How Do People Use the Web?

Before you can create a dynamite web site, you have to understand how people use the web. By understanding common web habits, you can increase your web site's usability; that is, its user friendliness. (See our May 21, 2007 blog post for an explanation of usability and why it's important.)

• Catching attention. As disappointing as it is to web designers who spend hours noodling over every line of text and the placement of each element on a web page, the average computer user opens a page, gives it a quick nano-second glance, and moves on. He's clicking through the "channels" faster than your Uncle Ed during the football playoffs! You have only a second or two to answer his question or grab his attention.
• Finding the info. When we're on the web, we don't read pages; we scan them, says Krug. It's faster, more efficient and, by golly, we're good at it. We learned to scan (or skim) for important information during third grade reading group, and we've had a lot of practice since then. Our eye just passes over the web designer's clever dialogue until it snags on a word we're looking for.
• Making choices. Web users don't waste time evaluating information before deciding what to click. Rather than agonizing over choosing the best option, "we choose the first reasonable option, a strategy known as satisficing" (satisfying + sufficing), says Krug. Since there's no penalty for guessing wrong, we just try again. If our click doesn't produce the desired info, we just hit the back button -- it's the most used browser feature.
• Figuring it out. Like the joke that real men don't read directions, well neither do web users. We don't need to understand how the web works as long as we can find a way to get the results we want. We'd prefer to muddle through than spend time reading tedious instructions. In fact, if we get the desired results, we'll continue to do something the long way around rather than learn a faster, more efficient way of doing it. We don't care if it makes sense, as long as it works!

So how do you use this information to create a user-friendly web site that will pull in potential customers? We'll talk about that in our next blog.