Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster by Jakob Nielsen
A bit of definition:
Information foraging is the most important concept to emerge from Human-Computer Interaction research since 1993. Developed at the Palo Alto Research Center (previously Xerox PARC) by Stuart Card, Peter Pirolli, and colleagues, information foraging uses the analogy of wild animals gathering food to analyze how humans collect information online.
[Read the middle yourself] and then:
The patch-leaving model thus predicts that visits will become ever shorter. Google and always-on connections have changed the most fruitful design strategy to one with three components:
- Support short visits; be a snack
- Encourage users to return; use mechanisms such as newsletters as a reminder
- Emphasize search engine visibility and other ways of increasing frequent visits by addressing users’ immediate needs
Next to the fact that it’s a useful theory for my work, it also calls for some parallels with blogging:
- Weblogs are rather snack-bars then restaurants: you can come often, find something to eat and leave fast. They are even better: snacks are changing (there is always something new), but the cook is the same, so you can easily get a feeling of cooking style and quality.
- Weblogs use RSS feeds to notify you when something tasty is served (and you can even try it without going there).
- Google loves blogs and brings readers directly to snack they want.
From this perspective the only problem with blog-snack-bar is that once you are there you can hardly find anything beyond the front raw of snacks :)
I also wonder when Jakob Nielsen will write a bit more about weblogs (because his Alertbox was a role-model for me when I started my weblog and because he is a bit sceptical now).
Tags: blogs, usabilityArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/07/16.html#a675; comments are here.
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