The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

When I joined Clickable as Director of Product User Experience (UX) almost two years ago, evaluating the Clickable product was a daunting task.  But what’s kept me calm and motivated is the vision of Clickable’s co-founders, and their commitment to simplicity, beauty, and ease of use.  This is why I joined Clickable and why I find it such a compelling place to work.  In previous jobs I often had to lobby for the importance of user experience. Clickable, however, is a certified believer, and continues to put user experience and user-centric design first. The usability team is involved with user experience, front-end development, web design, interaction design, and information architecture.  I want to share our strategic approach, our vision for Clickable, and how we keep our methodology fresh.

To Conform Or To Separate From The Pack?
If you want to book a flight, rent a car, or reserve a hotel room it’s easy on the Internet. You can perform any one of these tasks by using the online applications built by these businesses. Notice the similarity in the Web sites the next time you’re comparing prices for a hotel room. From the Hilton to the Marriot, there’s hardly any difference! The structure and content of this type of business has been scrutinized, compared, analyzed and re-analyzed - to the point where all of these sites - though osmosis - have become extremely similar.
 
Typically, a comparative analysis of services like this is relatively easy because their applications are revealed upon entry to their sites and not hidden by password protection..  To conduct a usability study you can visit the top 5 hospitality sites, set up a grid in Excel and do a feature-by-feature comparison.  In search marketing this task would be infinitely more difficult.  Many search-marketing tools are “behind the curtain” due to companies’ pricing and subscription models.  In fact, you often have to go through an online demo, or sign up for a trial, to test-drive an application.  So as a usability team in this industry we have learned to rely just as heavily on our customers’ needs.

Reinventing The Wheel, Or An Opportunity In Disguise?
How many times has a usability team heard, “Just look at what the competition is doing, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.”  But is this the right approach to usability innovation? The difficulty inherent in accessing the competitions’ application presents an opportunity to be truly creative in application design. Too often, the osmosis that makes hospitality sites appear cloned, is what prevents any one of them from claiming some advantage within their industry.
 
Usability Is Listening To The Market
Clickable is keenly aware of our competitors’ offerings and we applaud unique features that differentiate their products, but we always listen to the marketplace first. For the usability team this means conducting thorough surveys and analyses of our existing resources rather than simply copying features we admire in our competitors. Listening to customers and hearing their preferences gives us a great start. Differentiating advertisers and agencies is another priority. Finally our own Assist team offers many ideas to make our products more efficient. Our analytics experts will always articulate where we can add value with our data analysis. And our Business Development team constantly provides ideas resulting from client discussions. Instead of checking off boxes on a “Features grid” of comparative items from our competition, we look to compelling criteria.

As a UX team we don’t rely entirely on heuristic analyses or other types of speculative formulations for our investigation. Having the empirical value, both from our own experts and our customers, drives a lot of the data in our research and this methodology has provided us with some valuable insights.
 
Going Forward
Discovering varied perspectives for criteria in application building has become part of the challenge for our UX team.  The complexity of search marketing presents the marketer with both a hierarchy and an independence of entities. Campaigns are essentially bound to the hierarchy while keywords are strategically more independent. We have put a great deal of effort into structuring entities on their own but also offering powerful filtering and bulk-editing possibilities.  Our plan for the future is to try and use a number of different analytic models to help us fine-tune Clickable’s product.  Topological models , market forecasting, advanced UML using pattern-behavior of customers, and  seasonality “drops and pops” from our account data are being considered for their potential impact on our product.
 
Our unique path of observation, driven by customers and experts, has allowed us to build an exceptional, and simple interaction design for Clickable’s applications - which continue to improve based on your feedback. We are always listening and looking for ways to innovate.  We look forward to your input!

Hass Murphy.

Clickable's team includes search marketing experts with a wide range of expertise, and we've