Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

The look of your website could effect user involvement, but so can the sound of your website. Consider when the website will be used to make decisions about design.

style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">When I began my first website, I did not consider ease of use, nor did I think much about when people might be looking at my site. I wanted to get information up on the site; I wanted the information to be impressive; and I wanted the information to lead to a conversion. I kept working on improvements which I thought would help to this end. When I began a second site, I became more concerned with how to make the site a success through posting frequency and other factors. With both of these sites, I did not pay much attention to the user, or when they would be viewing the site, and how that could effect their interaction with the site.

    My assumption was that people looked at these business sites while at home, since they would be doing something else at work. I began to see evidence in my analytics that Monday was a big day, so I focused on ensuring new content on Mondays. This actually made Monday my big day, because users new that was the day I would deliver new material. Over time, I began studying my reports in greater detail discovering exactly when did people come to the site, what did they do when on site, and which days were more natural for them to be searching my site. Part of this research was due to planning out when should ads be delivered, and part was to see what correlation there might be between viewing the site and the user calling for a quote. The fact dawned on me that users were not interacting with the site in ways that I had assumed.
    Currently my break down for one specific site can be generalized like this:
Time of day: beginning around 11am websites continue to increase until 4pm when they drop off. The number of visits increases again around 7pm till around 10pm when they drop off. By 4pm, the site will have received around 66% of its daily visitors. There is a nice little peak about 7am.
Days of the week: Sunday has a good crowd which steadily builds up through the week, dropping on Friday, but the real low point is on Saturday.
Facts about the site: this site is geo-targeted for one specific area. Around 70% of the visitors to the site come from that area. The site does not sell goods; it is offering a service. Most buyers want this service on the weekend when they could be present for the work.
    What you may notice is visitors are coming around their lunch break, but it seems that most are on the site during their work hours. The natural flow tends to be away from Monday towards the middle of the week. This may not hold for your site. You have to go through clicktrack data and more to make such determinations, but you may find that many sites are being targeted by visitors during their work hours.
    I was asked what would be a good theme song for a site. The person was so excited that he could force music to play when someone landed on the site, and he wanted the perfect song. Sure, there are studies that show music helping influence people; I am not sure that anyone has studied that factor for web design though. Since I was familiar with his business, I knew that it would follow closely to the times that I mentioned above. I pointed out to him that if someone was at work, having a song coming out of their computer may be a give-away that they are not working. Also the nice flashing “click here” may indicate to their boss that they are not on the company intranet. I looked at his analytics to discover his bounce rate was high. This meant users were leaving the site fairly quickly. He only noticed that his number of visits was going up, so he thought he was good.
    Once you realize when people arrive on your site, think about their environment, and what they want. In the case above, speed in finding information is also a factor. A person at work does not have time to be reading your site, or hunting for the information. They also may not want to see your holiday pics. I am left scratching my head as to why some images were chosen for websites. Alright, I know the phrase “sex sells”, but this does not mean that you should have sexy pictures plastered over your site (when looking at a real estate site, my wife thought I was on an inappropriate site, because the female Realtor had shall we say interestingly posed shots of herself- no nudity, but it did make you wonder what she was selling).
    Each site is different, and you will have to study your own reports. You may find that people are visiting your site during business hours, so all of those nifty bells and whistles on your site may have the opposite effect of what you want.

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