Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox today, entitled “The Myth of the Genius Designer,” really struck a chord. Nielsen writes about the myth that a company can hire a great designer and that a great designer will eliminate the need for usability testing.

Not many designers will admit this, but I will say that I’ve made mistakes by making assumptions about a web site’s users. This was apparent last week when I attended a usability session for a client (more about that in a later post). Having spent lots of time in usability labs, I thought I had a good foundation to make assumptions about this client’s web site users. In fact, my assumptions were more inaccurate than I expected, and I realized this firsthand during a usability test.

Three of Nielsen’s points hit home for me, and I offer them here because they are truisms in the web design industry, whether web designers care to accept them or not.

The first is that “good designers get to be good in the first place by learning which of their ideas work and which don’t.” Good designers learn what works and what doesn’t through “empirical data, which usability provides.” It’s true that a designer has tools at their disposal to see what web site users click, etc., but nothing beats watching users use a web site you’ve designed. It can be a humbling–and very educational–experience.

The second is that “design is an inexact science,” and that “it’s only prudent to reduce risk and subject design ideas to a reality check by user testing them with actual customers.” I’d add that there is often more than one way to solve a usability problem, and user testing can reveal the best solution.

Finally, Nielsen writes that “even the best designers produce successful products only if their designs solve the right problems. A wonderful interface to the wrong features will fail.” How true. The only way to be certain what features are useful to a customer is to ask. Whether this is done through usability testing, feature set surveys or other methods, asking users what they find most helpful (and using common language to so so) is a prudent step before a designer opens Photoshop.

While some business managers choose not to perform usability testing or research up-front, setting aside the budget to do this will inform your design and produce a site that will be much more successful.

There are ways to perform this research inexpensively, but that’s a topic for another day. Stay tuned…

Tomorrow night, I’ll be on a panel with Patrick Bozeman (LeadFoot Designs) and Frank Carlomagno (Kinetic) discussing e-commerce at the monthly Refresh Richmond meeting. This panel will discuss the front-end, back-end and strategic basics of a successful e-commerce site.

I’m planning to throw out two topics:

• “My client wants e-commerce, now what?” will cover the strategic aspects of planning an e-commerce site for a client.
• Design philosophy for a successful e-commerce site, including wireframe prototypes, design considerations and page real estate.

If you’re a designer in Virginia, come down to the Work Factory in Richmond tomorrow evening for the discussion (directions and meeting details can be found on the Refresh Richmond web site). Bring your questions!

If your company is new to Google Adwords advertising and you’re trying to go it alone, chances are you’re looking for ways to maximize your ad spend. Rather than broadcasting your ad to the largest possible audience, I’ve prepared three suggestions to control your advertising spend beyond just setting a daily budget. These three tools are in the Google Adwords pro’s arsenal, but aren’t commonly-known by the Google Adwords newcomer.

1. Turn off the content network.
In your Google Adwords campaign settings for each campaign, you can disable the content network, which is enabled by default. The reason you want to do this is because if you’re bidding $2 for a phrase on the search network, you’re bidding $2 for the same phrase on the content network by default. Since your ad will be seen on the content network much more than on the search network, there’s more of a chance that you’ll deplete your budget on clicks that generally aren’t as relevant.

2. Bid on more specific words and phrases.
When you bid on phrases and exact matches, you’re limiting the word combinations that would trigger your ad. This not only helps you control costs, it also can make your campaign more relevant to the searcher because the phrases that trigger your ad are more specific.

In addition, bid on phrases containing two or more words.

Let’s say I am bidding on the term “widgets” (without the quotes) with a broad match. Make this phrase more specific by adding qualifiers, and add quotes/brackets around the term. For example, rather than bidding on “widgets,” I might bid on the following:

• “red widgets”
• [red widgets]
• “buy new widgets”
• [buy new widgets]

3. Use negative keyword matching.
Often times, the phrases that you want to match are similar to unrelated or irrelevant topics. For example, if you are bidding on “Peanuts,” (the cartoon), you probably don’t want your ad to show up when someone searches for “Planters peanuts.” In this case, you could add “Planters” as a negative keyword to your keyword list, and your ad would not be shown when a person searches for “Planters peanuts.” To include a negative keyword, simply put a hyphen before the word you want to designate as a negative keyword.

So how do you find potential negative keywords? Go to Google and search for a very broad term that relates to the products you sell. In the above example, search Google for “peanuts.” You’ll see that some sites are food-related while others are related to the Peanuts cartoon.

Hopefully, these tips will help the Google Adwords novice control ad spending while making the campaign more effective.

Even though designing with the customer in mind, or “usability” as we call it in the web design business, isn’t a new concept, there seems to be increasing popularity in putting the customer first. Many traditional ad agencies haven’t embraced the concept of usability in the past, opting instead to design sites on the bleeding edge of technology or sites fit to win fancy awards. But can their sites sell?

One trend I’ve noticed recently is that marketing firms are embracing usability, especially search engine optimization firms. Last month, there was a seminar titled “Usability and SEO: Two Wins for the Price of One” at the Search Engine Strategies conference. Firms are blogging about usability. And SEOMOZ’s Rand Fishkin recently blogged about 17 New Rules for Successful E-Commerce Websites. While the rules presented in the article aren’t new per se, it does prove that sharp minds in marketing know that getting traffic to a web site isn’t worth the cost to the client if customers can’t figure out how to effectively interact with a site.

Today’s best firms understand that the fusion of designing usable sites and driving traffic through aggressive marketing is the formula for success.