Revisiting the Cre8tive Flow Blog in 2005 to Learn about Jared Spool and the Timelessness of Usability (for SEO), a Hamsterdam History Lesson

By Ethan Lazuk

Welcome to another week of Hamsterdam History, where we look at vintage SEO articles to honor their contributors, gain historical context, and learn what’s changed since.

This week, we’re going back to 2005 to talk about Cre8tive Flow, Jared Spool, and usability.

We’ll revisit “Thumbnail: Jared Spool,” a blog post written by Cliff Anderson (then a senior usability engineer at Wachovia Corp. and today a principal user researcher at Ally Financial).

The post was published in The UPA Voice (a blog affiliated with the Usability Professionals’ Association, now called the User Experience Professionals Association) and mentioned in the Cre8tive Flow Blog.

You might be thinking to yourself, “That sounds great! But how the hell did you decide to write about this post?”

Well, like all good SEO things, it came through a rabbit hole.

In Hamsterdam History lesson #2, we looked at a Cre8site Forums discussion on links from 2005.

For some reason, though, when I visited the Cre8site Forums on WayBack Machine this time, I spent 15 minutes clicking around but couldn’t reach the actual forums. (I’m not sure what I did differently last time.)

Out of desperation and curiosity, I clicked on the “Cre8tive Flow Blog” link instead:

That took me to a blog subdomain on the date of August 29th, 2005.

Cre8tive Flow is described as “Deep Linking from the Desk of Bluebert G. Peabody”:

Um …

So I searched, and there were only two results:

The first is a marketing company that I wasn’t familiar with, but I like their style — a racing motif.

The post was written by Max Speed:

I don’t know what to believe anymore …

The second result also had some cleverness, like how it framed the date:

I wish I’d thought of that.

I wasn’t familiar with Eric Meyer either, but will definitely bookmark his work for a future Hamsterdam History post!

But looking at the actual Cre8tive Flow Blog, the picture becomes clearer.

The first article on this date was posted by Bill Slawski (RIP), so I knew I was in a worthwhile place:

Bill’s post called out CiteSeer, which is still active as CiteSeer^X:

We’ll bookmark that for a future post, as well.

Scrolling down the Cre8tive Flow results, I saw another article from August 10th, 2005, that caught my eye.

I was curious what “UIE” was, and also what made someone a “bad boy” at usability:

We might say “bad boy” is 2005’s equivalent to “real one” today. But I digress …

The article’s first paragraph mentions “user testing”:

This aligns with my interests for two reasons.

The first is that I’m an advocate for using Microsoft Clarity, which I see as a budget-friendly avenue for user insights. (In fact, that’s one of my website’s first blog posts!)

The second is that I recently spent way too much time refreshing an article on 11x content, where I referenced user testing, and I’m looking for every possible excuse to get people to read it. 😉

Also, the last paragraph of the Cre8tive Flow usability post mentions addressing “real business needs,” which was a theme of this week’s Hamsterdam recap (Part 56) introduction.

It felt right.

And so I clicked the link to the full article on The UPA Voice:

I didn’t find a live link to the article in search. We got an actual thumbnail instead — it also seems Jared isn’t on X anymore, but I still dig that profile photo. That’s also a great People also ask question below it:

Reading The UPA Voice’s article on WayBack Machine instead, some of the themes Jared espoused back in 2005 related in my mind to user-first principles that apply to SEO today, and for creating helpful content, in particular.

Let’s first explore Jared’s work, as explained in The UPA Voice by Cliff, and then we’ll draw out insights for today’s page experience principles.

An overview of “Thumbnail: Jared Spool” in The UPA Voice, circa 2005

In the opening paragraph, Cliff Anderson describes Jared Spool as recognized for his “challenging opinions”:

“Jared Spool is usability’s ‘bad boy.’ With his challenging opinions and his theatrical way of presenting them, he has excited and frustrated usability practitioners and thought leaders for many years. Agree or disagree, love him or hate him, you have to give him credit. Jared’s is one of the most easily-recognized names in the field.”

