Category Archives: User Behavior

How Our Brains Engage with Online Ads

On Monday, I talked about how our brain found Waldo – how we pick a recognized figure out of a busy background.

Yesterday, I took the same principles and applied them to how our brain scans a webpage.

Today, I want to dive into how the mechanics of our brain’s ability to focus attention impacts our engagement with online ads.

The Role of Engagement

One factor above all others dictates the level of engagement we have with online advertising: are we looking for it? Intent is the spoiler in ad effectiveness. When we have intent that aligns with advertising that’s presented to us, the rules of engagement significantly shift in favor of the ad. I dealt with this at some length in a previous post, so I won’t rehash the topic here. However, in all that follows, it’s important to keep that in mind.

As I laid out yesterday, our intent will determine our information foraging strategy on a web page. We will have an idea of what we’re looking for, perhaps even to the extent of creating a mental picture in our visual cortex, and the attention focusing apparatus in our brain working together with our ability to quickly scan a page in it’s entirety through peripheral vision will help us “thin slice” (to use a term from Gladwell’s Blink) the contents of a page, mentally dividing it up into areas of greater and lesser promise. Clusters of information scent are important here to help guide our attention in the most promising directions, as determined by our intent.

Now, obviously the more detail there is on a page, and the more diverse it is, the harder this attention focusing mechanism has to work. Busy pages make us work harder than clean pages. That’s why we tend to get frustrated with them. I’m not sure this tendency is universal, however. Past eye tracking work seems to suggest that at least some of our visual preferences might be cultural. In China, for example, very busy websites seems to be the norm.

So, we have our peripheral vision scanning a page for relevancy, ready to swing the spotlight of foveal attention in the right directions. What happens now?

Conditioning in a Scan Pattern

When we start scanning a website, our foraging strategy isn’t a blank slate. Because there tends to be some commonalities in how websites are built, we have built up some universal strategies we use to find the most promising content on the page. The examples below from The BuyerSphere Project show how these strategies guide us through the first few seconds of interaction with a web page:

webinteraction

These conditioned patterns allow us to mentally divide up a page for easier digestion. This has significant implications for advertising placed on the page. Ads tend to occupy real estate that is outside this conditioned navigation path. They are usually placed at the top (the much maligned banner ad) or on the right side of the page. Because placement is fairly constant, we have become conditioned to expect advertising in these spots. This makes it a sort of “no man’s land” on most websites. Ads are seldom aligned with intent. They tend to interrupt our intent. So we try to filter them out. Ads start with one strike against them. We might scan them peripherally just to see if there are any relevancy “hits” with our activated “target” neurones, but if there’s no hit, we spend little time with them. The eye tracking heat map below shows the difference in ad engagement when an ad is placed in the top banner position versus a position in the middle of content.

adplacement

Ad Relevancy

But, what if an ad is relevant? Thanks to Google and other content targeting ad networks, relevancy has been introduced into our ad targeting strategies. This has a significant impact. Enquiro worked with Google to try to quantify the impact of relevancy in a study we conducted in 2008. We gave respondents scenarios that simulated purchase intent and then showed them various websites. Some were relevant to the purchase, some weren’t. Also, some had ads that were contextually targeted and others had general ads which weren’t contextually relevant. The results, shown in the graphs below (again, from The BuyerSphere Project) were somewhat startling and counter intuitive.

Contextualads

While non-relevant ads scored higher on ad awareness (recognizing that there was an ad on the page) they scored much lower on almost every other metric. 3 times more respondents remembered the ad messages in a relevant ad and  5 times more respondents indicated that the advertised ad would make their short list of candidates. In “intent to purchase” the non-relevant ads actually performed worse than the control group (who saw no ad) and significantly worse than the relevant ad group.

How Hard Do Ads Have to Work?

In my post on the alignment of intent, I said that ads that don’t benefit from aligned intent have to work much harder to get our attention. Ads that are aligned with intent (search ads are probably the best example) can be much more subtle. This was shown in another study Enquiro conducted in 2007. We found that while more intrusive ads (i.e. video ads) did a better job at attracting our eyeballs, they didn’t do so well in convincing us to consider the advertised product. Which ad format performed the best? The lowly text ad, if it was relevant and aligned with consumer intent.

adformat

Let’s go back to our mental attention focusing apparatus and explore some of the possible reasons for this advertising dilemma: why do the ads that are best at grabbing our attention seem to be the worst at putting us in a positive frame of mind about a potential purchase (note: I have reservations about the research methodology here, which I’ll talk about at the end of this post)? Remember, we go to a webpage with a specific intent. Intrusive, interruptive ads have to pull out a bag of tricks to hijack our attention. The most effective of these play directly into the properties of peripheral vision, which acts as a type of early warning system for us. Peripheral vision evolved to keep us alive and warn us of potential danger. What signal is the most reliable predictor of potential danger? You guessed it – movement. Something moving in the corner of our eye is sure to get our attention. But it comes at an emotional cost.

The brain has a rather effective mechanism that allows us to put our tasks on hold if it believes we’re in danger. In effect, the prefrontal cortex – the thinking part of our brain – is bypassed by our danger circuits, routed directly into the amygdala and sub-cortex – the “animal” part of our brain. Movement in our field of vision gets us ready to flee or fight.

Now, you say, that’s ridiculous. Even the most annoying online ads don’t cause you to suddenly run away from your laptop. No, but there’s an element of proportionate response here. The brain also has a slightly delayed dampening circuit that assesses potential danger and shuts down the alarm if it proves to be false. In extreme cases (the oft-cited example of a garden hose mistaken for a snake in your shed) your heart stops racing, adrenaline stops pumping and your hands stop shaking. In mild cases (i.e. intrusive ads) it’s a much more subtle sense of anxiety and annoyance. The mechanism is the same, it’s the degree that differs.

Think about how annoying you find a particularly intrusive ad on a website where you’re there for a purpose other than to look at the ad in question. One of the key sins in usability is using movement in a page element which is not of primary importance in the page. The eye is continually dragged away from what it is trying to do. Yet, this is exactly what most sites do when they include rich media or video ads. Yes, the ads get our attention but in doing so, they almost always piss us off. The reason is that we resent being tricked into paying attention when our intention is to do something else.

Now, I said I did have quibbles with typical ad effectiveness metrics that we and almost everyone else uses in most effectiveness studies. The opinion we get from a respondent immediately after exposure to an ad is typically not very indicative of the longer term effectiveness of an ad. For one thing, it doesn’t capture the subliminal influence of an ad. Barring any compelling empirical evidence, it’s difficult to say what the long term effectiveness of an intrusive but annoying ad might be.

