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Web Site Behavioral Interaction Optimization
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It is important not only to
employ ample planning and an experienced web developer when creating
your website, it is important to also optimize the site after it has
been constructed. Optimization is essentially the process of
making small changes to get incremental improvement that can lead to
increase the likelihood of fulfilling your goals. While the
concept of web site optimization has been around for some time now,
one can perhaps take a new perspective on the optimization
problem. The new perspective is that optimization has two main
parts: (1) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that improves how your
site gets ranked when people are looking for topics that your site
addresses, and (2) Behavioral Interaction Optimization (BIO) that
improves how people interact with your web site by assuring
important information is easy to find (customer point of view) and
assuring that the important aspects of a site (retailer point of
view) get noticed. Some may also consider this to be Behavioral
Debugging
.
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Partnering with a web design firm or web search engine
optimization firm makes a lot of sense for designing your website and
optimizing it for search engine placement. First of all, you need to
employ the technical know-how of programmers and people who have current
knowledge of all the most useful plug-ins that you might want to include in
your site design. Second, once the site has been constructed, the
interplay of your site with the dynamically changing search market (via Google or Bing)
must be kept current so that you are ranked as ‘important’ (and ideally
foremost important) in searchers performed by perspective customers.
This is where a search engine optimization firm is very helpful and can
provide that extra improvement needed to meet site goals on hundreds or
thousands of web site visits.
The search engine optimization plans typically have 2
flavours: (1) a one-time optimization consultation and website revision, (2)
a term contract where the performance of the site is monitored (via various
tools such as Google Analytics),
and where the website is incrementally tweaked to determine what changes lead
to the best performance increases (measured as successful customer-web site
transactions known as goal conversions, or increased website traffic
originating from web searches). Lately, I have been working with a variety
of people to learn more about the typical site optimization process: the
weaknesses and the strengths.
I’ve identified various strengths and weaknesses of
standard site optimization methods. The main strength is the automatic
generation of site usage statistics from analysis tools. Many objective
measures of web site variables are collected including: the geographic
location from which people are accessing the site, which pages are viewed,
the amount of time certain site pages are viewed, which pages lead to
successful goals, what links are clicked. These statistics provide an
overall measure of traffic patterns for the site. This is also the main
weakness of standard optimization methods: standard web site optimization
only utilises an analysis of web site traffic. We don’t know what
people are doing while a page is being viewed, we don’t know if people are or
are not seeing links, and we don’t know if people who do in fact see a link,
are purposefully not clicking on it. Moreover, we don’t know which
aspects of the site hold the attention of the potential customer and we
don’t know what aspects of the site confuse the customer.
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A study of eye-tracking that explains what the average
person does when he or she views the site and can begin to answer some of
these questions that search engine optimization metrics do not
address. Eye-tracking can (more closely than web site analytics)
begin to tell us how people ‘behave’ in the context of the task at hand.
(See Figure 1. on this page.) Hence, analysis of the combination
of eye-tracking data and web site analytic data can tell us much more than
either method alone. It can tell us about: (1) the behavior of page
viewing, (2) how page viewing relates to link clicking, (3) how these (1
and 2) relate to the task at hand, and (4) provides information by which we
can modify web site interaction. The combined use of eye-tracking
data and standard web site analytic data can be best described as what we
call: Behavioral Interaction Optimization (BIO).
Behavioral Interaction Optimization of a site can
increase website effectiveness beyond what standard methods can provide
because more information about people who use the site goes into site
strategy. This is useful because there are many reasons for the overt
behavior of clicking on links and not clicking on links, or viewing pages
for short or for long intervals of time. For example, people might
not click a particular link on a web page because (1) they don’t want to
follow the link, or (2) they don’t see it or they are distracted by some
other feature on the web page. Eye-tracking provides information about
covert behavior. That is, using eye-tracking we can obtain
information that isn’t normally visible this giving us information about
the ‘thinking’ stage of human behavior. This extra information and
can be used to satisfy the question, “do they even look at the
link?” This extra information allows us to intentionally make
specific, objective, changes to the site that might only be guessed using a
web site designer’s intuition or inferred from web site analytics.
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Figure 1. The screen location of looking at objects in a
1st -person computer interaction environment.
Visual features (not visible in this heat map) relevant to the task are located
in specific areas of the screen. While there is visual information
available in all locations of the screen, there are only a few ‘hot
spots’ illustrating where most looking takes place. This ‘hot
spots’ indicate the screen locations that have visual information that is
most relevant to the task. These data tell us that, on average
people ‘behave’ in response to visual information that are relevant to the
task that they are trying to complete. In a way, this contradicts
the notion that in North America, people always look at the top left-hand
part of the computer screen.
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- Author: Philip Michael Zeman -
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