When improving the user experience of your site or just fine tuning elements to improve conversion, it’s important to understand your user types first before you make any rash decisions. When we work with clients on designing a site, one of the first questions to ask is who will be using the site? Specifically a user’s age plays a huge role in what people like and how people think. In this post I’ll generally talk about how users cognitively look at interactive mediums (not just the web).

There are many different types of users out there, especially when you think of how they learn and digest information.  So to quickly categorize them, they are: kids, teens, and adults. Many of these people use technology every day and are accustomed to make certain decisions based on their device of choice, their way of looking at the world, and most importantly what matters to them.

Kids
Kids are click o’ holics. They’re very visual and will click on virtually anything regardless of whether or not it’s a button (their favorite color, character, etc). This is why the majority of kid’s interfaces are created in Adobe Flash. It’s the visual/interaction engagement factor (animation, games, etc) that gets kids attention. Kids are sponges and generally absorb everything and learn through visuals, audio, and interaction (kinesthetic learning). Kids will spend 2 seconds on a screen with just text, but will spend a great deal of time on a page with visuals and interaction.

Without experience with different types of interfaces, kids don’t know any better. Kids are more likely to click on elements that have nothing to do with the content or that lead them to a dead end. They except what they see and generally don’t make a lot of criticisms (like we do) on how an interface could be better.

Teens
Teenagers spend a great amount of time online through a home computer, but more than likely a wireless device (cell/smart phone, iTouch, etc). Their fixated on what and how other people see them, so their online presence with friends is important, especially social networks. They’re not adults yet, but would like to be considered one.

Like I said before kids are sponges, but as kids get older the ways they learn and take in information change or tend to favor one vs. the other (visually, auditory, or kinesthetically). A teen is more likely to read more about what a peer thought of something than an adult and more so what their friends thought of it.

Adults
As we get older, we get stingier about our interface decisions. We know what we want and we want it now. At this point we know what feels wrong in an interface but maybe not able to express why or how it could be better. More than likely if an interface is hard to use, the business wasn’t thinking about their users and those users have long since went somewhere else, or struggled through the process of using that interface if they couldn’t go anywhere else.

Generally adults with interfaces or on the web are looking for information or services, selling/buying items, businesses, people (friends), basically anything you can think of. So based on the user’s needs, interfaces work out best when choices are user centric, unlike kids or teens who don’t mind being told what to do or having things already done/filled out for them. Left brain, right brain, the learning aspect continues and tends to stick. If a person learns a certain way (say, visually), it’s more than likely that the person will always learn things that way.

So what kind of learner are you? When I say “fire truck”, what comes to mind?

If you’re a visual learner like me, you would say red. If you’re an auditory learner, you might be thinking about the siren that it makes or that you actually saw one or heard one this morning.

Here’s another example, for the next time you get gas for your vehicle. At the gas pump you swipe your debit card and type in your pin, if that numeric pad didn’t beep while you were pressing the buttons then I bet you’ll look at the screen to see how many asterisks are shown. Plus if the numeric pad didn’t ‘feel’ like it was being pressed, it would have the same effect, you looking at the screen to verify.

Regardless, it’s important to understand how users think vs. what actions you’re asking them to do. That way you can apply various techniques to your interactive mediums and create a holistic experience that’s intuitive. Your users will thank you for it.

We’ve all seen the movies where the robots are coming for us, including classics such as The Terminator and The Matrix. What people may not know is that they already came for us – and got all of our information… In fact, the most widely used website in the world is built upon one of these robots: The GoogleBot.

Indeed, not all robots are here to subjugate humanity and turn us into subservient slaves. They are actually quite helpful, indexing web sites on popular search engines so that visitors may come and indulge in the pages of our websites. Without these robots, most of the information revolution we’ve seen in the past 20 years would not have been possible.

