As a front-end web developer, I often hear the terms “findable”, “searchable”, “indexable” and “accessible” thrown around interchangeably. For many, they mean that the content can be accessed by a non-human, be it a screen reader or a search engine spider. On some level this is true, but there are several significant differences that are must not be overlooked.

For the sake of this discussion:

• Findable: how easily a site can be found when using a search engine (rankings). Yes, I realize that this term also refers to how easily content can be found once the user is on the site, but I’m ignoring that aspect of it for now…
• Searchable: how easily specific content within a site can be accessed when using a search engine (deep-linking)
• Indexable: how easily the content of a site may be retrieved and used in search engine results
• Accessible using AT: how easily someone using assistive technologies can use your site

(ShoeMoney.com has compiled a list of definitions for SEO from some industry experts, as well)

A site created completely in Flash or Flex may be findable thanks to the use of meta-data, but it is not indexable. With some diligent coding, information may be searchable, but this is no guarantee that it will be accessible.

(Not content with these descriptions? Have more to add? Please let me know what you think in the comments!)

As I’ve mentioned, my background is in accessibility: prior to coming to Resource, I worked on large subscription-based web applications. SEO was not a consideration at all. However, accessibility was. When I first came to Resource, I was eager to see how the two complemented and contrasted each other.

Overall, I see some overlap between the areas. However, their focus is different.

SEO is based on a page mentality - this is apparent in the search results that come up. Many common SEO techniques are applied at the page level, via adding meta tags or optimizing title tags. This is how a site that requires login, or is built using a technology like Flash or Flex, can appear in search results. A search engine can access meta information about the page, and use that to rank it. Findability relates to the notion of the discovery of the page itself.

A secondary notion is that of searchability. A web application may be found on google, but can the specific content that is being sought be retrieved? Searchability refers to the idea that site visitor can easily navigate to the specific information he’s searching for within the site, once the site itself has been discovered.

Both searchability and indexability deal with how elements of the page can be accessed, but arguably in different directions. Deeplinking into a flash movie may facilitate searchability, helping a site visitor dig into the site at a specific point. In contrast, indexability refers to the ability of a search engine spider to do a broad pull of content from the site.

Where SEO and Accessibility really start to diverge is when we move beyond the retrieval of content itself. A search engine spider is only interested in the data, so that the appropriate search result may be returned to an information seeker. In contrast, accessibility refers to the ability of a site visitor to navigate within an experience. The implications are significant: each interaction must be coded in a way such that a screen reader user can activate the change, and be notified of any changes that occur.

Another important distinction is the extent to which the site content is made available. A site may work to optimize or only make indexable certain aspects of the site. In contrast, accessibility refers to the ability of all content to be available and able to be engaged with.

iKeif is my pod-neighbour at Resource. We both started at Resource this year as Sr (Front-end) Developers, coming over from large corporations. We share many of the same interests and opinions on the UX/Web field (at least, he doesn’t disagree with me..!). If I hear of a new service, he’s probably already investigated it. Lately we’ve both been figuring out where we stood on the different lifestreaming services and how to manage the various “updates” each will cheerfully send off.

I’ll speak to this a little, but I hope he’ll chime in as well

I have two major profiles online: this blog and my facebook profile. I will readily admit that I select other online services based on their integration with these platforms. I had the visual bookshelf application on facebook until I realized that shelfari had both a facebook app and a widget. Keith had asked me about this, so I assume he made the same decision. The fewer manual “syncs” a person has to do, the better! Sharing every detail of your life with the world shouldn’t be hard, should it?

Recently I turned to friendfeed as an aggregator. I used to have both my twitter updates and my del.icio.us bookmarks on my sidebar of my blog as well as as standalone apps on facebook, but I’ve consolidated. I try to be careful not to duplicate my content pushes too much.

Part of the challenge as well is determining “what update goes where”? I asked another coworker this a few weeks ago: he had both tumblr and del.icio.us and I wasn’t sure what he used when. His response was that tumblr was for sharing with others, del.icio.us was for reference. Well that sufficed for me, and I’ve recently started tumbling. For me, tumblr is the light version of this blog: things I want to share or comment on, but not to the extent of a post like this.