Tomorrow, I’ll pick up this topic again as we look at how our attention focusing plays out on a page of search results.

How Our Brain Scans a Webpage

eyesYesterday, I explained how our brain finds “Waldo.” To briefly recap the post:

  • We have two neural mechanisms for seeing things we might want to pay attention to: a peripheral scanning system that takes in a wide field of vision and a focused (foveal) system that allows us to drill down to details
  • We have neurons that are specialists in different areas: i.e. picking out colors, shapes and disruptions in patterns
  • We use these recruited neuronal swat teams to identify something we’re looking for in our “mind’s eye” (the visual cortex) prior to searching for it in our environment
  • These swat teams focus our attention on our intended targets by synchronizing their firing patterns (like a mental Flash Mob) which allows them to rise above the noise of the other things fighting for our attention.

Today, let’s look at the potential implications of this in our domain, specifically interactions with websites.

But First: A Word about Information Scent

I’ve talked before about Pirolli’s Information Foraging Theory (and another post from this blog). Briefly, it states that we employ the same strategies we use to find food when we’re looking for information online. That’s because, just like food, information tends to come in patches online and we have to make decisions about the promise of the patch, to determine whether we should stay there or find a new patch. There’s another study I’ve yet to share (it will be coming in a post later this week) that indicates our brain might have a built in timer that controls how much time we spend in a patch and when we decide to move on.

The important point for this post is that we have a mental image of the information we seek. We picture our “prey” in our mind before looking for it. And, if that prey can be imagined visually, this will begin to recruit our swat team of neurons to help guide us to the part of the page where we might see it. Just like we have a mental picture of Waldo (from yesterday’s post) that helps us pick him out of a crowd, we have a mental picture of whatever we’re looking for.

Pirolli talks about information scent. These are the clues on a page that the information we seek lies beyond a link or button. Now, consider what we’ve learned about how the brain chooses what we pay attention to. If a visual representation of information is relevant, it acts as a powerful presentation of information scent. The brain processes images much faster than text (which has to be translated by the brain). We would have our neuronal swat team already primed for the picture, singing in unison to draw the spotlight of our attention towards it.

Neurons Storming Your Webpage

sunscreenshotFirst, let me share some of the common behaviors we’ve seen through eye tracking on people visiting websites (in an example from The BuyerSphere Project). I’ll try to interpret what’s happening in the brain:

The heat map shows the eye activity on a mocked up home page. Remember, eye tracking only captures foveal attention, not peripheral, so we’re seeing activity after our brain has already focused the spotlight of attention. For example, notice how the big picture has almost no eye tracking “heat” on it. Most of the time, we don’t have to focus our fovea on a picture to understand what’s in it (the detail rich Waldo pictures would be the exception). Our peripheral vision is more than adequate to interpret most pictures. But consider what happens when the picture matches the target in our “mind’s eye”. The neurons draw our eye to it.

One thing to think about. Words shown in text are pictures too. I’ll be coming back to this theme a couple of times – but a word is nothing more than a picture that represents a concept. For example, the Sun logo in the upper left (1) is nothing more than a picture that our brain associates with the company Sun Microsystems. To interpret this word, the brain first has to interpret the shape of the word. That means there are neurones that recognize straight edges, others than recognize curved edges and others that look for the overall “shape” of the word. Words too can act as information targets that we picture mentally before seeing it in front of us. For example, let’s imagine that we’re a developer. The word “DEVELOPER” (2) has a shape that is recognizable to us because we’ve seen it so often. The straight strokes of the E’s and V’s, sandwiched between the curves of the D’s, O’ and P’s. As we scan the overall page, our “Developer” neurons may suddenly wake up, synchronize their firing and draw the eye here as well. “Developer” already has a prewired connection in our brains. This is true for all the words we’re most familiar with, including brands like Sun. This is why we see a lot of focused eye activity on these areas of the picture.

Intent Clustering

In the last part of today’s post, I want to talk about a concept I spent some time on in the BuyerSphere Project: Intent Clustering. I’ve always know this makes sense from an Information Scent perspective, but now I know why from a neural perspective as well.

Intent clustering is creating groups of relevant information cues in the same area of the page. For example, for a product category on an e-commerce page, an intent cluster would include a picture of the product, a headline with the product category name, short bullet points with salient features and brands and perhaps relevant logos. An Intent cluster immediately says to the visitor that this is the right path to take to find out more about a certain topic or subject. The page shown has two intent clusters that were aligned with the task we gave, one in the upper right sidebar (3) and one in the lower left hand corner (4). Again, we see heat around both these areas.

Why are intent clusters “eye candy” for visitors? It’s because we’ve stacked the odds for these clusters to be noticed peripherally in our favor. We’ve included pictures, brands, familiar words and hints of rich information scent in well chosen bullet points. This combination is almost guaranteed to set our neural swat teams singing in harmony. Once scanned in peripheral vision, the conductor (the FEF I talked about in yesterday’s post) of our brain swings our attention spotlight towards the cluster for more engaged consumption, generating the heat we see in the above heatmap.

Tomorrow, I’ll be looking at how these mechanisms can impact our engagement with online display ads.

How Our Brain Finds Waldo

At Enquiro, we did some interesting work in 2009 with visual attention and engagement with ads. We found, for example, that attention significantly impacts how we see ads and retain the messages shown within them. We also found that brands can play a vital role in this process. Over the Christmas holiday, I found a number of neurological studies that start to shed some light on how we might visually process information on websites and the role advertising might play. This week, I’ll be breaking them into individual elements and exploring them a little more fully, showing the practical applications for advertisers and web designers. Much of this was also covered in my book, The BuyerSphere Project.

Today, let’s spend some time finding Waldo

The “Where’s Waldo” Neuronal Choir

whereswaldoHow much mileage can you get from creating exercises in visual attention. Well, if you’re Martin Hanford, the answer is: a lot! Hanford created the phenomenally popular “Where’s Waldo?” set of books. At last count, Hanford’s playful take on visual attention had produced a couple dozen books, video games, an animated series and even a potential movie deal. And it all comes down to the same basic premise: how long does it take us to find one distinct element in a visually busy environment? How do our eyes pick Waldo out of a visually dense picture, packed with details and optical red herrings?

That was the question researcher Robert Desimone, director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the Doris and Don Berkey Professor of Neuroscience at MIT decided to tackle. Specifically, he wanted to explore two differing schools of thought:

Do we move our attention around the page like a spotlight, physically scanning the environment inch by inch looking for Waldo, the intended target of our attention; or,

Do we scan the image as a whole, looking for clues in the overall pattern about where Waldo might be?

