

There are similar challenges with AJAX and JavaScript. Search engines can’t deal very well with the dynamic and “pageless” content that can be enabled by these technologies. The functional and stylish enhancements that JavaScript can bring to a site’s navigation can also block a search engine’s ability to build a model of the site’s link structure. Search engines can only see the initial page load. If AJAX is used to later alter that content, the new content won’t be seen by a search engine. There are techniques to deal with these issues that you may want to consider.

And finally, with the growing popularity of content management systems (CMS) in education, institutions are faced with a whole slew of additional considerations that affect search. For example, it’s not uncommon to “restart” a site within a CMS, generating a new URL structure for all the content. Search engines, however, have indexed your site using the previous URLs. You are effectively starting over at ground zero with search engines when you flip the CMS switch. Content management systems can also generate problematic URLs along with cloned and duplicated content, which also don’t make search engines happy. If you’re considering a CMS, questions to the vendor about how it supports search are in order.

7. Bring back the site map — And finally, have a good old site map page, a hierarchical list of all the links of the site. The popularity of providing site maps has waned, but they are good for SEO. For one thing, such an alternative link structure can help make up for issues being caused by JavaScript, AJAX, and other crawler blockers. Also including the site map’s links at /sitemap.xml and /sitemap.txt can help search engines understand your site’s structure.

Like all things web, developing for search optimization is a balance between human needs and the needs of technology. It can be challenging, but in many cases what works well for one — structure, conciseness, explanation, consistency — also benefits the other. Search optimized content can be a win win for human and robot.

Adaptive Path President Peter Merholz recently started blogging at Harvard Business about the customer experience-driven business. In addition to being credited with coining the term “blog,” Merholz has worked with a wide range of clients in the areas of user experience, strategy, and design.

In his first post, Merholz writes: “…this isn’t about money — in my work, the biggest impact I’ve seen a customer experience mindset have is to help companies understand how they can better orchestrate existing elements to realize new value….This is about choreographing what you already have (technologies, people, offerings) to better respond to your customers’ needs and wants.”

Adapative Path’s clients are much more likely to be companies and corporations, but it occurred to me that you could substitute “students” for “customers” in the above. And in these economic times, who wouldn’t be on board with taking what you already have and better aligning it with your students’ goals and needs?

In his most recent post, Merholz examines how businesses see their customers and, unfortunately, how little they often understand them.

About working on a project with a large bank, Merholtz writes: “Buying financial products is challenging, because unlike physical goods, it’s hard to define what you want ahead of time….

“We realized that customers must satisfy three sets of requirements — functional (does the product meet my basic needs); intellectual (through comparison, am I confident I’m getting the best deal); and, crucially, emotional (could I have a relationship with this bank?).”

Again, drawing a parallel with the challenge of college selection: Does the college meet my basic needs (functional)? Through comparison, am I confident I’m getting the best university for me (intellectual)? Could I have a relationship with this college (emotional)?

The bank wanted to drive all applications for new products online, according to Merholz, but researching and listening to the customers revealed that they still wanted to be able to have a human relationship, either in person or on the phone. Continuing to provide that contact opportunity was a better strategy.

The bottom line here is that it’s not just who your customers/students are, but how they behave. And have you aligned your institutional processes with actual behaviors, not with labels and preconceived notions about your customers/students? Is your admissions strategy meeting the functional, intellectual, and emotional concerns of potential students?

Fifty-nine percent of Americans believe they can judge a company’s values by its online presence. That’s according to a new study by MS&L and reported in Brandweek. So, first, what’s your online presence (and we’re talking about more than just your Web site) say about your school’s values?

The study, which polled 6,000 consumers worldwide, also found that consumers are increasingly driven to identify leading companies as those that are “innovative, financially secure, ethical and possess the biggest market share.” This means traditional notions of competitive advantage are shifting, and that means how you communicate your values must shift as well:

The findings underscore the need for marketers to shift their business focus from being “driven by a coherent set of core values” to one that emphasizes how those “values [can] be communicated effectively at every touch point or companies risk undermining both their relationships with their customers and their long-term success,” said Mark Hass, CEO of MS&L Worldwide, a brand communications and consultancy network headquartered in New York.

Schools too often take their values as a given. After all, information about those Spring Break service trips are posted in the news archive and that page with the mission statement has been on the Web site for years. But the fact is, the values that an institution projects are generally (to extend Donald Rumsfeld’s epistemological categories) “unknown knowns.” That is, they’re things we don’t know we know because we’re too close to them. When we spend the bulk of our time talking to people who are equally invested in and knowledgeable of the institution’s values, we take it for granted that those values are apparent to everyone. However, what you say your brand values are and the values you project can be radically different. (And, at any rate, as this study indicates, consumers aren’t interested in what you say your values are; they’re inferring your values based on what they see or experience.) Take the example of the campus tour: How many schools tout their individualized approach to education–to large groups of prospective students and their families? Think prospects who are looking at everything with a critical eye–and who are hyper-aware of propaganda–don’t spot the disconnect?

Other findings:

72% of U.S. respondents believe that companies can have values just like the public does.

75% of Americans said companies have both a “higher purpose” and want to be financially successful, with honesty being a core component of that success.

56% of Americans said it is crucial for them to know about the values of the companies they do business with, while 33% said this was somewhat important.

Respondents polled in the survey also rated a company’s competition in the marketplace (87%) to be as important as environmental responsibility (82%).

While price and quality may be the primary purchase influencers in tough times, in the long run, it’s values that matter the most. 77% of consumers in the U.S. said they either strongly agree or somewhat agreed with that statement.

David Armano of Logic + Emotion lays out a conceptual framework for online community building in an article in AdAge.  Everyone wants engagement with their brand.  The problem is that most companies believe that viral strategies are the only (or at least the best) way to do this.  Armano makes the case that community building offers a more achievable goal:

[U]nlike viral, community requires a different set of objectives, strategy and tactics around measurement. Yet, intuitively, brands realize there is value to them. That’s because if we take our bright and shiny marketing hats off for a moment, we realize that it’s likely we are part of them. … People who use social networks also feel like they’re part of a larger community of people they relate to.

Regardless of whether you’re considering starting an online community, Armano provides a concise framework for any online presence—and for any brand initiative for that matter:

Content
When considering community initiatives, there are three questions to ask: Where will the content come from? Does it provide indisputable value? Can a regular flow of quality content be maintained?

Context
Context means understanding how to meet people where they are and serving them the right experience at the right time. Well-designed applications and functionality have great opportunities to deliver on context.

Connectivity
… It’s not about mass communications but more about the micro-interactions …. Designing experiences that support thousands of micro-interactions means you are making a commitment vs. trying to produce a one-hit wonder. …

Continuity
Communities … need to be flexible to evolve while still providing a valuable and consistent user experience which can be sustained.

Read the full article here.