But what if you have some information on your website you’d rather not have the whole world take a look at? Perhaps a baby picture from when you were small that you only share with family friends, internal pages that you may want to keep out of the search results page from a business perspective.  There are many valid reasons for “banning” the bots from certain pages, and there are some good ways to do this.

One answer is a robots.txt file. Essentially this is a text file (which can be written in any text editor) that issues commands to robots to visit only the portions of a website that you allow. The basic syntax is fairly simple, and a good overview is available here. We want to be very careful when employing these files, however, and make absolutely sure that we know what effects our actions will have.  For this reasons, many webmasters are uncomfortable with editing this themselves, as one small mistake could render your site entirely invisible (or entirely visible) to any robot.

Luckily, Google now offers a tool that will automatically generate a robots.txt file for you, saving some time and perhaps avoiding an unintentional disaster.

Using this tool can help you control the pages of your website, and we can make sure our robots keep coming back on our terms, without terminating us.

The internet is the largest and most varied medium of information in all of human history, housing literally billions of web pages ranging in topics from the mundane to the esoteric. Many companies struggle with determining how to make their websites visible and heavily trafficked on the Internet, and Google is helping out website owners, search marketing managers and webmasters with tools that include Content Analysis, Sitemaps, and more.

These tools are incredibly useful vehicles to develop and manage sites that a search engine can navigate and use, which any Search Engine Marketer will tell you is fundamentally important for the success and visibility of a site on the web. One aspect of this topic includes the importance of page elements and how to effectively leverage rich content like flash, AJAX, video, and more.

One thing to remember is the importance of using textual alternatives for content that is primarily audio/visual for the benefit of searching technologies. While humans have the ability to comprehend the “message” behind this rich content, search engines cannot.  While we as humans can look at a picture of a car and understand and interpret what we’re looking at conceptually and even specifically, a search engine spider is left with nothing more than an array of pixels.  One way to “tell” a search engine what’s behind this content is to use alt attributes for images and noscript/alternative content for browsers without JavaScript/Flash.

This has twofold importance. For one, this makes a site much more accessible to the visually impaired (who may use programs such as JAWS, a text/speech tool for visualization), and second, it helps search engine spiders index a site. Failure to use such options effectively leaves large portions of the internet essentially blind to your content, resulting in fewer page visits and less overall user engagement.  In order to be more than just another fish in the sea, webmasters should leverage these tools and techniques to free their information, bringing it into the light for all to see.

If you’re not using Google’s Webmaster Central, get an account today and get instant visibility into the pages of your site.

The group that controls the distribution of IP addresses has passed a resolution that makes it virtually impossible to get more IPv4 addresses. In a strongly worded resolution, ARIN is taking “any and all measures necessary” to “encourage migration to IPv6 numbering”.

ARIN has been preparing for this for this moment for a long time, as their own root servers that control the DNS system across the internet have been upgraded to IPv6 since 2004. While this is a logical first step for the organization responsible for the internet architecture, end users with less sophistication may want to approach the upgrade with caution as the potential pitfalls are numerous, particularly with regard to stateful firewalls. In most IPv4 implementations there is a stateful firewall where external packets can only traverse the network in response to an originating packet from inside the network. Apple’s new Airport Extreme garnered much geek appreciation with it’s IPv6 implementation, but it has received it’s share of bad press from the mainstream publications over these security concerns. As much as the technologist and tester in me would love to implement IPv6 immediately on Webshare’s routers and servers, the responsible sysadmin will likely take a wait-and-see approach and wait for a few BKMs.

There may be a silver lining from this: the examination over the role of a firewall in modern computing. The problem in the above mentioned case arises because the computers behind the router are falsely assuming the all “bad” packets have already been filtered out by a secure firewall. This works fine in the case of corporate servers, but what about laptops on dialup connections, data cards, or open hotspots? Smartphones on cellular networks? If each device were to employ it’s own packet inspection and security measures, these firewall exploits would be far less devastating. Instead, our current reality is that an unpatched machine exposed with no firewall can be compromised in mere minutes.