– The UPA Voice

Jared came to usability from the technical side. “He started out writing code for office software at Digital, once the number-two computer company in the world,” writes Cliff.

It appears “Digital” refers to the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).

According to an Ars Technica article, DEC was founded in 1957 to build small digital modules, which led to “minicomputers.”

While DEC is a part of computer history today, its contributions endure:

“Unless you use a Mac, your computer’s CPU has its roots in a DEC processor that failed in the market. … And as it turns out, there’s a connection between Apple and DEC as well … if you are reading this on a computer or iPad, you are doing so thanks to DEC.”

– Ars Technica

Like with DEC, it’s not hard to find search results for Jared Spool.

He’s contributed a lot of information, and even has a knowledge panel:

Here’s an excerpt from an interview he did in 2021 with dscout:

“Back when I started, we were very much focused on basics. For example, how do you get computers to work for people in simple forms? The big difference is, when I started, there were no personal computers. So I worked on the first generation of personal computers. All the computers that existed, people used because they were trained to do so. You had to go to weeks or months of training just to be able to touch the machine, let alone be able to program it and operate it. You often had to be a programmer to use the computer, or you used it on behalf of programmers.

This idea that everybody would have their own computer that they would operate themselves, and that none of them would be programmers, that was a novel idea when I started. So we had to figure out what the rules of engagement were for this technology—it being a new idea that someone else would have to program it and let you use it for the things you wanted to use it for.”

– Jared Spool (dscout interview)

This segues to Cliff’s article.

He writes that usability was born “with a market shift from technical users to the average person”:

“Digital responded by putting together an ‘all-star group’ of psychologists and sociologists. Except for a few other standouts like IBM, this was something that ‘no one had really ever done before.’

For Jared, it was a perfect match: ‘They didn’t know very much about engineering, and I didn’t know about psychology, so we sort of made a deal. … We worked together to try and identify how to develop applications with the user in mind, to understand what would make an interface that we now refer to as ”intuitive.””

– The UPA Voice

In 1988, Jared started his own company called Usability Interface Engineering.

And there we have the first piece of our puzzle, the meaning of UIE.

“The early days of UIE involved quite a bit of evangelization. One of the presentations that Jared showed to potential clients was called ‘Software That Makes People Cry,’ and was based on a test that UIE had run where a user did just that. He originally thought companies would ‘flock to do [usability testing],’ but found he had to sell the idea and to tailor his message.”

– The UPA Voice

Another interesting part of the article describes making the business case for usability:

“Addressing the client’s real business needs was another lesson: ‘You have to talk to what the issues are. Once we realized that, everything changed.’ Currently, Jared points out, ‘every recommendation we make we have to pinpoint to a business objective, usually something to do with increased revenue, or some other activity obviously tied to the success of the business. If we see something now that is frustrating users, but we can’t figure out how it’s affecting business, we don’t report it.’

That led to more educational materials and conferences:

“As UIE grew and tested more and more users, Jared noticed that ‘we kept seeing the same problems over and over again.’ To address these issues, UIE moved into more of an educational role. Jared started a newsletter, called Eye for Design. Workshops at UPA and CHI eventually evolved into UIE’s own conference, the User Interface Conference.”

The article mentions how the upcoming conference in October of 2005 marked the event’s 10th anniversary.

This legacy of education is also how we get back to that great PAA question from earlier.

It refers to the Center Centre:

Where Jared is still involved:

Cliff’s article also mentions how Jared found inspiration in “studies like Rolf Molich’s CUE, which he calls ‘really telling.’”

That study looked “primarily at heuristic evaluations, finding that there is ‘very little overlap of the problems that [different teams] found.’”

That led me to look more into the background of Rolf Molich, who is a Danish usability consultant who founded his company in 1993.

