“Google may be the only company in the world,” says the Google corporate information page, “whose stated goal is to have users leave its Web site as quickly as possible.” In fact, a reported 81.9 million Web searchers per month use Google to locate content ranging from Jessica Simpson to Hurricane Katrina. Many of us don’t even bother using our bookmarks or favorites anymore-we just Google it when we need to find it.

Now that it’s so easy for people to search for anything in a fraction of a second and retrieve content buried in deep links thanks to Google and other high-speed tools such as MSN Search, is this creating a kind of laziness on the part of Web users? In the early days of the Web, we might have imagined that we’d become sophisticated online researchers in the future, but now it seems that everyone is just doing the “search lurch”: Enter a few key words, click through a few search results, and maybe you’ll find what you’re looking for in a few seconds… or maybe you’ll just give up and move on to something else. It’s like channel surfing with the remote, but on the Web.

We asked some well-known experts to comment on how our search habits are changing Web culture and even changing the way Web sites are being designed and maintained. Usability guru Dr. Jakob Nielsen founded the “discount usability engineering” movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation. Jesse James Garrett is a renowned author, interface designer, and information architect. Best-selling author and content expert Gerry McGovern is widely regarded as the number one worldwide authority on managing Web content as a business asset. Tara Calishain, an Internet researcher, is coauthor of the Google Pocket Guide and Google Hacks (O’Reilly), as well as other books on Internet searching.

Question: As the power and influence of search engines such as Google increase, will Web users bother going to homepages and trying to figure out each site’s navigation scheme? Or with our increasingly shortened attention spans and demands on our time, will we just Google everything?

Nielsen: Users have never wanted separate interaction designs on each Web site, and the associated learning overhead. That’s why it has always been a strong guideline to comply with user expectations and avoid deviant design. Search engines are simply making this trend stronger; they are not its cause. I know from user testing that one of the reasons users have been embracing search engines so warmly is as a way to liberate themselves from awkward and clumsy design on individual Web sites. One user told me: “I don’t want to navigate this information the way this Web site wants me to; I just want to go straight to the page I want, so I’m going to search for it.”  Garrett: I don’t think we should lament the passing of an era in which users had to master navigation schemes in order to use sites. In some ways, search may be the best thing that ever happened to navigation-we’re seeing lots of sites now paring their navigation back to just what’s really necessary and essential to user needs, rather than trying to cram an entire site map into the left rail on every page.

Calishain: I don’t think they’ll Google everything. I think instead what will happen-what is happening-is that standards are developing for site navigation. Users will not have to grasp new site navigation schemes since they’ll get used to going to a site and looking for the nav bar HERE and the content HERE and the search box HERE. I think people understand that search engines don’t include the entire Web. As long as that’s understood, they’ll further understand they can’t Google everything. They’ll have to explore sites.

McGovern: I think people everywhere are very impatient when they’re on the Web. If they don’t get what they’re looking for in the first page of search results, they’re not very likely to go to the second page. Very few people will use advanced search. I haven’t seen this basic pattern of behavior change in the last five years.

Q: Do you think it’s futile for site designers and information architects to struggle with developing effective navigation schemes for their sites? In other words, is search engine optimization becoming more important than navigation optimization?

Calishain: Good lord, I hope not. A truly effective navigation scheme, it seems to me, should prove effective for both a human visitor and a spidering ‘bot. The challenge is to build a structure that a ‘bot can appreciate and a human can understand, and build a vocabulary of description on your site that a human can appreciate and a ‘bot can understand. I believe these are complementary aims.McGovern: No. In my experience, there is a difference between the behavior of someone when they are on Google and when they are on an ordinary Web site. People may use Google to find a type of Web site, but then they are likely to navigate around it if it’s well-designed. They will often only resort to using search on that site if the navigation is poor.

Garrett: Navigation still has a very important role to play. First of all, there is a large audience for whom search is not their preferred method of information retrieval. Secondly, navigation helps users make connections between content elements that they might not otherwise make. Search is great when you’re looking for a particular piece of information; navigation helps you find information you didn’t know you were looking for.