The answer appears to be both. And the reason both systems are active come from our evolutionary past. We need to focus attention on the task at hand, but we also need to scan the environment for signals of something that might suddenly need our attention. And the way the brain does this is fascinating. It does it by literally creating a choir of neurons, all firing in a synchronized pattern. It seems to be this synchronization that represents the focusing of attention.

Picking Waldo Out of the Crowd

Let’s go back to Waldo. Neurons tend to have specialized functions. We have neurons that are better at picking out colors, neurons that a better a picking out the edges of shapes and other neurons that pick out patterns. In the case of Waldo, before we ever start scanning the page, we recruit the neurons that are best suited to recognized the distinct image of Waldo. For example, because Waldo is dressed in red, we recruit the red neurons. We create a picture of Waldo in our “mind’s eye.”

So, we have our handpicked neuronal “swat team” ready to intercept Waldo. But, how do we actually find Waldo? This is where the two mechanisms of the brain work in unison. In eye tracking, you soon learn the difference between foveal attention and peripheral attention. Foveal attention is where the brain focuses our eyes, allowing us to pick up fine detail. When we read, for example, we use foveal focus to pick up the shape of the letters and interpret them. Eye tracking only picks up foveal attention. This represents the “spotlight” function of attention.

But the brain has to tell the eyes where to move next. And to do this, it relies on peripheral attention. This is what we see out of the “corner of our eye”. Peripheral attention allows us to scan a much broader field of vision to determine if there are elements in it that merit the refocusing of foveal attention. Peripheral vision is particularly tuned to movements and coarser visual cues. This has significant impact on the effectiveness of advertising, which I’ll talk about in a future post. For today, it’s sufficient to understand that peripheral vision allows us to scan our environment in a repeating “quick and dirty” pattern.

Now, our neuronal swat team has identified the target pattern for us. This image has been implanted in our prefrontal cortex as a “top down” imperative, a directive to our visual cortex. And, through peripheral vision, we’re scanning the entire picture to find possible matches. To help separate the most promising areas of the picture from the background noise of the other detail, it appears that an area of the prefrontal cortex, the FEF, orchestrates our hand picked neurons to synchronize their firing. This synchrony helps the signals from this group of neurons stand out from the noise of the rest. It works just like the the synchronized dancing in these examples of flash mobs –  the Sound of Music in an Antwerp train station, a Glee medley in a Roman piazza and the Black Eyed Peas surprising Oprah.

Sound of Music | Central Station Antwerp (Belgium)
GLEE – Il FlashMob
Black Eyed Peas – I got a feeling on Oprah Chicago Flashmob

Just like the dancers in these Flash Mobs- the synchronization helps our “Waldo” neurons stand out from the crowd, raising above the noise. As we scan the image through the periphery of our visual focus, the FEF orchestrates the neural synchrony of our group of “Waldo” neurons, drawing the spotlight of foveal attention to the parts of the picture most likely to contain Waldo. There, we switch to a more detailed scanning to determine if Waldo is indeed present.

Tomorrow, we’ll use the same basic theory to talk about what happens when we first visit a website.

If you want to find out more about Dr Desimone’s work, read these two articles:

Long-Distance Brain Waves Focus Attention

Research Explains How The Brain Finds Waldo

Who Says Subliminal Advertising Doesn’t Work

This will be a short post today because I rambled on longer than intended with yesterday’s post about Dr. Robert Heath and how we process advertising. Today I wanted to share an amazing example of how subliminal suggestion can work.

Popular UK mentalist Derren Brown games two UK ad agency types (who doesn’t love screwing with these agency wanks) by turning the tables on them through the power of subconscious priming. It’s from a popular TV show, so you have to take it with a grain of salt, but even allowing for some manipulative editing, the clip is startling.

My plan was to analyze the reasons why this worked after you had a chance to watch the clip, but to be quite honest, Steve Genco over at Intuitive Consumer Insights does such a good job of this, I’d only be repeating him. So, you might as well go right to the source. I highly recommend reading Steve’s analysis after you have a chance to watch the clip.

Marketers: Shift Your Paradigms

First published December 3, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I think I know what I want to do with the rest of my life. I want to shift paradigms.

Now that I’m older and arguably wiser, people sometimes ask me for that “one piece of advice.” Usually, it involves stepping into someone else’s perspective and seeing things from their viewpoint. With each year that passes, I find myself doing that more and more, leading me to dole out that piece of advice more frequently.

You see, there is no truth or ultimate reality. There is only our perception of it. We have a lens we see the world through.  And everyone else has his or her own lens.  Paradigm shifts happen when we suddenly see reality through another lens, and the best way I’ve found to do that is to try to understand what another person’s view of reality looks like.

In one of his books, Stephen Covey tells a story of a ride home in a New York subway. In the same car was a father with his two children. The children were running wild through the car, jumping on seats, jostling other passengers and fighting with each other. The father sat oblivious to the actions of his children, staring straight into space.

Suddenly, Covey could take it no longer. Someone had to rein these children in and the father didn’t seem to be doing anything. The reality through Covey’s lens was that the father’s obvious lack of parental discipline had resulted in two rude, ill-mannered children. Finally, he could take it no longer. He moved over to the father and said, “Your children seem a little rambunctious.” The father looked at the children, then, turned to Covey, “I guess they are. I’m sorry. We just came from the hospital. Their mother passed away this morning.”  Needless to say, Covey’s paradigm shifted in an instant.

The Paradigm of the Marketer

Most of the problems I see in marketing result from the fact that marketers see the world one way and their prospects see the world another way.  We have two different paradigms. And marketers have a difficult time putting their lens away long enough to try the view through their prospect’s lens.

About a year ago, at the Search Insider Summit (I’m actually at it again as I write this) I saw this clearly in a session on mobile advertising strategies. From the audience, which was made up entirely of marketers, there was frustration that the carriers wouldn’t allow targeting of mobile users through their account information. “You have all the information, why don’t you allow us to use it to target our messages?” was the cry from more than one frustrated marketer. I asked for a show of hands of all who thought, as marketers, that this would be a good move on the part of the mobile providers. Every hand shot up.

“Okay, as mobile users, who still wants to have ads targeted to you by your personal information.” Several hands suddenly wavered, hit by the force of shifting paradigms. Many went down. Others dipped noticeably as their owners realized their own hypocrisy. Suddenly, they were seeing the world as a customer, not as a marketer.

Analyzing campaign data and crunching numbers is not the way to shift a paradigm. Our personal lenses are stubborn things. It’s very difficult to swap them for another.  The best way carries the fancy title “ethnography” but it simply means “writing about people”. Ethnography, a branch of anthropology, seeks to understand people by observing them “where they live”, in the full context of their lives. In this setting, one gets further removed from your reality and more embedded in theirs, making paradigm shifts easier. I don’t think we, as marketers, spend enough time in the lives of our customers. And unfortunately, the Internet and the flood of data available is only making the problem worse.

