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Intelligence
Visitor (Mis)Behavior

Intelligence

Visitor (Mis)Behavior

Nov 14, 2014By mStoner Staff

Trying to divine how visitors will use the sites we build is one of the most challenging and rewarding parts of my job. We encourage our clients to take a visitor-first philosophy when it comes to organizing, labeling, and structuring their navigation and content. But what does that mean? What does ‘visitor-first’ look like? How are visitors really behaving?

Ideal vs. Real

In an ideal world (and the one which many of our sites still assume is the status quo) everyone would use our website just like this:

Ideal Session:

  • Prospective student John opens up his laptop web browser.
  • John types in the URL for your home page (because he remembers it from your print brochure, naturally) and follows this path: 
    • Home >
    • Academics >
    • Majors >
    • English >
    • Apply
  • You immediately profit! High fives with the enrollment team.

But we don’t live in an ideal world. If we’re lucky, visitor behavior looks more like this:

Real Session 1

  • John is at home on the couch. He opens up Google Chrome on his iPhone and searches for ‘English Degrees in (Your State).’
  • He finds your department page listed in the top 3, because you did such a great job with SEO.
  • He opens your English major home page (which looks great on his phone, because you have a responsive design, of course) and follows this path: 
    • English Major
    • Application Process
    • Application Requirements
    • OH SWEET THE VOICE IS ON!
    • He bookmarks the page for later (maybe). End of session.

Real Session 2

  • The next day, John remembers he was looking at English degrees and that he liked yours but got distracted. His phone is dead and he’s on the bus, so he takes out his iPad, grabs the bookmark he made and follows this path: 
    • Bookmarked degree page >
    • Reads everything you’ve ever written on the English major >
    • Clicks apply now button >
    • OMG Mike just shared the craziest pic of a A CAT DRESSED IN A BACON COSTUME ever! End of session.

Real Session 3

  • That evening, John’s sitting at home on his laptop. He’s sure he wants to apply based on his past visits. He follows this path: 
    • Googles your school’s admission page.
    • Gets lost for a bit browsing the admissions site full of student profile videos.
    • Eventually gets around to clicking apply now
    • Completes the application process
    • Profit, high fives, etc.

You get the idea. You’re not designing your website for robots in a vacuum. You’re designing it for John and thousands of his peers — living, breathing, teenagers in the real world.

One Journey, Many Paths 

Because visitors like John can access any one of your pages from any number of different devices at any given point in their relationship with you, it’s impossible to account for every path they will take. Instead of prescriptively trying to dictate the exact paths and priorities they will need, we need to embrace reality and develop navigation schema that are flexible enough to accommodate real browsing behaviors.

Let’s look at some of the most common behaviors and which schema are a good match:

Known-Item Seeking

When visitors are searching for something that they already know is there, they are known-item seeking. Visitors will typically spend as much time as they need to find the information, though the longer it takes them, the more unhappy they will be with the experience.

This is precisely why faculty and staff are the worst possible testers for sites dedicated to students. They already know what they want and what it’s called. They want the quickest path to this information as possible, which if they had their way would be the home page. The solution to this is to provide audience navigation tailored to them: frequent, recurring information and transaction needs for people highly familiar with the material.

In our case above, John used known-item seeking for the apply process. He knew it must exist and wanted to end up there, even if there were other stops along the way.

Exploratory Seeking

Visitors browse and explore your website either out of curiosity or because they aren’t sure what they are looking for. Prospective students will use this type of behavior when they are first visiting your website and simply want to know more about you.

When visitors are exploring out of curiosity, you want to keep them engaged with a steady stream of compelling content, such as feature stories, profiles, events listings, and outcomes. A well-designed home page or sectional landing page with a strong content strategy can really help you excel with this type of user experience.

When they are looking for something but aren’t sure exactly what it might be called or whether it even exists, guidance from a strong, clear topical navigation can help lead them down a path to their desired goal. In John’s case, he used Google to search for English degrees, and then used the topical navigation to drill down into the application process and degree requirements.

Exhaustive Research

Visitors who have explored your website and discovered something that interests them may decide to explore it in more detail right away or at a later time. If they are exhaustively researching a major, they will want to find out everything there is to know about the subject and are willing to spend a great deal of time with that detail.

For this type of experience the most important navigation schema are local and page-level. 

A strong local navigation structure will help them understand what detail is available and what they’ve already read. The information can be exhaustive, but shouldn’t be overwhelming. The user shouldn’t be forced to move around much — they are reading every word.

On each individual page, using the right hierarchy of header (H1 — H3) formats in your body copy can help chunk this sometimes dense content into more easily consumed parts. 

John decided he liked what he saw from his initial exploration of your English program. His return trip was purposeful; he wanted to know everything he could find without being jumped around from section to section.

Just the Beginning

This example only captures one moment in time for a prospective student as he or she explores programs and considers applying. That same individual will have a much different expectation of experience as they progress from prospect to applicant, enrollee, student, alumnus, and beyond. Ensuring a consistent, positive lifetime experience is really the ultimate aspiration for visitor-centered UX in higher education. That’s a long, tough path to tread, and it’s critical that the first few steps are taken in the right direction.