Nielsen: Good navigation is still essential, especially local navigation to information in the neighborhood of the current page. First, search engines are not magic, so they don’t always lead users to exactly the right page. Sometimes users need to move around a little inside the site to zero in on the stuff they want. Second, Web sites often have additional information to offer that’s spread among multiple pages. This is especially true for B2B sites where products and services are too complex for a single product page to offer everything users want. There’s a need to navigate to whitepapers, spec sheets, and much more, and there’s also often a need to navigate between members of a product family before users can decide which one is the most appropriate for them.

Q: On the premise that Web users are already Googling more, navigating less, what would you recommend to site designers to make their sites more usable and searchable right now?

McGovern: Creating a good navigation will always be a core challenge for the Web designer. What is often forgotten is the relationship between well-organized content and search. The better organized and written your content is, the more searchable it is. And it’s not an either/or. Search and navigation needs to work in tandem, with some people using people to get to a certain part of the Web site, then using navigation to go further.Nielsen: Good usability has always been essential, since people have always left sites that were too complicated. The rise of search has simply lowered the threshold of what’s considered “too complicated” a good deal because users have nine other sites at their fingertips on the SERP [search engine results page]. There is now more of a tendency for users to dip into sites briefly for a very quick visit of 1-5 pages. As a result of this information-snacking behavior, Web sites must design to be attractive snacks and offer value for these ultra-short visits.

Calishain: If there are any pre-existing organization structures that would work on your site (organizing by date, alphabetization, card catalog number, etc.), use them. Consider using a site map. Have a Home button on each page. Put an About button somewhere, no matter how bloody obvious you think your site’s purpose is. Make sure that if someone does come to your site via Google that they have some way to quickly get to a summary of what your site is all about.

Garrett: It used to be that we could reasonably assume that most of the audience seeing a page deep in the site will have already seen the home page, a section page of some kind, and possibly some related content. As search engines become more effective, we have to acknowledge that users may not have all that context when they come to the page, and design every page as if it were the very first page the user sees in their experience of our site. The homepage is no longer the only place where we have to make a good first impression.

This article by Garth A. Buchholz was originally published by InformIT for Prentice Hall Technical Reference in 2005.

What inspired you to write your latest book, Corporate Conversations?

There is a fair amount of literature available on employee communications for communication professionals. But there’s very little geared toward non-professionals who want to figure out the why’s and how’s of internal communication. I wanted to produce a guide that business managers and leaders could use.

In terms of content development, do you think the corporate intranet is still treated as the poor cousin to the Internet site in many organizations? Are communications staff doing enough to make their intranet a tool for internal communications?

In most organizations, yes, the intranet doesn’t get anywhere near the resources the external Web site gets. The external site is seen as a profit center while the intranet is viewed as just another repository of information for employees. That’s not true in all organizations, though. If you look at IBM, for example, former CEO Lou Gerstner identified the intranet as the future of how employees would conduct business. Since then, it has become THE most trusted source of information, more than supervisors and peers combined. It has been the source of innovation, it is being used to proactively identify information employees can use to do their jobs, and it is driving business initiatives. But, as would be the case anywhere, it took senior management support to make that happen.

Communication staffs are doing what they can with the resources they have. Where I think they could do more is in making the business case to management for investment more in the intranet.

Over the last few years, have you found that communications staff becoming better online writers? Or are Web staff becoming better communicators?

Neither, in most cases. Online writing continues to be terrible, and IT people still don’t understand communication models. Of course, they shouldn’t have to. Expecting IT to become communicators is like expecting printers to become magazine writers.

In your experience what are the “seven deadly sins” that content developers commit on the Web?

I have to limit it to seven? Well, okay. Here goes:

1. There’s nothing on the home page that tells a visitor what the company is or what it does.
2. There’s no contact information, or it’s hard to find. I’m constantly amazed at the number of Web sites that don’t include a mailing address, for example.
3. They publish long tracts of scrolling text with few or no subheads.
4. They write content that is meant to be read instead of scanned. For most reference documentation on the Web, people scan and will not put up with text that requires them to sit and read.
5. They use graphics as though the document is print. Clip art and irrelevant photos that don’t enhance understand or scannability just get in the way.
6. They write lousy headlines.
7. They write lousy links that don’t articulate specifically what readers will find when they click the link.