The Survey Says…

Here’s my last analogy. I’m a huge “West Wing fan,” and I recently watched an episode from season two where President Bartlet’s staff was polling five red states on their attitudes towards gun control.  Not surprisingly, the percentage approving came up short of expectations. Josh Lyman, a White House staffer, was disappointed and frustrated.  “That’s it!” he said, “We have to dial down our gun control rhetoric.”

The pollster, played by Marlee Matlin, responded, “I think you have to dial it up.”

“That’s not what the data says,” Josh said.

“How do you know what the data says?” said the pollster. “The data says whatever you want it to. It depends on how you ask the question, what they had for breakfast and whether a gun control lobbyist pissed them off yesterday.”

Data tends to reinforce paradigms, not shift them. It’s the understanding that comes from personal contact that shifts paradigm. It’s sitting beside an apparently delinquent father and learning that he just lost his spouse.

Could Intel Hardwire Your Brain for Google?

Last week, Roger Dooley had an interesting post on his Neuromarketing Blog (great blog, by the way) about Intel’s efforts to implant a computer chip directly into our brains, essentially allowing us to interface directly with computers. Roger ponders whether this will, in fact, become a wired “buy button”. I wonder, instead, if this is the ultimate Google search appliance? The idea was floated, somewhat facetiously, by Eric Schmidt, in an interview with Michael Arrington on Tech Crunch this year:

Now, Sergey argues that the correct thing to do is to just connect it straight to your brain. In other words, you know, wire it into your head. And so we joke about this and said, we have not quite figured out what that problem looks like…But that would solve the problem. In other words, if we just – if you had the thought and we knew what you meant, we could run it and we could run it in parallel.

The Singularity and Hardwired Brains

Okay, this crosses all kinds of boundaries of “creepy”, but if we stop to seriously consider this, it’s not as outlandish as it seems. Ray Kurzweil has been predicting just this for over two decades now..the merging of computing power and human thought, an event he calls the Singularity. Kurzweil even set the date: 2045 (by the way, the target date for the Intel implant is 2020, giving us 25 years to “get it right” after the first implant). Kurzweil’s predictions seem somehow apocalyptic, or, at the least, scary, but his logic is compelling. Computers can, even today, do some types of mental tasks far faster and more efficiently than the human brain. The brain excels at computations that tie into the intuition and experience of our lives – the softer, less rational types of mental activity. It the brain was simply a huge data cruncher, computers would already be kicking our butts. But there are leaps of insight and intuition that we regularly take as humans that have never been replicated in a digital circuit yet. Kurzweil predicts that, with the exponential increase of computing power, it will only be a matter of time until computers match and exceed the capabilities of human intuition.

Google’s Brain Wave

But Intel’s efforts bring up another possibility, the one posited by Google’s Sergey Brin – what if a chip can connect our human needs, intuitions and hunches with the data and processing power available through the grid of the Internet? What if we don’t have to go through the messy and wasteful effort of formulating all those neuronal flashes into language that then can be typed into a query box because there’s a direct pipeline that takes our thoughts and ports them directly to Google? What if the universe of data was “always on”, plugged directly into our brains? Now, that’s a fascinating, if somewhat scary, concept to contemplate.

Let’s explore this a little further. John Battelle, in a series of posts some time ago, asked why conversations were so much more helpful than web searching.  Battelle said that it’s because conversations are simply a much bigger communication pipeline and that’s essential if we’re talking about complex decisions.

What is it about a conversation? Why can we, in 30 minutes or less, boil down what otherwise might be a multi-day quest into an answer that addresses nearly all our concerns? And what might that process teach us about what the Web lacks today and might bring us tomorrow?

Well the answer is at once simple and maddeningly complex. Our ability to communicate using language is the result of millions of years of physical and cultural evolution, capped off by 15-25 years of personal childhood and early adult experience. But it comes so naturally, we forget how extraordinary this simple act really is.

Talking (or Better Yet – Thinking) to a Search Engine

As Battelle said, conversations are a deceptively rich communication medium. And it’s because they evolve on both sides to allow the conversant to quickly veer and refine the dialogue to keep up with our own mental processes. Conversations come closer to keeping up with our brains. And, if those conversations are held face-to-face, not only do we have our highly evolved language abilities, we also have the full power of body language. Harvard professors Nitin Nohria and Robert Eccles said in their book Networks and Organizations: Structure, Form and Action:

In contrast to interactions that are largely sequential, face-to-face interaction makes it possible for two people to be sending nod delivering messages simultaneously. The cycle of interruption, feed-back and repair possible in face-to-face interaction is so quick that it is virtually instantaneous. As (sociologist Erving) Goffman notes, “a speaker can see how others are responding to her message even before it is done and alter it midstream to elicit a different response’.”

The idea of a conversation as a digital assistance medium is interesting. It allows us to shape our queries and speak more intuitively and less literally. It allows us to interface and communicate the way we were intended to. In his post, Battelle despaired of an engine ever being this smart and suggested instead that the engine act as a matchmaker with a knowledgeable human on the other site, the Wikia/Mahalo approach. I can’t see this as a viable solution, because it lacks the scale necessary.

This is not about finding one piece of information, like a phone number or an address, but helping us through buying a house or a car. Search still fall far short here, something I touched on in my last Just Behave column on Search Engine Land. In those situations, we need more than a tool that relies on us feeding it a few words at a time and then doing its best to guess what we need. We need something similar to a conversation, in a form that can instantly scale to meet demand. Google, for all it’s limitations in a complex scenario, still has build the expectation of getting information just in time. And the bottle neck in these complex situations is the language interface and the communication process. Even if we’re talking to another person, with all the richness of communication that brings, we still have to transfer the ideas that sit in our head to their head.

So, back to Intel’s brain chip. What if our thoughts, in their entirety, could instantly be communicated to Google, or Bing, or what ever flavor of search assistant you want to imagine? What if refining all the  information that was presented was a split second closing of a synapse, rather than a laborious application of filters that sit on the interface?  Faster and far more efficiently than talking to another human, we could quickly sift through all the information and functionality available to mankind to tailor it specifically to what we needed at that time. That starts to boggle the imagination. But, is it feasible?

I believe so. Look again at the brain activity charts generated by the UCLA – Irvine research team that tracked people using a Google like web search interface, particularly the image in the lower right.

googlebrains

Let’s dig a little deeper into what is actually happening in the brain when we Google something. The image below is from the Internet Savvy group in the UC study (sorry about the fuzziness).

