Recently I was telling you that I found a book by John Lenker titled Train of Thoughts
. The published book talks about assessing your website from a more general point of view. As you know, designing a professional website nowadays isn’t just about the conceptual design but more than that.
Currently, it requires more analytical thinking than slapping physical beauty onto a website. I’ve spoken a bit on this analytical data in User Experience Design. While planning out a website fo a new client, something hit me and I started sketching my analysis of ‘Web Experience in a Bubble’.
Click image to view full size..
So let me explain my own analysis of a web experience to you from my point of view and let’s try to keep it simple to understand.
When a person visits your website, their sense of sight and sound are the only main things driving their emotions. If you have a clean layout, they might feel at ease or some might feel worried because it’s so empty. Why does Flash make a great presentational impact? Because other than having the ability of entertaining with motion, they could freely combine sound that either irritates the user or excite them.
When a person’s emotions start to set in, that’s when they make a split second decision if this website or its context is worth being around. It’s their emotions of impatience in waiting for something to load that drives the person away. Emotional resulted behaviour is one of the hardest to achieve in my opinion. Imagine you’re sad and yo visit an artiste website, if it’s dark and the music is mellow, it just makes you feel worst and might not want to even enter.
The behaviour driven by these elements are never certain becaus as human beings, we all react differently in many ways. However, it’s notable that after the emotions that would result in your behaviour, the next thing that might come to your mind while visiting is the usability of a website. If you’re sad from the start and aiming to release stress, you’d want to navigate easily and want to feel more laid back. Usability comes in here because it’s the ease or difficulty of the websit that would later result in the person’s after experience.
The results a person gain when visiting your website is good and bad depending on their state of emotional journey to their behaviour navigating through the website. I’m happy, I know what I’m looking for now and I go and find it.
Then upon leaving or as I’m done with what i needed to do, the after experience gives me a reason to stay and surf or visit the website more. The after experience or accomplished goal of the website is what will help dirve your people back again.
Sometimes it takes a little squeeze to get people to come back. That’s where the bonus or goodies come in. Being part of the after experience, if you’re able to offer someting above the goal accomplished, it becomes an emotional booster and would set a better expectation on the next visit.
And the process later would just repeat itself for every other person. However, it might quicken for repeating visitors because their expectations had been set already.
So that’s my analysis of web experience in a bubble.