What are some of the newest challenges in online communications, e.g. wireless content, corporate blogging, etc?

RSS is one of the biggest challenges. This is the most important online technology since the introduction of the hyptertext transfer protocol and yet few communicators are even aware of it. Applying is represents one challenge, but another one that is less understood is the fact that people who use RSS feeds read their feeds in a news reader. The last thing they want to do is click back and forth to Web sites. RSS readers will disintermediate much of the Web, and content producers will need to figure out how to make sure they can get their messages across when readers are reading their content somewhere other than their Web sites.

Corporate blogging is certainly another challenge from a number of angles, from the need to develop employee policies to figuring out how to employ them strategically and effectively. More broadly, recognizing the growth of social software and the demands from audiences to be more engaged is going to represent a challenge to organizations accustomed to using their communication channels primarily for one-way, top-down communication.

Are you working any new book projects? If so, can you share anything with us about them?

I have a few proposals out, but nothing that’s been accepted yet. I am updating my manual for IABC, “Writing for the Wired World.” The proposals have to do with the new face of the engaged customer, business blogging, and business podcasting.

We’ve all read in Wired Magazine and other publications about how you founded Wikipedia. What’s something we didn’t know about how it all began?

My daughter was born December 26, and Wikipedia was founded January 15. Her birth was a life-changing experience for me, which drove me personally to become radically committed to the goals of Wikipedia.

How will the new partnership with Yahoo! extend the reach of Wikipedia?

I don’t know if the partnership with Yahoo is an important step in extending our reach or not, but I’m optimistic about it. Our traffic has traditionally doubled about every three or four months. I don’t see any slowdown in that, and of course getting more traffic from people like Yahoo will help to continue it.

Wikinews is a newer offshoot of Wikipedia. Do you ever lay awake at night wondering about whether someone is posting something defamatory, uploading content that can’t be considered fair use, or posting some unattributed “news” item that’s a bunch of bunk?

No, I’m a good sleeper. The community is smart and takes care of itself.

Why doesn’t Wikinews offer an RSS or Atom feed?

It’s a simple technical matter, which will be addressed soon enough.

Wikinews scares some journalists the way news media were scared when they were told that blogs would replace newspapers. Is Wikinews a new revolution in grassroots journalism?

Not yet, but is has the potential. There are a lot of experiments going on now in the citizen/grassroots journalism world, and Wikinews is one of the important ones. We know from Wikipedia’s coverage of current events that this can work really, really well.

What’s in the future for the next version of Wikipedia? Is the main effort going into knowledge asset management on the site, or into systems that help verify the user’s identity to reduce graffiti and vandalism?

I am a carpenter, not an architect, so I don’t understand the meaning of phrases like “knowledge asset management”. I have no idea what that means.

There are no efforts underway to “verify the user’s identity” and we don’t feel that such efforts are a productive way to deal with behavioral problems.

Do you identify at all with the character Don Quixote de la Mancha? If so, are Wikipedia editors a kind of collective Sancho Panza?

Oh, well, hmm… I am very idealistic but I don’t think I’m impractical – Wikipedia is more popular than the New York Times online now, after all. And the community isn’t really my humble sidekick or anything like that.

Linus Torvalds has a famous line where he says that he’s really just a very lazy person who likes to take credit for what other people do. Like everyone, I laughed when I first heard the line, but now it’s actually the story of my life. Everywhere I go people thank me for my work but frankly, it is the community who does the real work and deserves the real thanks.

There’s an “open access” movement in academia to promote unfettered access online to sources of academic knowledge. Will Wikipedia ever be extended into academia for this purpose, and are there other communities on the Net that could use their own kind of Wikipedia or Wikinews, too?

Yes, Wikipedia will play an important role in the open access movement. There are many, many communities that can learn from the success of Wikipedia to generate high quality work from collaborative efforts.

I think there could be a similar model for that sort of thing, but it would have to be different from Wikipedia. As an example: one of the firm rules of Wikipedia is “no original research” – we simply aren’t qualified to evaluate it. That’s what academic journals are for. So, why are academic journals written in such an old-fashioned way? Can’t there be some dramatic improvements in that process now that we have collaborative authoring technologies? I think so! But exactly how to do that? Hmm, it’s an interesting problem.

