How web sites make us feel

Surfing the web isn’t a passive process, it’s an active one and web sites do make us feel emotions.  A lot of web sites are terrible and you've probably experienced them at times.  They’re hard to navigate, confusing, badly organised, badly written, rude, over-designed and often don’t give us what we want.  We feel stupid, frustrated, let down or angry.  We lose confidence, leave the site and don’t go back.  A web site has to gain our trust and confidence because surfing the web is an emotional business.  Brand and reputation can depend on making us feel confident and positive and gaining our trust.  If we have a positive experience, we’re much more likely to make that purchase, book that ticket, register for that newsletter, or make a comment.

How we use web sites

So, we know that web sites can make us feel all sorts of emotions.  It’s also useful to think about how we use web sites.  No-one likes looking at computer screens.  They’re grainy, they flicker and they make your eyes hurt.  So we have developed behaviours to cope.  

Speed - we work fast, we’re impatient and we make quick decisions.

Scan – we don’t read web pages, we scan them.  We have a quick glance for stuff that catches our eye.   As web editors/designers we might like to think that our users read every word and pause for reflection regularly – not so.  Why do we scan?  For speed, because we know we don’t need to read everything, and because we’re good at it – we’ve been scanning newspapers and books for years and we know how it works.

Satisfice – most of the time we don’t choose the best option, we choose the first reasonable option.  We click on the first link that catches our interest or vaguely resembles the thing we’re looking for.  We don’t make a fully informed choice.  This is a strategy known as ‘satisficing’ (a cross between satisfying and sufficing).

When users get nearer their target, they will spend longer and will begin to read and make informed choices, but only when they feel they are getting close.

At first, it’s just scanning and satisficing behaviour and at speed!

Eye tracking video 

This is a video of someone using a web site, in this case one called Squidoo.  What they’ve recorded here is the movement of the person’s eyes, so that they can see what the person is looking at and what they are focussing on.  The blue line shows the movement of the eye and the blue circle shows the current position – it gets bigger when a user has focussed on something for a couple of seconds.  Watch how quickly the eyes move around the page and notice how little reading the individual does before moving on.

Heat map 

This shows a ‘heat map’ of the Marks and Spencer’s homepage.  In this case, data from eye tracking studies has been amalgamated to produce a heat map.  The ‘hotter’ areas show parts of the page that have been focussed on and the darker areas are parts of the page that haven’t been looked at.

From www.etre.com 

You can see that there is a lot of focus on the links, particularly those down the left.  People have a quick glance at the logo, top left, to confirm where they are and then have a quick look at the search/shopping basket.  Notice how little people have looked at the adverts – they've really zoned them out.  But interestingly, people have focussed on the faces.  It's an innate trait within us to look at a face which makes them very engaging on a web page.