The Power of The Back Button
I often find I have to explain to my customers something I consider self –evident: It is not enough to get your website listed high in search engines or to get prominence through thousand dollar worth marketing campaigns or even to get hundreds of visitors. Your website, the centerpiece of your business, should be able to engage your visitors in a set of processes that will guide them to your ‘goal’ (like the purchase of your products, or the download of your software).
Creating a website and letting all else go to chance is definitely not the right approach on this problem. A website should be considered like a dynamic entity, an organism, that has the power to manipulate your visitors, to guide them from one place to the other to achieve small or large ‘goals’.
However, the difficulty in this is the fact that the website does not have the autonomy to act on its own based on the visitor behavior in order to ‘optimize’ itself and and turn the visitor to where it wants. (Such a self-organization is lacking from the web as a whole and is a matter worth discussing in the future.) It falls in the hands – and analyisis – of the site owner to get and understand the visitor feedback and modify the website appropriately in order to get the most out of his/her visitors.
Do not under any circumstances assume that the visitor is free to move in any way he wants in a website. Visitors are as free in websites as they are in super markets… Website zoology and visitor behavior falls somewhere between the realms of art and rocket science at the moment but there are some definite and well structured rules in this.
The most common action on the web these days is the pressing of the ‘Back’ button in the browser, a matter indicating the immense power of this behavior and the lack of understanding of this effect by web owners (I once had to give up on trying to reason this with a well educated web owner / customer since he did not even want to believe in the data, but was trying to find clever possible biases for the ‘back’ button effect. Sometimes prejudice lies in incredible places…)
Getting your visitor to act the minute he lands on your website requires special analysis and understanding of various matters (like where the visitor actually came in from) but is usually assigned to usability optimization of the website. In brief one must watch things like (there is A LOT more to this, we are just being telegraphically brief):
- Readbility. Are your texts clear and readable with no problems on all possible machines and resolutions?)
- Web content. Writing for the web is a lot different than writing for paper publications
- Navigation. Does the website allow the visitor to move ‘freely’ and be in full orientation in the website?
- Speed. Dopes the website load fast – faster than all your competitors?
- Accesibilty. Is the web site accessible to all?
- Aesthetics. This usually does not fall in the area of usability but it is inherently related. Does your site look professional and like a relic of the 60ies?
Again I must stress that it is stupid to fight so much to get visitors on your website only to lose them after they land on it. It is unfortunate that sometimes usability is harder to reconcile than search engine optimization. Do not trust yourself for any of the usability matters that were mentioned here. Ask a friend, a colleague (who hasn’t been involved in the project) or a professional for assistance.
Posted by Harry at June 11, 2004 06:09 AM
