In the “old” days, a company only needed to manage a visitor’s website experience from the homepage.  Now with the effectiveness of social media and search engine optimization, more and more visitors are entering a website through subpages.  Statistics show that an average of 40% of visits derive from interior page entry points.  So what are you doing to customize your brand’s online experience based on how customers enter your website?

It seems like a large problem to tackle, but focusing on your web metrics to uncover pieces of how the site is being received is the key.  Now more than ever close evaluation of your web metrics reports from Google Analytics, Web Trends and Omniture is essential in making this happen.

To be effective, companies must evaluate popular entrances, reason for entry, bounce rate, and conversion percentages per entry point.  Understanding these dynamics for each subpage will allow you to determine which pages deliver the experience you desire for your clients.

So what are some of the things you should test to help increase a page’s effectiveness?  Reanalyze the ideal paths that you want visitors to follow by entrance.  Create navigation points and conversions that are unique to each page and the context in which a person enters the site through referral links.   Measure how these small shifts in navigation and conversions lower your bounce rate and increase your click-throughs to your site.    Once you focus on the subpages and see what works, you will see that your overall KPI’s for your site will improve.

As the creepy voice in Jacob’s Ladder says, “Dream On.”

This month saw the release of two “new” search engines, Wolfram|Alpha and Microsoft’s Bing.

Wolfram|Alpha is being labeled an “answer engine” instead of a search engine.  The gist of how it works is it takes your query, repeats it to you (so you can make sure you understand it) and then returns the “answers” you’re most likely to want.  Examples are math problems, common cultural trivia, historical trivia and practical everyday knowledge (like what German size is a US women’s size 8 shoe).  It’s a good lifeline if you’re playing Millionaire.

Bing is Microsoft’s re-release of Live Search.  In an attempt to compete with Google, Bing integrates well with Microsoft’s other tools (maps, etc.).  It also supplies what it feels are context sensitive links for other things you might be searching for (for example, if you search for Charleston SC, it will assume you would like to travel and highlight specific travel searches on the left hand side).

We’ve yet to see how Bing will handle advertisements, but we know they will work their way in.  Don’t know how long it will last, but Bing seems to have filtered out a lot of the search spam that Google has (or it wasn’t filtering and was just because those sites spamming Google have targeted their algorithms so well).

I still prefer Google, but the ante has been upped with the shifts in how these two new engines are working (better context links for “types” of searches and just answering your question).

I’ll leave you with some fun (albeit probably hard-coded and not very useful) searches in Wolfram|Alpha:

are you skynet?
all your base
what is the answer to everything?
what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen african swallow?
how much wood could a woodchuck chuck?

What you don’t do for your dog says as much about you as what you do for them.

The new campaign for Alpo dog food capitalizes on this thought brilliantly. By showcasing the ridiculousness of pet owners dressing up dogs and paying for pet massages, it focuses on getting back to the basics of what it means to be a real dog and dog owner. It invites its target to laugh with the brand at other types of dog owners who go overboard with their dog pampering. It brings the realness back to dog ownership that these owners have never forgotten. Now I must admit, I wouldn’t buy Alpo even though I don’t dress up my dog. I am a very different type of pet owner that would never think of giving my dog anything but the best food and care possible. Said plainly, I see Alpo as a cheap and more importantly less healthy brand of dog food. Not good enough for my pup. But I am not their target. Their target buys dog food from a grocery store not a pet store. And they don’t let their dog eat better food than they do. But even though I am not their target, I find these ads amusing, honest and funny in a way that stories about peas and carrots could never be. After all, dogs were once wild animals forced to hunt for their food.

With everything from downloadable posters, stories about dogs lost to pampering that need to be “found” and even viral videos of people going into doggy spas to “rescue” the dogs by giving them Alpo, this campaign brings their headline “Quick, get that dog some Alpo” to life. The tagline “Real dogs eat meat” hits close to home for both the target’s way of thinking about feeding their dog as well as how they think about feeding themselves. Bravo to Alpo for truly understanding their target and how to talk to them.

Here is the campaign website.

When you hear the words “interaction design” what do you think? I know plenty of people will immediately go and look it up on Wikipedia so here’s a link to save you some time.

Robert Reimann defines interaction design as

a design discipline dedicated to:

• Defining the behavior of artifacts, environments, and systems (i.e., products)

…and therefore concerned with:

• Defining the form of products as they relate to their behavior and use
• Anticipating how the use of products will mediate human relationships and affect human understanding
• Exploring the dialogue between products, people, and contexts (physical, cultural, historical)

We interact with things every day. Whether it’s a door knob, our car, or Facebook. These have to be designed by someone to (hopefully) provide the best experience to the user as possible. A doorknob is probably a simplistic example but if a knob is the wrong size or is hard to turn (or unpredictable in its behavior), people might have a hard time getting used to it.

Human-computer interaction has historically been a tough challenge to conquer, so kudos to Douglas Engelbart for inventing the mouse.

When it comes to the Web, interaction design is closely related to interface design. The key difference is that interaction design focuses on the behavior of the interface and how it responds to the user; interface design focuses more on layout and positioning. Take for example our navigation on this site. Interface design determines that there’s a navigational bar and that it is collapsed. The interaction design delves into how the user experiences our site. Roll over any element and the list expands to allow you deeper access into our site. The user interaction has determined how the site reacts to accommodate what the user wants to do.

Truly great interaction designs provide a rich user experience that is appealing, informative, and functional. “Web 2.0″ and the age of powerful JavaScript libraries has caused good interaction design on the web to become more prevalent and there are some websites that just “get it.”

Take for example Netflix. Aside from their great service, their ratings system and suggestion features meet all three of the above criteria. Rating movies you’ve seen in the past doesn’t require filling out a form and hitting submit, but simply moving your mouse over a graphic of 5 stars and as you move closer to the 5th, they turn yellow. No explanation, no in-depth dissertation of how you should rate the movie according to what the stars mean. It is just intuitive.

What about Netflix’s recommendation engine? I know the movie suggestions are not always great, but the fact that it offers me more choices based on my past behavior is fantastic! From an interaction standpoint all I have to do is pick a movie and they automatically recommend similar movies. I can add movies to my queue from right there if I want. There’s no hassle and minimal clicks to find what I want.

It is important to remember that interface and interaction design are not the same. Take into consideration the cognitive processes that a user will be going through while using your site or application. Focusing on usability through interaction design will naturally flow from understanding what the user wants… but that’s the ultimate question: what does the user want? Sometimes you have to guess. Let’s hope the guesses are right.

• Interaction design -The blog about interaction design and usability
• Thoughts on Interaction Design
• So You Want To Be An Interaction Designer