22 How Well Do People Use the Web?
26 User Satisfaction with Web Sites
27 How People Use Sites
36 Search Dominance
45 Scrolling
47 Complying with Design Conventions and Usability Guidelines
52 Information Foraging
You have less than two minutes to communicate the first time a prospective customer visits your Web site. This is the basic fact about the Web experience: As far as users are concerned, every page must justify its claim on their time. If a page doesn't do that immediately and clearly, they go elsewhere. Most don't even bother scrolling to see what's further down the page. Web users are extremely impatient: In our study, they spent an average of 27 seconds on each Web page. Why the rush? Because there's too much irrelevant junk on the Internet. If people carefully studied everything they came across online, they would never get to log off and have a life. There's no silver bell that alerts users to a page that is worthy of their attention. You need to convince them. In this chapter we look at users' general behavior on the Webwhere they go first, how long they stay, what they do when they get there. We also examine the rise of "information foraging" and changes in the way people use search engines. When designing a site, these are the factors you need to keep in mind if you want people to stay long enough to see all that you have to offer. |