Analysis or synthesis?
04 March 2007 I've done a bit of user evaluation of websites, and I'm starting to realise there's one major division I can propose between the way individuals behave in sites.People either search, or they don't."Don't get me wrong, every site above about five pages needs a search function, but not everyone will use it.
Some people are analytic, like me. They are natural taxonomists, dividing information into categories, looking for similarity and difference - these people expect to use navigation to find stuff, because the stuff will be categorised. If they're disappointed in this, they may just strike their tents and depart, never to return.
But the other class of users, the ones I didn't suspect existed until I began to observe how other people use websites - they don't think taxonomically. They see information as a mass of discrete chunks, linked by a web of possible connections, any one of the possible arrangements could be the real arrangement, so they don't expect to divine it. They go straight to the search box.
These users don't analyse information, they synthesise it, they look for connections, not divisions.
Now obviously only a head case is really 100% either of these things (but believe me, I've done my reading, and those head cases do exist). Most people are on a continuum between the two poles. The useful thing to remember is that if your site is going to satisfy as many users as possible, not only does the search have to be well-designed, well-placed on the page, and fully functional - but the navigation has to be intuitive, clear and designed with user goals in mind.
Only with both bases covered can your site hope to 'do the business'.
Labels: usability
posted by Bruce on Sunday, March 04, 2007,
1 Comments:
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At June 20, 2007 11:21 AM,
Rowan Simpson said...
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Nice post!
It's always interesting to watch what people do when they first visit a new website.
Some will look for a search box. Others will look for a link to click on (in research lingo they are "search dominant" or "browse dominant" and studies suggest the split might be around 50/50, see: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9707b.html).
When you're designing a site you need to accommodate both.
Searchers will look for a single text box and a button labelled 'Search' or 'Go'.
Browsers will look for things that are blue and underlined.
You can save yourself a lot of trouble by sticking to these conventions.
This whole thing is a bit of a dilemma for people working on websites, as they too are either search dominant or browse dominant, and can sometimes forget to design for the other group.
