3 Signs Your Users Are Lost: Jared Spool at SXSW 2012

On the opening day of SXSW 2012, Jared Spool showed the audience of designers, programmers, and this editor three easy signs that users are getting lost on our websites. Spool has been studying how people use the Web since its inception and he has analyzed hundreds of sites. In doing so, he has found three predictors that almost guarantee a user won't find what they are looking for on your site. And like any good SXSW presentation, the results are not what you expect.

"Links want to deliver users the content they desire," Spool explained. "They also want to emit the right scent." The "scent of information" was a concept developed at Xerox PARC when the graphical user interface was first being invented. "The way people navigate large bodies of information is the same way a bee find honey, or a fox finds a rabbit," Spool said, "they detect traces of it and follow it to the source."

Sounds simple enough, but the truth is the vast majority users still can’t find what they are looking for when they visit a web site—any web site. After 15 years of studying clickstream, Spool says that users fail to find the specific content they want 58 percent of the time. What’s more, these lost users almost do the same three things.   

1. Hit the Back Button

It is easy to appreciate why the user hitting the back button is a bad thing, clearly the user is looking at a page that doesn’t have what they are looking for. But the numbers Spool gives for the magnitude of the failure are pretty shocking. He says if user hits the back button once, the failure rate rises to more than 80 percent. As he puts it, and he made the entire audience recite, “The Back Button is Doom.”

2. Pogo Stick

The second sure sign that your user is lost is something he calls “pogo sticking” and it is an effect that many site operators see as a feature.  Pogo-sticking is when users hop back and forth among products from a common gallery page. In theory, this means the user is comparison shopping and will eventually find the products they want and buy it. In practice, Spool says when a user pogo-sticks their failure rate goes up to 89 percent.

3. Search

The final indicator of failure is the user using search. Spool says Search is always the second thing users do when they come to a site.  The first thing they do is scan the page for trigger words that will help them click to what they want. Having the right trigger words on every given page is key. According to Poole, once users are forced to use the search box they fail to find what they are looking for 70 percent of the time.

Since giving users access to the information, be it an article or a product listing, is the goal of every site operator, what does Poole recommend as a fix? First, he says sites should not be afraid of providing links packed with trigger words on their home pages. The more users click them, the bigger they should be. What should those trigger words be? Just look at your search logs.

“Your users are telling you what your trigger words should be,” Poole says. “If you’re tracking where searches come from inside your site, you will even know what pages are failing you.”

Finally, webmasters need to avoid useless links. “ ‘Learn More’ is the second most useless pair of words on the Web, and ‘Click Here’ is number one.” Poole says.  “ ‘Click Here To Learn More is the granddaddy of them all.”

For more from SXSW, see the slideshow below.