Any student of UX or UCD should know about “the myth of the average user.” There is no such thing – we learn that early on. What we don’t often talk about is some of the things that we share in common. While we spend time worrying about target audiences and their interests, there are still some things we can generalize about most users.
Tonight I delivered a lecture to my Web Concepts class at UNLV – second time delivering the same lecture – but for some reason I was struck by my own words and reminded that we sometimes lose sight of the fundamentals of living life in an age of the Web. The lecture topic was about how users influence Web design in terms of characteristics of modern life. A lot of these ideas were thrown together from a range of UX gurus – Garrett, Krug, Nielsen – but I think this list really says it all.
We don’t read, we scan assimilate
Krug says we scan, meaning we only glance through text content looking for words and colors that jump out at us. Through Nielsen’s eye tracking studies we know that most users don’t fixate on any specific part of a page for very long and that eyes follow similar patterns across web pages, frequently focusing on very selective areas.
In addition, scanning increases speed and efficiency, and it’s frequently influenced by personal choices and behaviors such as selection of monitor size, how large we make browser windows, whether we zoom, do we scroll, and so on. (Scrolling, incidentally, is a topic for a whole other post.)
Modern man…impatience at it’s finest
Modern life, with all its technology, speed, and information has done little to improve our lives other than to inundate us with so muchstuff that we have to do everything fast. I, myself, fall into this category – trying to hold down 4 jobs, school, volunteer work and what little social life that leaves me. So I know that what I get out of it is an huge amount of impatience.
With all this stuff to do, to look at, to deal with, we’ve become an impatient society. Fast food, increased speed limits, convenience stores – it seems like everything our lives are hurtling faster and faster. But with regard to our users, why not use this to our advantage? Let’s take this list of character traits as a starting point:
So what does this mean for user experience? Can we successfully make our sites like a 7-11 store where we can find any suitable product or opinion or data quickly and easily? If so, it would lend itself to meeting the demands of modern man.
Ultimately the goal of many web sites is to make money. Period. A web site is a business, or at least a really small version of one. Unless we’re pushing captive audience live video or we’re Facebook and can keep our users engaged on a single web page for hours, it is unlikely that we can keep eyes on the page for very long.
And a few quandaries
And of course there’s always the quirks of modern life. Once again, a list:
I relate the intuition question to the guy who refuses to ask for directions and would rather drive for hours than swallow his pride. For some reason, even in our own personal space without any repercussion, we tend to continue down the path we think is right rather than double back and refocus. Crazy. The question for an experience designer is…how can we redesign navigation to help guide the user?
Reviews – we all read them, we sometimes believe them, and yet we follow them. And serendipity – well, there is that quirk of life that we actually like to stumble onto things. I myself love StumbleUpon because it’s just friggin’ fun to find crap.
So the question is – what can we do to improve the experience of our web site for the impatient user? Can you, in fact, use this to your advantage? Would love to hear any stories….