You’ve said that Web designers should think of the Web as a publication and think of themselves as editors. What about those who are trained to think more in terms of application development and database-driven content rather than the front end?

I think there’s obviously a strong role for application development on the Web. However, I feel that overseeing everything should be a publishing approach. Someone needs to ask the question about whether we need this application in the first place, whether anyone is interested in reading this piece of content.

How can organizations develop a Web publishing strategy, and who should champion it? Traditionally this was within the purview of the IT folks, but should it now be led by a Web manager, a communications manager, a business manager or an IT manager?

Developing a web publishing strategy is really about figuring out what content you have that can drive value for your website. It’s about focusing on content as an asset, not a commodity.
I think there’s a big trend away from IT having responsibility for the Web. The intranet is coming under the responsibility of communications, and the public Web site tends to go to marketing.

How can teams of people from different backgrounds learn to work effectively and collaboratively on a Web team?

Web teams are no different than other teams, except that then tend to be a bit rudderless. I think there’s a relatively simple way here: put someone in charge. Nobody is really in charge of a great many Web sites I come across, and that results in all sorts of delays and compromises. Somebody needs to be able to make decisions that stick.

You wrote an interesting article called Words Come Before Looks in Web Design. In spite of the old maxim that “content is king”, an interesting study done at Stanford University in 2002 found that the “look and feel” of a Web site was the prime factor participants used to assess the credibility of sites. Do you think people are drawn more to content or to functionality, e.g. Google?

I think that graphical design is important but good functionality is far more important. Why is Google worth 25 billion? Because it has a nice logo or because it has a great search? Examine the homepage of eBay. It looks like it was designed for a kindergarten audience, but it is very simple, very straightforward: “Find, Buy, Pay”. First and foremost, Web sites need to be useful.

What’s the best strategy for creating metadata? Should you have a Web editor assigned as a metadata specialist to summarize content for search engines and browsing, or should there be a more distributed approach whereby you train Web publishers and SMEs how to create effective metadata?

Depending on the size of the organization it could be a combination. I do think that writers should be trained in creating quality metadata for their own content, but there will also be required an editorial oversight.

Let’s play futurist for a minute. How do you think content will change/evolve as we draw towards the end of the first decade of this century? How will content management improvements in technology change the art/science of information design? Any predictions on what kind of networked environment we’ll be living in?

I think the Web will get smaller. There’s been an awful splurge of content on the Web over the last 10 years, and most of it is useless content. I think by the end of the decade we’ll see less content of higher quality. The future is about back to the basics: learn to write compellingly, clearly and concisely.

The Elements of User Experience got its start on your Web site. What are the origins of that book?

The model described in the book really grew out of my need to explain the work I did to the people I had to collaborate with. I was the first information architect in a rapidly growing design firm, and many people there weren’t familiar with IA. I drew up the model in a single-page PDF document, and when it was finished I thought maybe some others in the field might find it useful. I posted it to my site, and it was the popularity of that document that led to the demand for a whole book on the model.

Do you have any new books coming out, or are you working on a new book now?

I’m not working on a new book at the moment. My company, Adaptive Path, has been in high demand since my first book came out, and managing that growth is really consuming most of my attention lately. I do have a couple of ideas for books that I’d like to tackle; I hope to be able to turn my attention to them sometime next year.

How would you define “user experience” to a non-techie?

I define user experience as the way a product operates and behaves in the real world. In other words, what’s it like to use the product? What kind of an experience is that? The philosophy of user experience design is that we can plan that experience before it happens and build certain qualities into it.

There are professional firms that call themselves information architects (ia), usability specialists, user experience designers (uxd), or just Web designers. Is this a sign that as the Internet evolves, expert roles are changing as well, or are Internet experts are gradually coalescing into specific fields of expertise to create professional standards and self-governance, as in other professions? Are all of these different titles confusing for clients who are paying for those services?