I also recently set up feedburner, and there is an option to include your daily del.icio.us links with your feed. I’ve started doing so, but it has impacted how I bookmark. I now try to add in some notes, keeping the new audience in mind. Keith mentioned he’s recently started doing this as well. He’s set up his automated services a bit more aggressively than I; his del.icio.us links feed into his live blog, which then sends out a tweet notifying people thereof! So whereas I am trying for a separation of the content from one service to the next, he’s tying them together as a single offering. It’s like two sides of the same “content/lifestream management” coin.

I mentioned struggling with deciding if I needed a tumblr account or not, and there have been a few other services we’ve chatted about. We both have pownce, but I haven’t really used it yet. We were actually brainstorming on some uses today, so we’ll see if it has a place in our online lifestream arsenal..

Today was our day off after 9 days of ATG training. Yesterday afternoon, we were all mentally “full” of all we’d been learning. I wasn’t sure how productive I’d be at work today.. and as it turned out, it was one of those great days where you just can’t get enough done!

The morning started somewhat slow, but we had a major meeting scheduled from 11-12:30 for an upcoming project in which we’re to flex our new ATG skillz. The meeting went really well, we went over the strategic and creative briefs before getting into some more technical details.
Because I’m trying to get into an IA role, I was really excited about dissecting the tiny pieces that went into what we saw on the screen. For me, IA isn’t just about sitemaps and wireframes. I come to it from a programmer’s perspective: so what different objects make up the site; what are the properties of each.

techie minds at work

After the formal meeting, several developers and our director were chatting about templates, and all of a sudden I got what was described as an overwhelmed look on my face. I was thinking about templates on two levels: templates that referred to data: mapping a template to a particular type of content, and then templates as they related to presentation. The scribbling to the right was my attempt to get some of this stuff out of my head: we could describe an object (say, a press release) as an aggregate of its parts: title, description, accompanying image(s), accompanying link(s). There could be a generic template used for this type of content, with variations based on the existence of different aspects of the element. Still, the underlying template would be of a press release.

But a template could also be used to vary presentation: a template could use the same attributes of a press release, but vary in terms of its orientation (image on the right versus the left). Where does the specification of this lie? Is it on the level of an individual instance (press release 1 could have the left-hand images, press release 2 could have the right-hand images), or should there be consistency across item types. (My personal thought is that for optimal user experience, items of similar types should be displayed in a similar fashion).
It’s like the post I had not long ago about areas of variation, or all the common UI building blocks discussions we had at LexisNexis. It’s about building a web application, not a web site.

After our group pow-wow, I still had all these questions on my mind, and I cheerily sat down to go through the wireframes. I tried to identify major item types, trying to consider all the information I’d taken in over the last few weeks. One major consideration is content updates, and I think sitting in training on the managerial track next week will help me understand what tools we need to provide for people to achieve their goals. (granted, we’re talking about my colleagues, who work at an interactive agency. We all have an abnormally high familiarity with the web, so we’re not indicative of a typical client)

I’m not the architect on the project, but I can’t help but see how the various pieces will fit together. I have a strong opinion on tying together semantically related content: an individual page describes a particular item, it is not simply a group of “stuff”. The challenge is looking across items to figure out how the compare and contrast. In training I asked about the possibility for a slot to be populated with different types of media — an image, a video. The response was that a slot can only contain a single item type: but the solution is to make a generic enough “type” that all media can be supported. I want us to see these patterns from the outset, rather than pigeon-holing ourselves into having unique, un-extensible content scattered throughout.

I’m really looking forward to this process…

Lately at work I’ve been helping out with some light Scotts work. The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company is a huge client, with several different microsites and campaigns. The recent redesign of scotts.com (disclaimer: I only performed perfunctory copy changes for the redesign) reminded me of much of the work I did at LexisNexis: scotts.com was the equivalent of a flagship product like lexis.com or nexis.com. The challenge from a branding perspective is how to maintain a consistent look and feel for subsidiaries, while still allowing them to maintain their own identity. I’ve donned both a developer’s and a business analyst’s hat in looking at these projects, and it’s a good exercise to identify the opportunities for consistency as well as for variation. This was truly where we were going with our common UX initiatives at LexisNexis before I left. How do we enhance the usability of all the sites by introducing consistent functionality, while ensuring each site meets its specific target audience’s needs?