Rolf’s website’s page on CUE-studies explains how they’re performed:

“In a CUE-study, a considerable number of professional usability teams independently and simultaneously evaluate the same website, web application, or Windows program. Afterwards the results are compared and discussed.”

– DialogDesign

The two most important goals are “reproducibility of usability evaluations” and “common practices.”

In 2018, he wrote a retrospective on CUE-studies, which concludes in part:

“The CUE studies raise some central questions for the future research of usability-testing techniques. How can we construct tests that find the important usability problems as quickly as possible? And how can we improve our practices so different teams will consistently find the same problems?”

– Are Usability Evaluations Reproducible?

As Cliff noted in The UPA Voice article in 2005:

“Jared found something similar in UIE’s own work. Contrasting evaluations of systems directly with tests of the same systems, he found they ‘were really bad at predicting problems,’ with a less than 50% accuracy test. ‘We were less accurate than a coin flip,’ he notes.”

– The UPA Voice

Later in the article, we also get a sense of why Cliff described Jared’s opinions as “challenging”:

“‘We’re going around promising people that usability will help you improve things when, in fact, we don’t really know if that’s true,’ he states. In typically blunt fashion, Jared believes that, overall, ‘nobody really knows what we’re doing, myself included.’

He compares the field to medicine in the early 19th century: ‘In the early 1800s, medical practice was really hit-and-miss. What doctors did and what they were trained to do sometimes worked and sometimes made the patient worse, and they didn’t have any way of knowing what they did.’ Jared deadpans, ‘A lot of usability practice today is a lot like blood-letting.’”

To take a quick detour to the present day and SEO …

My first thought reading that above excerpt was how I reframed my 11x content article for the “post-HCU world.”

As I described it, more pseudo-SEO practices popularized for human-coded algorithms, but which didn’t inherently put users first, are misaligned with how AI-driven ranking systems evaluate content today.

In short, neural networks pick up on patterns in user interaction and other data the naked eye can’t likely see, and perhaps the mind can’t even comprehend.

That requires a fundamental mind shift regarding what makes “good” content for SEO purposes — i.e., what makes content “helpful.”

My solution in the article was the “value-to-time ratio,” where helpful content is defined as delivering the most value in the least time.

In the graph below, negative X-axis numbers mean efficiency gains:

Put simply, I don’t believe SEO content should be evaluated based on a list of individual factors.

It needs to be approached from a single, holistic point of view — the user’s value-to-time ratio.

SEO knowledge still matters, of course, like for discoverability, relevance, and page experience.

On that last point, it means SEO requires more understanding of usability.

Back in 2005, Jared had his own ideas for confronting the needs of usability:

“So what’s the solution? ‘We need to make a huge investment in usability science,’ Jared counsels. ‘We need some major theoretical underpinning to explain how people interact with design and to explain good design. I think if we push hard, we can come up with that.’”

– The UPA Voice

That need shifted UIE from consultancy to research:

“‘We are no longer a consulting company,’ reflects Jared. ‘We are a research company. Consulting represents a very small percentage of our revenue base. And the only consulting we do is consulting that’s basically funded research.’

‘We see ourselves as serving the usability community as a whole,’ he continues. ‘Our goal is to completely eliminate frustration with technology. We see that as a hundred-year mission. I’m building a company that’s going to be around long after I’m gone.’”

As for the “bad boy” label, it was really an openness to question the status quo:

“In the meantime, Jared does confess to being something of a rebel: ‘I think to some extent I am, because I’m asking really hard questions. I’m asking why.’”

What can we learn from this discussion of usability in 2005?

I think it comes down to this earlier quote of Jared’s in the article:

“‘We realized that there were many questions that our clients had that nobody knew the answer to. So we started to put research together, to actually start and answer some of these questions.’”

That made me think about today’s SEO questions around HCU-impacted sites, in particular.

We can’t always pinpoint what led to an unhelpful content classifier during September of 2023, or what kept a site’s rankings suppressed after March of 2024.

What we can understand better is whether content delivers the most value for someone’s time, and usability counts.