Brainactivity

The front section of the brain (A) shows the engagement of the frontal lobes, indicating decision making and reasoning. This is where we render judgment and make decisions in a rational, conscious way. The section along the left side of the brain (B) is our language centers, where we translate thought to words and vice versa. The structures in the centre part of the brain, hidden beneath the cortex are the sub-cortical structures (C), the autopilot of the brain, including the basal ganglia, hippocampus and hypothalamus. I touched on how these structures dictate what much of our online activity looks like in a post last week. Finally, the area right at the back of the brain indicates activation of the visual cortex, used both to translate input from our eyes and also to visualize something “in our mind’s eye”.  As shown by the strong activation of the language center, much of the heavy lifting of our brains when we’re Googling involves translation of thoughts to words.

Knowing that these are the parts of the brain activated, would it be possible to provide some neural short cuts? From example, what if you could take memories being drawn forward (activating both the hippocampus and the frontal lobes) and translate this directly into directives to retrieve information, without trying to translate into words? This “brain on Google” approach could be efficient at a degree several magnitudes greater than anything we can imagine currently.

By the way, this interface can work both ways. Not only could it feed our thoughts to the online grid. It can also take the results and information and receives and pipe it directly to the relevant parts of our brains. Images could be rendered instantly in our visual cortex, sounds in our audio cortex, facts and figures could pass directly to the prefrontal cortex. Call it the Matrix, call it virtual reality, call it what you want. The fact is, somewhere in an Intel research lab, they’re already working on it!

Aligned Intent: A Different Ad Engagement Metric

On Tuesday, I talked about the importance of information foraging in understanding our online behaviors. Yesterday, I talked about how we navigate online based on habit and instinct, keeping our thinking to a minimum. Both of those behaviors are threatening  traditional ad revenue models. The very nature of engagement with advertising is undergoing a dramatic shift. Today, I want to talk more about that shift, because at Enquiro, we’ve seen dramatic evidence of it in our research over the past few years.

The Traditional Model

Let’s begin by exploring how advertising has worked up to now – the model that Rupert Murdoch is still pinning all his hopes on.

In the past, we used a “destination” based information gathering strategy. We depended on someone to gather the information and get it to us at a destination that would become a mental landmark for us. This was the model that gave rise to our traditional news industry. We trusted our favored sources to cover the world for us. It was their job to stay on top of what was happening, interpret it and present it back to us. Publishers developed editorial voices and we grew to trust those voices. We didn’t have time to cover every possible news channel, so we short listed it down to the information sources that best matched our interests and personality. We picked our favourites and trusted these few sources to keep us informed. These favorites formed the most visited locations in our mental information “landscape”.

Once we had our list of a handful of information sources, we would set some time aside every day to stay informed. It was a different paradigm of information gathering. We treated our sources as destinations and made the trip worthwhile by investing some time in it. We’re read the paper in the morning. We’d watch the news at night. We’d listen to news radio. In each of these cases, we’d take a discrete and substantial chunk of our available time and devote it to “staying informed”. There was no specific piece of information we were looking for. We trusted our information sources to serve us something interesting. Our intent wasn’t tied to any particular topic, although there might be sections that we favored (sports or business). Our intent was simply to spend some time with our favorite information source. Just like a trip to a physical destination, we understood that this journey would take some time.

This relationship, that of a favored source, then offered the published a willing set of eyeballs without any set agenda. The audience was there to browse through the content offered. That was the objective. And that objective allowed publishers, and through them, advertisers, to make some safe assumptions: the audience would be there for awhile, the audience had no other urgent priorities, and the audience could be safely categorized by the characteristics of the ideal audience of the channel. One could assume that the reason they favoured the channel was that they matched the target profile. All of this formed the foundation of traditional advertising as we know it.

The publishers job was to amass the audience. By doing so, they could then go to advertisers and deliver the audience. And it was the advertiser’s job to catch the audience’s attention. Again, remember, the audience had already set a significant chunk of time aside to spend with the publisher and the audience had no specific intent other than visiting their information “destination.” This mindset is critical to understand, because it forms the “before” state of the shift I’ll be exploring. The audience had to be distracted by the advertising, but the distraction was a minor derailing of our attention. Let’s dive a little deeper here.

Yesterday, I talked about the switching on and off our our neural autopilots as we do any mental task. Our attention and the full power of our brains only get focused when we need to. The rest of the time, we’re subconsciously scanning to see if there’s anything that merits our attention. The arousal of intent, the mental embedding of a clear objective, kicks the brain into high gear and causes us to focus our attention, including the full power of the frontal lobes – what we can consider the turbocharger of the brain. With those mental mechanics understood, let’s look at how we might browse a newspaper.

Newspapers, or any traditional information source, look the way they do because over years of trial and error, publishers and advertisers have discovered what it takes to catch a few fleeting seconds of a brain’s attention while it’s idling on autopilot. As we pick up the paper, there is no intent which has aroused the full power of the brain. It’s doing what it should be doing, idling as the eyes scan the headlines, graphics and other information cues, looking for something of interest that merits the brain kicking into a higher degree of engagement. What catches our eye depends totally on what we’re interested in. With no set mental agenda, when we look at a newspaper, a story on major crime, a business report on a company we know, a box score for a team we’re a fan of or an ad for a car we’ve been considering all stand a good chance of dragging our eye balls to them and jolting our brain from it’s semi-slumber. The typical display ad (at least, the effective ones) have been honed by years of experimentation to be very good at this. Their entire purpose is to stop the eyeball just long enough for a fragment of the message to sink into the brain.

The Just In Time Information Economy

Now, let’s look at what’s shifted. Through the ubiquity of information online and the reasonable effectiveness of web search in making that information instantly available, we’ve changed the way we gather information. We’ve moved from a “destination” to a “just in time” information economy. Let me return to our food foraging analogy for just a second to illustrate this.

When you shop for groceries, you probably have a favoured store. You trust this store because they have a good selection, the produce is fresh, the deli counter has your favourite cheese, the prices are reasonable, the location is convenient and the staff is courteous. This store becomes your primary food destination, just as a newspaper could become your primary information destination. For certain items, prices may be a little cheaper elsewhere, the produce might be a little better at an organic whole food store and the deli counter may be amazing at a little store you know across town, but it’s just too much trouble to go to all these destinations. You compromise and stick with your store, giving it your loyalty.