Before I left LexisNexis, I was the UX representative on the architectural advisory board and I sat on the brand spirit (branding and identity) committee. There, we had three flagships and literally hundreds of projects a year that had some level of association with at least one of the three. It was absolutely imperative that design or development decisions were not made in isolation. The User Experience department I was a part of held design reviews every week to push for consistent user interaction and design across our products.

Coming to Resource late last June, I was thrown into agency life. It’s quite different dealing with different clients, who are paying for the development of their own unique brand and user experience. While there are always benefits in developing code libraries of common components that can be reused, the nature of the challenges we dealt with in a huge beast of an application like lexis or nexis simply don’t compare.

It’s actually fun for me to look at Scotts and see those patterns and consistent elements. In developing one microsite, I’m stretching my “build for the future” muscles again in anticipating potential future additions. It’s interesting how I can build this into my work both as a developer (coding in anticipation of reuse), and as a business analyst (explicitly identifying requirements that have shown up elsewhere or may be of significance moving forward). At LexisNexis, some of these considerations (as well as others) would be made by the system architect or a portfolio manager, but those are roles we don’t particularly have at Resource, due to the nature of most of our client engagements.

It’s interesting that considerations into the creation of a robust, usable, expandable site occur throughout the design and development process. I guess I consider it the difference between creating a web site, or developing the architecture for a web application. You can make a web site to achieve a specific purpose, or you can create a framework that supports as-yet-unknown functionality.

This is why I once felt I wanted to get into architecture: rather than putting square pegs in square holes, I want to consider the fact that I may not know what pegs I’ll be given down the road. I hope that in the movement to BA or IA, I will also be able to anticipate these unknowns and ensure we continue to deliver engaging user experiences that are also robust, usable and extensible.

After 8 years of various “web-” jobs (from Web Director (Jagged) to Web Designer (Maxim) to Web Master (Youthone) back to Web Designer (Common Sense Solutions) to Web Technician (Franklin University) to Web Developer (LexisNexis) to Senior Web Developer (LexisNexis) and now Senior Developer (Resource Interactive), I’m starting to think about a shift in my daily duties.

My earliest work on the web were all centered around fostering community and facilitating communication. I was a geocities community leader. I volunteered for the Open Directory Project (back when everyone thought human-powered search results were the way to go). I was on livejournal before they required invite codes. I worked for a not-for-profit that provided youth with online support and volunteer opportunities.

I waded through a bachelor of science in digital communication, a computer science certificate, a java 2 certification exam, and am nearly finished with my master of science in computer science degree. I definitely have a technical background. But in the end, I’m a liberal arts girl at heart and I just want to give users a kickass online experience, ensuring they can meet their needs in a way that best suits them.

At LexisNexis, I was in the User Experience team, so we primarily built prototypes and went out to usability testing and kept abreast on trends and best practices for providing an optimal user experience. Even as a developer, I attended weekly design reviews and had the opportunity to contribute to crafting the solution to usability challenges. My last year at LexisNexis, I was sitting on several boards and committees (Architecture Advisory Board, Branding and Identity Committee), and was the key Accessibility Contact. Everything was firmly with the users’ best interest in mind.

I can code. Some would say I do it well However, my interests really lay in how information is presented to the user. I’m fascinated by how people use technology to meet certain needs, and how we can best support them in their goals. I am working on that “Rich Internet Accessibility” paper, and the internet has been a great way for me to read up on other opinions, and connect with industry leaders. It’s also helped me to understand the challenges some people face. One article I found on the accessibility of social networks really struck me: one user stated that it was difficult for him to seek out a speaker at a conference to ask further questions, so he preferred to look them up online after the fact. It helped drive home the fact that the internet can really help people with disabilities, if we take the time to consider their needs. (Another great example is the short film “everything I can’t do in the real world, I can do with my Mac“).

