Is your homepage your homepage?
In testing recently, we came across a user behaviour that was challenging, not so much in itself but more so for its impact on the category and how it needed to be taken into consideration during website development.
Taste.com.au Recipe
One of our Clients was in development of a website that targeted aspiring cooks. In a nutshell, they wanted to confirm that their planned website was in line with user needs, and also that they were on the right track with the specific functionality that had been developed. We used focus groups and moderated one-on-one user testing on the project.
During the focus groups, the importance of search became very clear. As mentioned above, this in itself was hardly ground breaking. The intriguing bit however was how much search engines (and by default, Google) had become the de facto homepage for this particular category. User behaviour was to go to Google and search some aspect of cooking, and to proceed to the websites recommended in the natural search results. The use of Google was so much a part of the process that the users were nearly universally unable to name any of the websites which were dominant (by traffic counts) in the category. The users knew the sites only by the pages that they had linked to via Google, which tended to be deep within the individual sites.
The behaviour was so prevalent that it became clear that our Client would need to rethink their homepage design and information architecture. Specifically, they had designed the site so that some of the core features were only clearly visible from the homepage, and were less easily accessed via the individual pages of the site. Understanding the user behaviour in this category led us to recommend to the client that they rethink their content pages, and consider how each one was effectively the ‘homepage’ of their site for most users. They needed to reconsider how to dial up the site’s branding, and how they could introduce some of the other features of the site (which had only previously been available on the site’s homepage) to the users without getting in the way of the core purpose for the users’ visit.
I think this has some interesting implications for the way that we undertake lab based user testing. In the past we have generally started tasks on the homepage however your project may suggest that we could start tasks from the most common entry pages.
How do you think this should influence our testing in the fuuture? Should we be starting users on Google with an explicit instruction to use a specific site?