Jim Hedger wrote an interesting piece in Search Engine Journal about how usability is moving into the optimization world…Usability has always been a no-brainer in terms of making money from your site, but Google reveals in its patent that it is looking at many user behaviours as part of its assesment of websites. From Jim’s article:
“Google is taking stock of a number of user-sensitive factors surrounding documents in its index. In March 2005, Google filed a patent titled, Information retrieval based on historical data. The patent application outlines the historic record Google keeps on every document and file in its index. One of the items mentioned covers user behaviours touching on the following points:

-how much time an average user spends examining a document,
- the entry and exit paths of users,
- if users store reference to the document in bookmarks,
- how users access the document (via search engine, typing URL, link from other document, or bookmarks),
- an evaluation of search traffïc driven by Google and related keywords the document was found under ”

It’s a little scary to see this, but at the same time it may indicate a better era of search is upon us. I think it is fairly obvious that real users are much better judges of websites than spiders, and no math in the world can come close to a human’s experience on a site.

A great resource for learning the basics of usability is the book Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug . This is a quick read, but it quickly cuts to the chase about why some site archtiecture confuses and repels users.