Thinking about SEO then and now

While we can’t see the Cre8site Forums directly — I’ll figure out how for the future, don’t worry! — we can revisit what the “Search Engine Optimization (SEO)” topic description from 2005 entailed:

Let’s ask ourselves, what’s the priority level of those items for getting a website found in search results today?

Keyword research?

This quote from Tomek Rudzki’s recent deep dive into Google SGE (which was in Hamsterdam Part 56 last week) came to mind:

Page titles?

This quote from Cyrus Shepard’s study last year came to mind:

Meta descriptions?

This quote from an Ahrefs study authored by Michal Pecánek four years ago came to mind:

Alt text?

This quote from John Mueller, mentioned in a Search Engine Land article by Roger Montti in 2022, came to mind:

In short, these things all still matter.

How much is the question.

Keywords matter because they tell you what users want to know. But there are plenty of aspects of organic traffic not tied to keyword rankings, as well as alternative sources for content topics.

Title links matter because they tell users what’s on a page, and can influence CTR and likely rankings to a small degree. Of course, Google also rewrites most of them, even calling its help page “Influencing your title links in search results,” not “Determining” or “Setting.”

Meta descriptions can matter for similar reasons as titles, excluding the ranking part. But Google also ignores most of them in search snippets, even saying in its help doc, “Google primarily uses the content on the page to automatically determine the appropriate snippet” but “may also use descriptive information in the meta description element.”

Alt tags matter for accessibility, but in the context of SEO, they’re more related to image search than being some special part of a page’s content.

Consider the opening paragraph of Google’s SEO starter guide, refreshed in 2024:

“When you built your website, you likely created it with your users in mind, trying to make it easy for them to find and explore your content. One of those users is a search engine, which helps people discover your content. SEO—short for search engine optimization—is about helping search engines understand your content, and helping users find your site and make a decision about whether they should visit your site through a search engine.”

– Google SEO Starter Guide

The guide still mentions keywords, title links, snippets, and alt text. They’re fundamental.

It also has this disclaimer:

“As SEO has evolved, so have the ideas and practices (and at times, misconceptions) related to it. What was considered best practice or top priority in the past may no longer be relevant or effective due to the way search engines (and the internet) have developed over time.”

And before it mentions those other things, it says this:

“Creating content that people find compelling and useful will likely influence your website’s presence in search results more than any of the other suggestions in this guide.”

That gets to the larger point I made in my refreshed 11x content article:

In short, helpful content isn’t about how good your SEO is, or even your content’s quality; it’s about whether it delivers the most value in exchange for someone’s time.

SEO matters, just not for its own sake.

Here’s a fuller excerpt from my article:

And one way to make a page worth someone’s time is to present information in a way that gives users the most value for the least effort.

The usability connection

Google’s guide on creating helpful content has a section related to page experience.

It links to “Understanding page experience in Google Search results,” which lists the following criteria:

As I mentioned in the 11x article — fourth mention, if you’re counting — helpful content or page experience criteria aren’t an SEO checklist.

To focus on SEO content as a checklist of items — like keywords, titles, descriptions, alt tags, etc. — is, in my opinion, to harken back conceptually to a lost era of hand-coded algorithms.

Today’s helpful content is largely determined by the nuanced patterns of human preferences observed by neural networks, shown conceptually in the graphic (from the 11x article …) below:

Checklists get set aside; the emphasis is on creating value for time.

To close by revisiting the other figure from earlier, if users see the world in terms of their valuable (and finite) time, that creates a logarithm:

Improving usability is central to that equation.

That means understanding past lessons, like techniques for user testing and tying it back to real business needs.

Hey, I think I’ve seen a similar diagram before.

Perhaps great minds think alike. 😉

Come back next week!

Thank you for taking the time to check out this week’s Hamsterdam History lesson!

We’ll have a new one next week, or feel free to explore past lessons below.

Until next time, enjoy the vibes:

Thanks for reading. Happy optimizing! 🙂

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