But let’s imagine that you could build a pick up window right into your kitchen. Through this pick up window, you could order any food item and it would instantly be delivered to you from any store in the world, right when you need it. No travel was necessary. The idea of a destination suddenly becomes obsolete. Food comes to you, just in time. What would this do to your foraging strategies? How often would you visit your favourite store? Perhaps there would be occasions when an item from your store was offered by your magic “food window”, and you might order it. You might even feel twinges of old loyalties. But the nature of the relationship has forever changed. You’ve become store “agnostic”. Now all you care about are the food items you order. And your intent has also changed. Previously, you went on a “shopping trip” for an hour to a store to pick up a list full of items. Your intent was focused on the store, not an individual item. But with your magic window, if you’re making a recipe and suddenly find you’re out of shallots, your intent is focused on the item you need, not the store you get it from. All you care about is getting the best shallots at the best price. It’s an important mental shift.

That’s what search has done for information. We care much less about the source of the information and more about the nature of the information itself. Also, we have shifted our intent away from the source of the information and to the quality and relevancy of the information itself. This has a profound effect on the nature of engagement with advertising that may sit alongside that information.

The Alignment of Intent

The Just in Time Information Economy has implanted intent in the minds of online users now, dramatically raising the attention threshold that must be bridged by advertising. Think of our mental process as a train. If the train is idling through a rail yard with no particular destination, it’s not that difficult for a hitchhiker (which is what most advertising is, messages interrupting you just long enough to hop on your brain for the ride) to jump on board. But if the train is going full speed towards a destination, the hitchhiker had better be a very fast runner. The Just In Time information economy has meant that many more visitors to online information sites are speeding express trains with a firm destination in mind, rather than than idling in a rail yard. We visit sites because we’ve come through a search engine looking for specific information. The site that hosts that information is secondary to our intent.

In the past few years we’ve done a number of studies of engagement with advertising that have yielded some surprising findings:

  • When it comes to ad awareness (participants remembering seeing an ad on a site) display and video perform best, search and text ads perform worst.
  • When it comes to brand recall (participants remembering the brand featured in the ad) display and video still perform better than search and text, although the gap is dramatically less.
  • When it comes to click throughs, search performs best, followed by text, display and video
  • When it comes to purchase intent, search and text are substantially better than display and video.

Ads that are relevant to the information they sit beside (as in Google’s AdSense network) also have this strange inverse relationship:

  • For ad awareness, non contextually relevant ads performed better than contextually relevant ones
  • For brand recall, it was close to even, with contextually relevant ads having a slight edge
  • For click throughs, contextually relevant ads blew the doors off non contextually relevant ones
  • For purchase intent, again, contextually relevant ads were the clear winner.

Why Ad Awareness Does Not Equal Ad Effectiveness

This is counter intuitive. If an ad is noticed and recognized as an ad, it should have done it’s job, right? According to the old rules, that’s all we ever asked an ad to do. But somehow it seems the rules have changed. Suddenly, ads that often don’t even seem like ads (after all, they’re just a few lines of text) are drastically outperforming more traditional ads where it counts, motivating a prospect to take action. We’ve tested a number of traditional best practices, including more effective creative, increased exposure both through frequency and more channels and this inverse relationship held: search and text outperformed flashing graphics, blaring video and looping audio. What gives?

The answer is the introduction of intent. By having intent planted in the minds of the prospect, by focusing their attention on an objective, the rules of interaction with ads has suddenly changed. When we have intent, we plant a mental objective which narrows our attention and focuses it only on relevant items that get us closer to the objective. Anything not aligned with that intent suffers from “inattentional blindness”. In eye tracking, we see this often has people scan a page, looking directly at an ad for several seconds yet afterwards swear they didn’t see the ad. The most famous example is the video “Gorillas in our Midst.” The unsuspecting are asked to count the number of times the basketball is passed in the video. Once attention is focused, most viewers don’t even notice the man in the gorilla suit walking right through the middle of the teams. If you haven’t seen this, I just spoiled it for you, but you can still try the experiment with your friends.

If a visitor lands on a page with a specific intent, their interactions look much different than those with no intent. They’re laser focused on relevant content. They spend almost no time looking at content that’s not aligned with their intent, including ads. Often, a single glance to identify it as advertising (thus the high ad awareness recall) is the limit of interaction. And the more an ad looks like an ad, the quicker it’s eliminated for consideration. The visitor becomes blind to it.

But if an ad is aligned with intent, it ceases to be an ad. It becomes a relevant information cue, a navigation option, a link laced with information scent. It becomes valuable because it matches our objectives. The user evaluates it along with all the other relevant navigation options on the page. This is exactly what happens with search ads, and the more relevant a text ad on the page, the more likely this is to happen.

Why This Does Not Bode Well for Rupert Murdoch

Murdoch, and for that matter, everyone else who still depends on a revenue from a “Destination” based ad model, will lose in this transition. The ones that will win are those that effectively leverage the alignment of intent and the “Just in Time” Information economy. Tomorrow, I’ll walk through the specifics of why the “Destination” ad model is doomed.

Mindless Online Behavior: Web Navigation on Autopilot

One of the biggest problems with Rupert Murdoch’s view of the world is that he’s assuming people are making conscious decisions about where they go to get their news and information. He somehow believes that people are consciously deciding to get their information from Google rather than one of his properties, and Google is encouraging this behavior by indexing content and providing free “back doors” into the WSJ and other sites. In other words, Murdoch has a conspiracy theory, and Google and online users are co-conspirators. The truth isn’t quite so evil or intentional.

Our Stomach’s Autopilot

I talked yesterday about the importance of information foraging and how we use the same strategies we use to find food to find online information. But tell me, how conscious are your decisions about where and what to eat? How long do you deliberate over eating a piece of toast in the morning, a sandwich at lunch or a plate of pasta at night? If you’re hungry, how often do you find yourself standing in front of the fridge, staring inside for a quick snack? It wasn’t as if you had a detailed series of decisions here: Hmmm..I’m hungry. Where would be the best place in the house to find food? The bathroom? No, that didn’t work. How about the bedroom? No, no food there. Hey, this kitchen place seems to be promising! Now..where in the kitchen might there be food? In this cupboard? No, that’s dishes. Down under the sink? Ooops..no, I don’t know what the hell’s under there, but it’s definitely not food. Hey..what’s in this big steel box here? Ah…Bingo!

Okay..it’s a ridiculous scenario, but that’s my point. It only seems ridiculous because we’ve found a more efficient way of doing it. We don’t have to go through these decisions every time because we’ve done it before and we know where to find food. Even if we went into someone else’s house, we would know that the kitchen is the best place to find food, and the fridge is probably the surest bet in the kitchen. We don’t have to think, because we’ve done the thinking before and know we can navigate by habit and instinct.

Where Do You Keep the Cockatoo Chichild Fillets?

