Nielsen went on to clarify that there many parallels between the two areas of study including 'information architecture' and 'writing for the web' in particular. He stressed that "it's better to be more accurate in the way we describe content".
User Experience 2007 Conference
The User Experience 2007 Conference provides up to six days of full-day tutorials from international experts on topics including Content Usability, Information Architecture and Managing User Experience Strategy. Jakob Nielsen's keynote speech on day four of the conference highlighted the state of usability and what's next for the field.
SEO and the State of Usability
Nielsen's keynote speech effectively outlined the next stage of search engine development for users. Having grown from 'Resource Discovery' engines such as Infoseek and Yahoo!, which focus on information retrieval and keyword matches, we are now in the phase of 'Solution Engines'. Search engines such as Google provide web users with the best, most popular documents based on popularity.
Nielsen predicts that we are currently moving further into an arena where search engine optimisation and usability will go hand in hand to provide more 'Solution Engines' like Ask.com that help users get tasks done and base results on behavioural metrics.
Evolution of Search
The Nielsen Norman Group behind the event in Barcelona is looking at research into 'Auto Search' where search engines monitor behaviour and metrics to provide relevant information in anticipation of the user's need. Jakob also expects further advances into personalisation based on market research. The current difficulty with this technology is user uptake. How can we encourage users to share more information to allow personalisation, and do they want this?
These predictions will raise difficult questions in the SEO community, such as how this can be measured and whether or not it is possible to monitor positions and rankings within personalised searches.
Trends in Usability
With Web 2.0 still a buzz word and Web 3.0 or even 4.0 on the horizon, Nielsen predicts a 'back to basics approach' as website owners realise that simplification and resolution of basic problems is the key to a positive user experience, rather than the bells and whistles that come with participation innovations.
Nielsen underlined this point by demonstrating the changes Google has made to its search engine results pages over time, reducing the level of content, removing a left hand column and continuing to improve basic user experience elements such as page load times - from 0.23 seconds in 1999 to 0.08 seconds in 2007.
Ultimately, Nielsen's keynote address poses an important question: should we look to trends in search engine development and SEO techniques to persuade web owners that simplest is best for website usability and 'findability'?