There are certainly more experts and specialists than there used to be. But I think it’s important to remember that for every specialist, there are a dozen generalists who have to handle many aspects of site design. Most information architecture work is not done by an information architect. I think the specialist community is missing an opportunity to raise the bar for the entire field by neglecting to find ways to help non-specialists do better work.

Are many user experience designers following your five-tiered model, generally speaking, or do you see many variations of it in the field?

I think there isn’t a strong impetus for people to come up with new models these days. One of the reasons the Elements model was so popular right from the start was that it was really filling a vacuum. A lot of people were wrestling with these ideas, but there hadn’t really been a concise, visual articulation of how the pieces fit together. These days, people don’t have the same motivation because these ideas have been much more fully explored over the last several years.

Your Visual Vocabulary Model for describing information architecture and interaction design has become a standard modelling language because of its logic and clarity. Do you anticipate having to make any changes to the current version 1.1b, and if so, what sort of changes do you anticipate and why?

The current version has been stable for a few years now. For the problems I designed the vocabulary to address, I haven’t encountered anything about the system that needs to change, and I’ve been using it longer than anybody! Of course, I may find myself wanting to extend the system to tackle new kinds of problems. So any changes would probably involve a significant leap forward – a Visual Vocabulary 2.0 – that would take the system into new territory.

In your book, you talk about the pitfalls of “design by default” (when a design structure follows the organization’s existing technology structure), “design by mimicry” (when the user experience inappropriately follows conventions used on other sites) and “design by fiat” (when someone’s personal prefernces drive the user experience decisions) — what strategy can designers use when a client or (worse?) a company executive is determined to stray down one of the above paths?

It all comes down to having reasons for the choices we make, being able to articulate those reasons, and being able to trace our choices back to the needs, expectations, and behavior of the people who will be using our product. Executives are all too often satisfied to see that a product works. The question we should be asking – the question I think every designer is ultimately charged with – is not “does it work?” but “does it work well?”

How can user experience design positively impact eGovernment projects and other public sector or non-profit organizations where issues like accessibility and universal design are important?

I think the various eGovernment initiatives are very encouraging for the field of user experience. Right now, the public sector unquestionably has its hands full meeting accessibility standards. But once they’ve made substantial headway there, it seems inevitable that they’ll turn their attention to user experience. It’s just a matter of time before agencies discover that accessibility is just one part of fulfilling their public mission, and that their sites aren’t serving the public if everyone can access them but no one can use them.

Taking a longer view, where is the Internet going and will user experience issues be overshadowed in the future by purely IT developments?

If anything, the role of user experience is only going to become more important as the sophistication of our technology increases. We’re never satisfied with what our technology does for us – we’re always pushing it to do more. That ever-growing complexity means that user experience designers are going to be busy for a long time to come.

I have been developing unified content strategies for about 15 years and working with content management systems for about the same period of time. The unified content strategy came about as I realized that there was no clear strategy for creating multiple documents or learning materials for products and services for a company. They were often created by different individuals and inconsistent. Often I was asked to create multiple documents on a very tight budget and short timeframe. The only way to do this time and cost effectively was to develop a unified content strategy then develop the materials to support the strategy.

My experience with content management began when clients had more and more information to manage (ranging from 10,000 pages to more than 100,000 pages) and as I began to develop materials in SGML. SGML databases enabled me to manage elements of content, not just documents. It was a perfect fit to use content management to support the unified content strategy.Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy came about as a result of our work with our clients. The book answers the questions that each client asked as they started to work with us. Now when we start to work with a new client the client already understands the basic concepts and process so we can “hit the ground running”. The Rockley Group works on each project as a team, drawing on different skill sets at different times to most effectively address the client’s requirements. It was a logical step to draw on two of our senior consultants to develop the content of the book. The book also answers the many questions we get from participants in our conference presentations, webinars and workshops. The book provides a solid foundation for anyone hoping to improve the way they create, manage, and deliver content.  Many companies tend to leave the content strategy to the IT developers, and many IT developers tend to shy away from serious discussions about content.

In your opinion, how can companies ensure that a unified content strategy will be developed?

