Users fear loss more than they care about gain
Posted: Mon Jan 06, 2025 10:10 am
Have you ever bought a pair of shoes on sale and left them in the closet? I have a couple of books still unopened that I bought online on Black Friday a year ago. I admit that they are drowning in dust. But that's normal: purchases are the result of a very complex decision-making process and a series of unpredictable but somehow influenceable behaviors .
In this article I describe 6 typical user behaviors and give you some practical tips on user experience to help you intervene on the Engagement of your website.
1# Users are looking for clues
When a new visitor lands on your web page, the first thing they do is try to figure out if they have come to the right place.
In order to make this assessment, your user uses a technique called Information Foraging , which consists of quickly exploring the page in search of clues on how to move to reach their goal. You can observe this behavior in the many eye movement and fixation test traces: users scan the screen to identify the path they have to take , which usually consists of keywords related to their goal.
If you use language on your site that matches your visitors’ conceptual model, your keywords will stand out and they’ll be more likely to continue exploring, confident that they’ll get the information or functionality they’re looking for.
Users Search for Clues by Reading with an F-Pattern - Credits Nielsen Norman Group
Recommendations
Here are some tips to help you improve your website user experience and give users those valuable clues that make the difference between staying or leaving your site.
Use descriptive titles, headings, images, and links .
Use terms that people are used to using.
Contextualize images through captions .
Highlight significant words in bold .
Space your paragraphs : optimizing the spaces will facilitate the user experience.
Minimize distractions .
Use calls to action that clearly tell the user what to expect when they perform them.
Make sure all your links say exactly what page the user will land on when they click them.
2# Users don't read everything
If users have decided that your site contains qatar phone number what they need, will they read the content?
Whether they do so depends on many factors:
the readability
the degree of involvement
the context of reading
the rush
the elements of distraction
Joshua Porter in "Principles of User Interface Design" wrote that “we live in a world of interruptions”. Always keep this in mind and work on user experience design to prevent interruptions. My suggestions in this regard are:
In this article I describe 6 typical user behaviors and give you some practical tips on user experience to help you intervene on the Engagement of your website.
1# Users are looking for clues
When a new visitor lands on your web page, the first thing they do is try to figure out if they have come to the right place.
In order to make this assessment, your user uses a technique called Information Foraging , which consists of quickly exploring the page in search of clues on how to move to reach their goal. You can observe this behavior in the many eye movement and fixation test traces: users scan the screen to identify the path they have to take , which usually consists of keywords related to their goal.
If you use language on your site that matches your visitors’ conceptual model, your keywords will stand out and they’ll be more likely to continue exploring, confident that they’ll get the information or functionality they’re looking for.
Users Search for Clues by Reading with an F-Pattern - Credits Nielsen Norman Group
Recommendations
Here are some tips to help you improve your website user experience and give users those valuable clues that make the difference between staying or leaving your site.
Use descriptive titles, headings, images, and links .
Use terms that people are used to using.
Contextualize images through captions .
Highlight significant words in bold .
Space your paragraphs : optimizing the spaces will facilitate the user experience.
Minimize distractions .
Use calls to action that clearly tell the user what to expect when they perform them.
Make sure all your links say exactly what page the user will land on when they click them.
2# Users don't read everything
If users have decided that your site contains qatar phone number what they need, will they read the content?
Whether they do so depends on many factors:
the readability
the degree of involvement
the context of reading
the rush
the elements of distraction
Joshua Porter in "Principles of User Interface Design" wrote that “we live in a world of interruptions”. Always keep this in mind and work on user experience design to prevent interruptions. My suggestions in this regard are: