Tocquigny Advertising and Design

This article is part one in a series on trends in web user experience. Technology is causing the marketing landscape to change more rapidly today than it ever has in the past, and with all this change, it can be difficult for marketers to keep up. The trends that will be covered here are not intended to be all-inclusive of everything that is happening in the world of digital and internet marketing, but they are a good sampling of things that marketers should keep watching — both now and in the future.

Sitemaps — the hierarchy of content

In the past, the only way to find the content on websites was through a hierarchy, starting with categories, which were divided into sub-categories, etc. This is often visualized as a sitemap. To navigate, users had to drilldown through a series of categories to find their search content. And when they were finished looking at something, they had to go back up the hierarchy and choose a new category, sub-category, etc., to find another piece of search content. Think of these hierarchical relationships as vertical pathways — with users moving up and down, vertically, through the content hierarchy.

A trend that has been going on for a while now — and has been picking up momentum recently — is the creation of horizontal pathways linking various content across categories and sections of websites. These connections allow users to jump directly to related content rather than having to navigate the hierarchy. Users are presented with links to “related,” “popular,” or “recently added” content and can jump straight to it — often times navigating across wide stretches of the sitemap in a single click. Ultimately, this type of alternate navigation improves the user experience by making it easier to find interesting and relevant content.

User-generated tagging

One way that horizontal cross-linking is being implemented is through user-generated tagging of content. In the user-generated tagging model, when a marketer creates a new piece of content, they add keywords or tags to that content while publishing it to the site. Then, once the content is published, site visitors are allowed to add more tags to the content.

As an example, if a marketer published a whitepaper on hybrid cars, they might tag it with hybrid,” “car,” and “technology.” A user might then read the article and add the tags “cool,” “fuel economy,” and “environmentally friendly.” Users are almost always able to come up with tags that the markers had not considered — essentially helping marketers to promote content. And while only a small minority of users on most websites will actually contribute by creating new tags, all site users can benefit from having the tags in place.

The real power of user-generated content tagging is in having your site use the tags, added by marketers and users, to automatically create horizontal pathways to related content. Content items that share the same tags are linked together based on the number of tags shared, vastly simplifying the task of creating thousands of related content links manually.

So what does this mean for marketers?

• Marketers should look into adding alternative cross-linked navigation, or horizontal pathways, to their sites — this will increase the number of pages viewed per visitor and ultimately create more engaged customers who spend more time with their brands.
• Specifically, marketers should consider allowing users to add their own tags to content — this will have a positive impact on SEO rankings by aligning tags and keywords with real user vocabulary and increasing the number of links between content.

Read part two in this series on trends in web user experience: Social Networks and Social Marketing