A business case for a unified content strategy should always be presented from the business perspective. That is, issues surrounding content are not merely technology problems. Rather, they are complex business challenges that affect a company’s bottom line, and should be addressed as such. The IT and the business side should be partners in a unified content project, with both sides responsible and accountable for process and quality improvements, reduced costs and ultimately, greater customer satisfaction.

In your book, you talk about separating form and content. It’s one thing doing that for structured content, but is there any risk in doing that with unstructured content?

The goal of a unified content strategy is to define structure for previously unstructured content. So, once you’ve analyzed and modeled your materials, the content is no longer unstructured. With content that is left unstructured, for example documents that are not broken down further than a title, subheadings and document body, you can still separate the form from the content.

The content is in fact structured, just to a very high level of granularity. If your authors create content using stylesheets or templates, the style tags can still be “mapped” to different formats for different media. However, if authors do not use styles or adhere to a template, you cannot easily separate format from content.

As you’ve written, creating metadata can be difficult and time-consuming. How can organizations learn to consistently create metadata across the enterprise for retrieval, tracking and assembling for re-use? Should there be a set of Internet standards for creating controlled vocabularies, etc?

Internet standards for creating controlled vocabularies would be helpful, but individual organizations don’t need to wait for these types of standards to go ahead and create their own guidelines and controlled vocabularies internally. Many sectors and industries already have terminology standards that can be adapted and used to create metadata guidelines.

To be successful, a unified content strategy should be considered as an enterprise-level endeavor right from the start, even if not all areas in an organization are participating right away. Participating departments should define their own metadata with the entire organization in mind. They should solicit information from, and share it with, other departments to make sure that the metadata can be universally applied when the time comes.

Can you tell us about some of the content-related issues and challenges you’ve seen many organizations face, either on the development or the management side of things?

The most common content-related issue, and often the indicator that drives organizations to seek help in defining a unified content strategy, is the inability of either internal users of the content, or customers, to find the information they need. This manifests in many ways, including redundant content creation, increased costs due to inefficient content creation processes, and lost revenue due to customer dissatisfaction or content inconsistencies.

Organizations sometimes have a hard time getting buy-in from management, which is why they need to present a business case that demonstrates how these issues are affecting the company’s bottom line. IT and business need to work together to build a strong business case for a unified content strategy, and to select and implement the proper tools to support the solution. Too often, organizations have already committed to a particular tool or technology, without properly analyzing content-related business requirements ahead of time. It’s like going out and having a suit made without first taking your measurements.

In the near future, what kind of technology solutions do you see as having a powerful impact on content management in large organizations?

The move to adopt XML by many vendors has been the most significant breakthrough to date affecting content management, and will continue to benefit the content management industry moving forward, as new ways to apply its versatility to content-related issues are developed. In future, better native integration between authoring tools, content management systems and delivery systems are likely to emerge, as content management vendors gain a greater understanding of the issues and requirements of authors and publishers. Industry-specific content management solutions for areas such as health sciences and other regulated industries are being developed now.

Another area that vendors are beginning to address is the translation of content, and the integration of authoring, translation memory, content management and globalization management tools.

How do you see the Internet changing? Do you think it’s becoming a more proprietary and less open-source environment in terms of information, culture, commerce?

The Internet has been moving towards more proprietary and less open-source for years as vendors have created tools to assist people in creating and managing content on the web. As these tools have gained acceptance their proprietary focus has been overlaid on the Internet. I don’t see this changing though there will always be a role for open-source.

The Internet moved very rapidly from a tool for the academic and scientific community to the primary marketing and sales vehicle for many companies. This has dramatically changed the orientation of the Internet. However, it has continued to grow and support knowledge in more effective ways than traditional libraries and this will continue. Education, learning, knowledge, and knowledge sharing have changed for the good and it can only continue to grow.

Finally, do you have any other interesting books in progress or other projects you’d like to tell us about?

The Rockley Group is currently focusing on content/information modeling and metadata design for content reuse and management. Little or no literature exists on this topic and it is critical to the effective design of a unified content strategy. We are developing methodologies, techniques, and strategies in this area to optimize reuse, content structure and optimize the support for the models in authoring, content management, and delivery tools. We have recently developed workshops for our clients and the public on this topic. At some point in the future this may become a book.