Make Your Website Better

We're All Hunter-Gatherers on the Web

I’m re-reading Prioritizing Web Usability, by Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger, as I’m planning and completely overhauling my workshop on how to improve your web site to better meet business and marketing goals. One of the best things about writing articles and planning workshops is that I get to go back to the basics. And I love the psychological and behavioral underpinnings of usability. Nielson comments that the single most important usability issue is navigation–you go to a site to find something. And that process has a direct line back to the time when we were hunter-gatherers. It’s a fun analogy.

We Forage, Following Information Scent

We enter a territory on the hunt for quarry (information). We look for cues. Our ancestors followed tracks, spoor, broken branches, sniffed out the scent of prey.  We come to a web site and see navigation links. We try to sniff out the scent of each link–will it take us to what we’re looking for? All we have to go on is the words in the link or navigation button. We click the link. If it gets us closer, we click again. If not, we may click again and continue the hunt… or we may move on to another site that could provide more productive hunting ground.

Users Estimate How Likely It Is That a Site Will Satisfy The Hunt

As site users, we make fast calculations as to the cost/benefit of each site we visit, asking ourselves “how quickly and easily can I find the information I’m looking for?” If the page we land on when we arrive at a site (and it isn’t necessarily the home page) doesn’t provide immediate good hints at what’s special about that hunting ground and make it easy for us to see how to find our quarry,  it’s not worth the time because we can be pretty confident that another promising patch of ground is close by.

On the web, there are now many sites that can provide good and easy hunting. If it proves too time-consuming to find the information we’re looking for on one site, the next one is just a Google-search and a click away.

How to Attract Hunters

Nielsen asks, “So how can you design a site that will attract ravenous beasts?  The two main strategies are to make your content look like a nutritious meal and signal that it’s an easy catch. These strategies must be used together: users will leave if the content is good but hard to find, or if it’s easy to find but not satisfying.”

I would add another strategy. You also need to attract and keep the prey satisfied. In addition to furnishing your own information, social media (blogs in particular) enable you to attract solid, satisfying information from other people. Hunters can meet around the fire at your blog, share the information they’ve gathered, and tell one another about other hunting grounds, too. Valuable information–a satisfying meal.

Does your web site provide the right cues to where the rabbits (or carrots) are? Are they healthy specimens that the hunters will want more of? The more you know about usability, the better your chances are of providing hunting grounds that attract lots of visitors and bring them back for more.

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