But what if you visited the Jivaro tribe of South America, where the culture is so different that we have no cognitive short cuts to follow? Much of the food they eat we’ve never even seen before. And, as one of the most primitive cultures in the world, there are not a lot of kitchens or fridges to act as hints about where we might find something to eat. If we were suddenly dropped into the middle of a Jivaro settlement with no guide, we would have to do a lot of thinking about what to eat and where to find it. And how would we feel about that? Anxious? Frustrated? Uncertain? We don’t like it when we have to think. We much prefer relying on past experience and habits. The brain heavily discourages thought if there’s a more efficient short cut. It’s the brain’s way of saving fuel, because mobilizing our prefrontal cortex, the “reasoning” part of our brain, comes with a big efficiency hit. The PFC is powerful in a “single minded” way, but it’s also an energy hog. The way the brain discourages unnecessary thought is through stimulating unpleasant emotions. If you’ve spent much time in foreign cultures, you know the constant stress of finding something to eat can quickly go from being exciting to being a complete pain.

Here’s the other thing about our brain, it isn’t discriminating about when to kick in and when not to kick in. It usually takes the path of least resistance first, relying on past experience rather than thinking. The more familiar the environment, the more the brain feels safe in relying on past experience and habit. What does this mean? Well, when you’re hungry, it will mean you suddenly find yourself standing in front of the fridge with the door open without even knowing what you’re looking for. When you realize you actually want some crackers (i.e. when your brain finally kicks in), you swing the door shut and go to where the crackers are kept. Online, it means you go to Google and launch a search without thinking through what your actual destination might be.

Google, The Information “Fridge”?

So, I’ve gone fairly far down the path of this analogy to make a point. According to Pirolli, we use exactly the same mechanisms to find online information. We go first to the fridge, or, in this case, Google, because nine times out of ten, or even 99 times out of a hundred, we find what we’re looking for there. And, if we don’t, we start to get frustrated because our brain is suddenly called into service and it isn’t at all happy about it. There’s no conscious conspiracy to screw Rupert Murdoch, there’s just us following our own mental grooves. And these grooves dictate a huge percentage of our online activity. There’s been little neuro-scanning research done on how our brains work during online activity, but the little that’s been done seems to indicate a regular shifting of activity from the “reasoning” to the “autopilot” sections of the brain. I suspect strongly that this is especially true when we use search engines. If we can navigate on autopilot, we will.

This principle holds true for almost all online interaction. I keep hearing about the “joy” of discovery online. I believe that’s largely crap. As online becomes a bigger part of our lives, we depend on it to do more and more and we don’t have the time for “discovery”. We don’t have the time to set aside 2 hours to browse through WSJ.com, meandering through the content and providing a willing set of eyeballs for all those ads. We want to find what we’re looking for, get in and get out. There are occasions when we’re willing to invest the time for a long voyage of discovery, just as there are times when we will go out and graze our way through a smorgasbord buffet, but it’s not the norm. As I said in the last post, Google and search has given us a “just in time” information economy and we have forever shifted our concept of information retrieval. How the providers of the information make money from that remains to be figured out, something I’ll spend some more time talking about tomorrow.

The Primacy of the Patch: Information Foraging is the Key to Behavior

As I said, this week I want to dissect some aspects of human behavior to show why Rupert Murdoch is seriously out of touch and how Bing can’t corner the news market.

The primary reason is that we’re changing how we get information. The implications of this are fascinating, because the implications will soon spread through all marketplaces and aspects of our society. And it comes down to one important factor to consider: Humans are inherently lazy.

Laziness is a Good Thing

Now, before you get all morally indignant on me, let me explain: humans are lazy in the evolutionary sense, the same way that Richard Dawkin’s genes are selfish. We’re lazy because it’s a natural advantage, it’s built into our genome. To be more accurate, we’re lazy when the expenditure of more energy doesn’t make sense. We’re lazy in a subtle, subconscious way. And, like all aspects of human behavior, we’re not all equally lazy. There’s a bell curve of laziness. Laziness has gotten a bad rap in our puritanical, WASPish culture, but the fact is, when it comes to survival, laziness is often the optimal strategy.

Look at it a different way. Say you need to drive from Detroit to Chicago. The only goal is to get to Chicago and pay as little for gas as possible on the way. What vehicle are you going to take – a Hummer or a Prius? The Prius is a no brainer. In terms of fuel efficiency, the Prius is a lazy car. It does what it has to do more efficiently than a Hummer. In a vehicle, this is a virtue, but somewhere in our twisted culture, it’s become a bad thing for humans.

Fat And Lazy? Maybe Not …

Calories are a human’s gas tank. We’ve been genetically hardwired to be very fuel efficient. In fact, we’ve developed very sophisticated subconscious mechanisms to ingest as many calories as possible without expending calories to find them. This worked well when we lived on the African savanna and the only food source was the odd Baobab tree. It doesn’t work so well when there’s a McDonald’s around every corner. It’s not a cruel joke what we’re attracted to high fat, high sugar foods. These provide lots of calories in one sitting. That’s why our society is fat (fat and lazy – how’s that self esteem so far?)

So, what the hell does this all have to do with search? Well, when humans are faced with new challenges, we’re stuck using the tools that evolution has endowed us with. We borrow from other abilities. The technical term for this is exaption. When digital information came along, we had to look into our evolutionary toolkit and find something that would work.

Foraging for Information

At Xerox’s PARC in the late 90’s, Peter Pirolli was exploring how humans navigated hypertext linked information environments. The invention of hyperlinking introduced a new challenge in information retrieval. Throughout history, information was structured into an imposed taxonomy or hierarchy. We sorted it alphabetically or by the Dewey decimal system. And, because information was static, it stayed within the boundaries we built for it. But the creation of the hyperlink meant that information suddenly became unstructured and organic. Topical links from source to source meant that imposed editorial restrictions no longer worked. Links kept leaping above the boundaries we tried to impose on information.

Given this new challenge, Pirolli wanted to explore the subconscious strategies we used to navigate this unstructured information environment. He wanted to reduce it to a predictable algorithm. Time after time, he was frustrated. Humans would start down a predictable path, only to suddenly take an expected turn. The patterns didn’t seem logical. But, as chance would have it, he had recently read some work on biological foraging patterns and decided to overlay that on the behaviors he was observing. It was Pirolli’s “A Ha” moment. Suddenly, the patterns made sense. Humans, Pirolli (along with Stuart Card and others) discovered, foraged for information. We used the same strategies to navigate the web that we use to look for food. And, just as is the case with calories, laziness (or efficiency) is a pretty good strategy for finding information.

