How Visitors View Websites

When planning and improving a website, it is important to know how people view websites. Knowing this will help you to design your site in such a way, that people will be able to find and do what they want on your website.

How to describe visitor behaviour?

Before changing the site layout, it is important to understand the nature of human behaviour on the website. It helps that certain known patterns apply to human behaviour, such as:

• people hunt for information, using words as clues
• people follow a funnel to conversion
• people flow like water, when released on a website

  In essence, the metaphors used to describe human behaviour stand on known natural principles, such as animal instincts and a flow of water. Let's look at them in more detail.

  Hunting for information

  When a predator stalks its prey, it uses its senses, such as smell and sight, to find the victim. It follows the trail of paw-prints, spots of fur and blood to track the target.

  Humans are very similar: they use words, related to their target (be it a product, an article, or a person's name) to find what they want.

  This fact is emphasized by people reading from top to bottom and from left to right, which creates a top-left triangle of attention. It means that in order to get noticed, you'll need to use the words your people will recognize as useful in the top-left part of the page.

  Read more about:

  • Web portals and scent
  • Getting confidence with every click
  • Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster (from Jacob Nielsen)
  • A 2001 Wired article: Hot on the scent of information
  • Advance Funnel design considerations
  • Conversion Funnel Folly, Part 2
  • Design Your Website for Increased ROI

    Water flow

    The water flow concept, which I introduce here (or maybe introduced by someone else elsewhere), is based on the fact that water flows the shortest way to the downside. The concept is not different from the other two, but it describes as clearly as the scent trail theory the attitude towards the trail: a visitor only goes where it sees a need to go.

    In the water theory, people are compared to springs, which go where they can, and when they can't go somewhere (no path), they just return to them main stream and flow another way.

    In general, this is no vastly different from the two above, but I prefer to see it this way.

    The details
    All the models, however simple or complicate they are, are based on a couple of principles that people follow:

    • the visitor goes where he sees a possible continuation of his visit: a link to a useful resourece/product/action
    • if the visitor doesn't see a way to continue his walk from the page, he goes to the previous page to try another way
    • the visitor follows the above principle until he either leaves the site (and thus goes back to the previous useful source) or converts
    • people scan from top to bottom, from left to right
    • people not read, but scan: quickly check if there's anything interesting on the page and proceed with their journey
    • since people scan, the text should be readable and simplest words available: your site should be understood by your every visitor
    • the words you use on your site should providing clear click path

      This goes in line with providing various paths for various kinds of customers, such as researching, comparing or buying, as well as different types of people, such as thoughtful (use facts, well-written articles, figures, graphs) and emotional (call to action, various benefits, etc).

      You can read more about various types of customers from the Eisenbergs:

      • Personas (more and before you build a website

        It may be hard to redesign later, not to mention it'll take more time and you'll have other issues at hand.

        In essence, no user experience

        It also goes inline with various values that you provide to your visitors. The more valuable your website/product is to the people, the more likely they'll stick around and do what they and you want.

        Rounding up

        Ideally, you need to at least think about the way the information is presented on the website (

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