Description: You work hard providing top-notch content on your site. Will your users find it? If they don’t, all that effort is for nothing. What can you do to guarantee that users find the content they’ve come looking for? You’ll come away with the most up-to-the-minute research on how people actually navigate sites, learning secrets behind successful designs including Lands’ End, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, CNN, and the BBC.
Links give a scent of the content they contain, make the scent strong.
Content pages are what the user came for, they didn't come to browse. The target content page, the page the user came for, is the most important page on the site.
When is the user done on the site? It's easy to tell with e-commerce, they're done when they've paid.
Getting form the home page to the content using a gallery page (a decision page). Example: All men's shirts.
Content gets more specific and the user clicks. Links contain trigger words to attract the user's attention.
3 things ensure failure to find the target content: Use of the back button, Pogo-sticking and Use of Search.
The back button guarantees failure. If a user doesn't use it their success rate of finding content is 42%, if they use the back button it drops to 18%. If they use it twice it drops to 2%.
Pogo-sticking is going back and forth between pages. 2/3 of all e-commerce sales happen with no pogo-sticking. Success rate without pogo-sticking is 55%, with falls to 11%.
Search is like creating your own link if you don't find one that you think will work. Success is 53% without search and 30% with search.
On the gallery page give user enough info to prevent pogo-sticking. Use links with trigger words and make links 7-12 words long, very descriptive, no guessing.
Longer single pages do better than shorter multiple pages. The more clicks to make a sale the less you will sell.
Give lots of info on decision pages so they don't have to go to the actual product page to see if it's what they were looking for.
Link order is important. Alphabetical is the same as random. "A quick air conditioner tip"
Don't make links too short and too vague, don't make people guess that what's on the other side of the link.
Each click should eliminate parts of the site's hierarchy.
Home page is the least important page on the website, it's only purpose is to get users to other content. Like a hotel lobby.
On home page 86.8% click categories, 6.8% search, 1.3% click on featured content and 2.6% click on the home link on the home page!
Lost of categories and descriptions of those categories with little featured content.
The back button is the "button of doom".
End
Matt
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