In information foraging, there is one overriding concern: take the most efficient path possible to the information you seek. I won’t get too far into the mechanics of how we do that except to say this – it’s not a conscious calculation. We’re constantly scanning the environment to see if a richer information “patch” is on the horizon. Information foraging is fundamentally important to understand if you’re to understand human behavior online. Jakob Nielsen called it “the most important concept to emerge from Human-Computer Interaction research since 1993.”

So, let’s look at how this applies to the Murdoch-Bing scenario. For almost 20 years now, we’ve been retrieving information online, using our foraging strategies. In that time, we’ve become conditioned to go to the most efficient sources of information…the places where we get the biggest information “bang” for our buck – and in this case, our investment is our time. As I’ve said before, this is a conditioned behavior. We don’t consciously think our way through this. Our subconscious efficiency circuits kick in and we do this by habit. To think of how powerful these subconscious loops are, just think about how hard it is to walk past a cookie lying on the counter. It’s not that you’re a bad person if you pick it up. It’s not that you’re stupid, eating it even though you know it’s not good for you. It’s those inherent human behaviors taking over. It’s powerful stuff!

So, for well over a decade, we’ve discovered that the shortest line between our need for information and the right online destination is a search engine. If there was a more efficient retrieval mechanism, we’d use it. This isn’t about brand, or loyalty. It’s just walking past the kitchen counter and seeing a cookie there. We’ll do it without thinking.

Murdoch’s strategy is flawed because he doesn’t realize that we now seek information differently. In the past, we picked the editorial channel that best met our needs. The Wall Street Journal may have been one of our favored patches, because we agreed with it’s “editorial voice”, it met a sufficient number of our information needs and we felt the investment of our time was warranted by the information we retrieved. in return for that, we started to build up loyalty to the brand, giving the publishers the right to sell advertising against that loyalty.

But the hyperlink and the internet didn’t just make information patchy, it also created a “just in time” need for information. 30 years ago, we didn’t suddenly develop the need to know who the director of “Booty Call” was because there was no easy way to retrieve the information. It wasn’t worth the investment. But Google made instant retrieval of information possible. It dramatically improved the efficiency of information retrieval. We started Googling everything because we could, without wasting huge amounts of time.

It’s this paradigm shift in information consumption that Murdoch is completely missing. Yesterday in Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan did a good job showing how the social web and the indexing of content makes any attempt to wall it off to preserve a revenue model futile. The one thing I disagree with Danny on is his assertion that a mutually exclusive Murdoch/Google relationship won’t hurt Google or Murdoch:

So what happens if the WSJ is out of Google? Nothing. Seriously, nothing. Remember, for years the WSJ was NOT in Google, and yet Google grew just fine. Also, the WSJ seems to have been fine. Neither is crucial to each other.

What we have here is a significant shift in human behavior, and right now we’re in the transition period. Google and other engines have dramatically changed the game of information retrieval and that means a huge upheaval in the industry. Society is moving en mass from one behavior, which publishers had build a revenue model around, to another behavior, which still hasn’t been fully monetized (Google has only monetized one small slice of it). To say that both will do fine is ignoring the lessons of history. These massive behavioral shifts are ALWAYS a zero sum game..somebody wins and somebody loses. Guess who will lose? Hint, it won’t be Google.

So, what about Bing? If my theory is correct, will Bing become the new favored patch by signing with Murdoch? I doubt it. There’s just not enough critical mass there to disrupt conditioned behaviors. The “just in time” information economy has eroded our brand affinity for favored patches. We’ve become more publisher agnostic. Again, this isn’t universally true. We still appreciate “editorial voice” for some types of information and may seek out one specific publisher, but our new promiscuity means an erosion of page views and traffic, which is killing the traditional publishing revenue model. But, more about this in tomorrow and Thursday’s  post.

The Usability Acid Test

I slagged eMarketer last week for misleading reporting on Twitter usage, so in the spirit of fair play, I’ll show them some love for an interview they did with Kevin Ertell, Vice President of Retail Strategy for ForeSee Results.

In the interview, Kevin nailed the top thing that every single business should have on the top of their to do list:

“We’re seeing at many, many retailers that the amount of people that say they came to make a purchase today is 20% or higher. Yet, those people’s conversion rates are nowhere near 20%. So, there’s a massive gap there, and a lot of that gap can be attributed to usability issues. ”

Kevin is talking retailers, but developing a core usability practice should be a no brainer for any type of business, no matter what their online objectives are. It just doesn’t make sense to spend all that time, money and effort driving leads to a website that then lets those leads slip through hundreds of cracks. I’m a big believer in picking one thing and doing it really, really well. For online marketers, that one thing should always be delivering a great user experience. If you have to make a sacrifice to do it, do it. Nothing is more important than this.

This is one of those things that falls into the common sense category, but very very few companies do usability well. There are a lot of really horrible user experiences out there. Here are 5 usability acid tests to hold yourself to:

Have you crawled inside your customer’s minds? The percentage of companies I know that have done robust research into understanding how their prospect’s brains tick is almost nil. This is the first place you have to start. Why are they coming to your site? What do they want to do? Like I always say, a good place to start is just to stand over a prospect’s shoulder when they’re on your site and start asking why. Sure, it’s not sophisticated usability testing, but it’s a beginning. The important thing is just to start doing something!

Can they find what they’re looking for? Prospects are coming to your site because they’re looking for something. Everybody is looking for something. And the vast majority of your visitors will be looking for a handful of common things. Make sure they find them. Make sure the cues and paths are easy to find, clearly lit and simple to follow. Provide site wide assistance in the form of clear sitemaps and internal search tools that don’t suck.

Can they do what they want to do? Again, prospects come to your site with an objective – something they want to do. The better you understand that objective, the more successful you can be in helping them meet it. Your job – your only job as the site designer – is to understand the paths your visitors want to take and remove any possible friction on those paths. You’ll have business objectives (i.e. capturing lead information) but these should never take priority over your visitor objectives.

Do You Make Your Visitors Do Too Much Thinking? (thanks Steve Krug!) – We do very little thinking when we navigate websites. Most of our online wayfinding is done subsconsciously. The minute you make a prospect stop and think, you’ve introduced friction and reduced their site experience. You should be able to get to where you’re going on the site quickly and intuitively. It’s not a puzzle to be solved. It’s a tool to be put in the hands of your prospects to help them do the things they want to do.

Do you have a servant based site philosophy? – This final point sums up all the previous ones. You don’t own your website..your customers do. Your goal is to meet their needs. Call it a servant based site design philosophy. Never make them sacrifice their objectives to meet yours (as in collecting lead information in a long form before they can get to where they need to get). If you provide enough value, they’ll meet you half way, but never force the issue.

This acid test for usability, if answered honestly, will help you understand how far you are away from a robust usability discipline. Assess and then make it a priority for 2010. There is no better place to spend your time!