In so much as I can contribute to delivering content in an accessible, usable fashion, I will do so. However, I feel as though I want to “move up” in the process, and suggest solutions or approaches, rather than coming in at the Implementation stage. It took me several months to really recognize that I have changed where I fit in the development cycle here at Resource. In the UX group at Lexis, yes, I was coding, but they were prototypes, early in the design phases. Now I work on the final production code, after certain major decisions have already been made.

One of the key reasons Resource is a leading interactive agency is our thought leadership. We do great work, particularly in our Insights phase. Certainly, our implementations are outstanding, but I am really yearning to return back to an ‘ideas’ role, rather than a ’solutions’ one. I have been the only female developer in the company since I was hired, and I can’t help but wonder if that’s somewhat natural: women as nurturers, giving birth to children and ideas and fostering the commuity, and men as providers and problem solvers, delivering on requests and meeting specific needs.

…Hmm.. perhaps that’s not the best thing to post in my technical blog, but I’ll leave it there all the same…

I am going to start doing some light Business Analyst work, with a longerish-term goal of getting into the field of Information Architecture. I think this will be the route I need to step away from specific implementations and focus on common problems (aha, I sense a return to my previous interest in patterns). Ultimately I believe it is the goal of what a site can help a user achieve, and how he feels doing it, that interest me, moreso than the specific details of how.

With only a few months remaining in my college career (this time), I realized I had better take advantage of student discounts. My bookshelf will soon include the following:

I had an interesting discussion with a co-worker yesterday about file-naming. A given project has pages dedicated to their leadership team and we were deciding how best to name these files of biographical information. Initially I felt very strongly that a page describing Julie Maples should be named jmaples.xxx, since it describes the content. That way if Julie went from general manager to ceo, we could continue to refer to the same page. My coworker felt the pages should be named according to job title, that is, Julie’s information should now live on the gm.xxx page, and if she were to be promoted, it should be removed from that page and added to the ceo.xxx page.

What was interesting about the discussion (I know, it doesn’t sound that interesting right now), is that we were both concerned about the same problem: ensuring users got the information they were seeking. We didn’t want inaccuracies or broken links. From my standpoint, I felt that information about Julie should always be on Julie’s page, regardless of her title. His concern was that people may not even know they were looking for Julie’s information; they would potentially be looking for the GM’s information. If it were Julie or Sam wasn’t the issue.

This issue really arose as we attempted to anticipate the user needs. Why were users going to get this information: the person, or the role? On the navigation of our site, the users’ names are linked, hence my rationale for naming them accordingly. On other sister sites, however, it was quite possible the links would go to “meet the CEO of XYZ company”. My co-worker was looking at how other sites would link to ours. In a closed site (what I was envisioning), when information changed, we would have the control to go in and change information and update links. We lose that control, however, when we become a destination site for other links. From that standpoint, I could see his point.

My next suggestion was to employ server-side redirects, so that someone could access gm.xxx or jmaples.xxx and get Julie’s page now, and if Julie were replaced by Sam, the redirect from gm.xxx would go to Sam’s page. My ever practical co-worker had concerns about introducing another level of changes to be made, although my standpoint remains that it simply should be done.

… I promise, the interesting stuff is coming…..

Ok, the reason why I was still thinking about this today is not because I don’t like to believe others are “more right” than I am, but because I was asking these questions of our copy writer and our information architect, and he said that this was really our (tech) domain. I don’t know about that, and it reminded me of the discussion we had back at LexisNexis about alt vs title vs link text. Who owns that? We had some great discussions about what title text on a link should describe: the destination of the link or the action the user is taking? Is that a copy issue, or more about user flow and interaction? Coming from an accessibility standpoint, I had a very different view than the Human Factors Engineers, since they wanted to “tell a story” and I wanted to let a blind user know where the link went.

As I continue to get more interested in the information architecture side of things, I am starting to see things differently: a page describing Julie Maples isn’t just about Julie Maples, it is also an endpoint for a given user task, it satisfies one or more user needs. So how do we help a user complete that task?