Who Invented The Hamburger Icon?

The hamburger icon is now a part of our online mobile experience. It sits there in the top left-hand corner of our small screen devices acting as the gateway to a number of other services & functions.

By its very presence we are reassured that additional things lie behind our current view and that they will be exposed by a single tap. In short... the hamburger icon is a simple universally understood metaphor for displaying further menus & navigation.

So how did we come to this collective understanding? Who originally thought that three horizontal lines was a sufficient way of depicting the menu behind it?

I think that whoever invented the hamburger icon deserves praise for creating something so simple and yet so useful. 

Google changes the top nav for search again

Google seems to be rolling out another new iteration of its top navigation bar.

In what seems to be an about-face from the adoption of the black left justified "Google bar" that currently lives across the top of all Google apps, the new version gets rid of the black background and moves to the right.

In my opinion this makes the Google+ link to Google Social Networkking platform even more obvious and seemingly relegates the useful links to: maps, Play (Google's app store), YouTube and more. To now reach these functions, you click on the three by three grid image, which then drops down the icons for these popular apps.

Will it catch-on and be adopted across the entire Google estate? Or have I just stumbled across a limited test by the Big G?

SEO and eCommerce Merchandising

At Ideal Interface we have various clients who have eCommerce websites. Having done SEO work for them, including strategy and implementation consulting, I thought I'd post on some ways you can leverage your online trading site to benefit your company's search engine optimisation efforts.

1. Give you products the names that people are looking for
   If you want to target search users who are looking for a "red patent shoe", then calling your product "scarlet platform brogue" isn't going to help as much.
2. Provide decent product descriptions
   The supporting content you provide on the page will help the search engine spiders to understand your page better. Also try to include alternative words to target the long tail of search (Hint: you might want to mention "scarlet platform brogue" here, but again only if people will search for that term)
3. Ensure your site navigation (and therefore your directory structure) includes keywords and that these are replicated in your page titles and breadcrumbs.
   E.g. footwear > shoes > smart shoes > red patent shoe
4. Use of on-site search for keyword research
   Take a look at the terms that users type into your on-site search and you'll learn a lot about what they are looking for. Obviously these will be different to the terms that users type into the major search engines (e.g. they don't tend to search too often for your site name in on-site search, rather your brands or products) but they will be terms that real users type in expecting to find things.
   You'll also find out (if your search is clever enough) the terms that bring up no products. (Hint: this could either be highlighting a problem with the way you describe products or be an opportunity in the making).
5. Optimise your entire site to ensure spidering and indexing by search engines
   As well as making sure every page of your site is coded to standards and that you're taking full advantage of Semantic HTML, you should use tools such as the Google Webmaster services that are freely available. 
6. Create a dynamic sitemap.xml
   If your product catalogue is constantly changing, then I  recommend the use of a dynamic sitemap.xml file. This is a technical file that sits in the root directory of your site and tells the search engines all the indexable pages your have. A sitemap.xml file should be created each time your website product catalogue is created and will save you effort of manually updating it

Does anyone have any further suggestions?

An effective URL strategy and its benefits

The URL and extended URL use on your company website is important for 2 key reasons:


1. It provides a logical navigation structure
Basic usability says that you need to show users where they are in the site structure. Yes, you can provide all the signage/clues/breadcrumbs/etc. but also providing a decent URL path gives your browsing user an informal breadcrumb trail that provides them with further hints as to where they are. Or put it another way, not providing this may mean the difference between your customers finding what they want and not.

For example, just by looking at the URL path on the Adobe site:
http://www.adobe.com/products/captivate/productinfo/product-demos/podcasting-software/

You could perhaps decipher that you were looking at some information on one of its products called Captivate. You may even go so far as to think you were on a page that demonstrated how its could be used for podcasting. You would of-course be correct.

However, who would have guessed that this is a link to PC World's Business site to buy this same product? http://www.pcwb.com/catalogue/item/ADOCA004


2. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
Real users aren't the only things that read URL's to understand the content. Most web search engines also read the URL and use it in their indexing of the page. This is one of the reasons why blog posting appear so high up in searches for specific phrases.
For example, if you type the following into Google "Customers can be brand evangelists", you get two search results, the top one being:
http://press20.blogspot.com/2008/04/customers-can-be-brand-evangelists.html
(my 14 April posting on the subject)



So if you're thinking about re-developing your new website, remember to ask your technical team what they are doing about the URL structure.