(apologies for crappy photos....I blame it on the red velvet cake ;-) )
Scent - what users follow as they go through the website.
Five types of pages that users encounter:
1) Target Content page
- The place users find what they're looking for
- All other pages are dedicated to delivering the user tot eh target
- Navigation pushes users
- Scent pulls users
2) Gallery page
- Aggregates multiple content pages
- Individual content depends upon scent to attract the user
- Basically a list of links
- When you have a gallery page, you have to worry about scent
- Trigger words are key - they trigger the user into acting
- Careful layouts enhance scent
- The best links are long - 7-12 words in length
- The best gallery pages lead directly to correct content
- Link order is important - alphabetical is effectively random order
- Longer pages work better - users don't care if you have a lot of things. What does matter is when they can't make choices because there are too many factors
- Used when galleries get too large
- Separates galleries into logical groups
- Basically are links to links and users expect that.
- Allows galleries to provide more detail per item
- Gallery links are descriptive to prevent pogosticking
- Categories need to be logical and meaningful - users need to quickly eliminate uninteresting categories.
- Used when you need to break out the departments (ie women's, men's, children's, shoes, jewelry, for the home, etc...)
- The page the user lands at.
- Can be any type of page
- Single purpose is to either present user with content on the page or to get the user to the page that has the content.
- The least important page on your website - the most important is the content page. No one cares about your home page - they only care about finding their stuff.
Users click on...
- categories 86.8% of the time
- search 6.8% of the time
- home (from the home page) 2.6% of the time
- featured content 1.3% of the time.
1) Use of the back button
- 58% of the time, users do not find what they're using for.
- When there was one instance of back button, user succeed 18% of the time
- When there were two instances of back button, user succeed 2% of the time
- The back button is the button of doom.
- The big brother of the back button
- When users don't pogo stick, they succeed 55% of the time
- When users do pogo stick, they succeed 11% of the time.
- The more someone pogo sticks, the less likely they are to purchase/complete goal.
- When a user comes to a page, they scan for trigger word. If they find it, they click on it. If they don't, they then go to search and type their trigger word into search.
- On most sites, if a user tries to look for content without search, they find it 53% of the time
- With search, they only find it 30% of the time.
- Amazon is an exception to this rule because people search for uniquely identified content. For not media products (ie cameras), it doesn't work as well because people aren't typing in specific product name.
3 comments:
I've always been interested in Spool's work, but never wildly impressed by it. Pronouncements like "the back button is the button of doom" and "alphabetical is effectively random order" are right some of the time but dangerously wrong much of the time. This blog's Categories list, e.g., is alpha, which made it easy for me to find all the "an event apart" items. And while typing this comment, I *wish* I could have used the Back button to harvest the quotes above; instead, I had to open your post in a new window.
When pronouncements are wrong, they're very, very wrong, which makes you question the person doing the pronouncing.
I agree that not every pronouncement is applicable to every situation, but within the context of what he was talking about, it made perfect sense. The basic premise was that they gave people money to go shopping on websites and then watched what they did. The people who spent the least amount of money had the pattern of doing the things he warned against in the talk. When they redesigned their sites based on his observations, they made more money. These are stats you just can't argue with.
I don't think we can look at things as black and white in any situation...never do this, always do that. Everything has a context.
Spool's work is valuable because it challenges commonly-held assumptions with user observation and data, not just preference. The "button of doom" comment, for example, was used in the context of an observed increase in the failure rate for people trying to complete a goal on a site when the back button was used.
All rules are, of course, made to be broken and challenged.
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