You know those cops shows where one cop stands behind a two-way mirror while the partner grills a suspect? That’s how I felt recently standing behind a two-way mirror while watching users interact live with a site redesign we’re finishing up. Most of the time, I get to see these results in the form of a powerpoint presentation or PDF, but watching it live really yields some interesting things about user behaviors when surfing a website.
These are some observations I made from the other side of the two-way mirror. The folks studied were both men and women, mid thirties, professionals from legal and accounting fields who are frequent users of the current site. The site is a business and finance news site.
Observation 1: Users don’t notice the design first, they go right to the content
This site design is a total departure from its current state. Totally different. Yet users skipped past that and went right to the content. In fact, the interviewer had to prompt the discussion of the design in many cases. This isn’t to say design is important. In fact, when they’re able to do that that’s a plus for the design as it doesn’t get in the way of users getting their information. Done right it actually facilities that. But this reinforces what I, and many others, say over and over—you have to get the content right to engage an audience online. If the content is bad or not what they want, the site could be designed by Michelangelo himself and they would still bounce.
Observation 2: Users only care about what they want
We’re promiscuous users when it comes to surfing the web. We have no problem bouncing from site to site in order to get our fill. This makes everything else on a single site virtually non-existent to that user. They only care about what they want. As a publisher, easier to pull this off with a niche site, but on a general interest or even a general financial site, this means that your users are ignoring a great percentage of your content. What can you do about this? First, understand that you can’t please everybody. However, knowing this, you can take steps to improve time spent on your site. Know your audience(s) and their interests. Create sample user paths for each one, so you can try and organize content in a way that is seamless and all in the same place for different types of users. Keep working hard to make sure they get more of what they want from your site.
Observation 3: Users want you to do the work for them
My colleague John Miller often talks about the value meal phenomenon at McDonald’s. When the fast food chain started packaging their meals sales went up 100% for each of those packaged products. Turns out customers didn’t want to have to walk up to the counter and choose between all the items of the menu. It was just easier to say, “I’ll have a number 1.” Same behavior happens online. When faced with the prospects of having to work to get the information we want, we take the simpler route—scanning the homepage or reading one story. A homepage that packages elements of their site, helps get those elements more time. Things like the “most popular” list or “don’t miss” perform well. On article pages, once the user read an article the clicked on they will bounce unless enticed to stay around. An article that aggregates related articles, photo galleries, blogs, video etc. does the work for the user, keeps them around longer.
Observation 4: Dark colors and larger images attract eyes
This test site is a conservative, traditional financial news operation. Most of their readers are accountants, lawyers and financial professionals. And while most media related to these fields are a bit traditional and boring, this generation of young professionals also grew up playing video games, using slick channel guides to change the channels on their televisions sets and programming their onboard navigation. They’re used to cutting-edge interfaces and styles. So just because it’s related to a newspaper product doesn’t mean it has to be black text on white or gray background. Make it as exciting as possible visually and users will more likely want to be associated with it, especially when the competitor’s site pale in comparison visually.
Observation 5: Users are smarter than we think
One of the things I hear routinely from clients when rethinking a user-interface is “our users will never figure that out” or “it should be more obvious that that’s a link.” I used to believe it and make adjustment accordingly, but this live user test really proves that theory wrong. Users are savvy for the most part. They visit multiple sites in a day, are exposed to a multitude of interfaces from websites to phone apps. They pick things up digitally pretty fast and are not afraid to play around with an interface to learn it. This is by no means a license to over-complicate things, but it’s important not to underestimate users and how they’ll react to features on your site, especially if its a feature that improves the overall usability of the site.
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