2/25/2008 9:10:00 AM
by Pontus Edenberg in
Marketing
One of the more important things when you have a
website is to understand how people navigate it. As the web and the average user
are maturing, he is not willing to spend time to try to figure out where to
click to get him where he wants, which means that the next click might be out of
your site.
An easy way to get good control of how people
navigate your site is to invite 10-15 people that represent your target group.
Put them in front of a screen with a video camera behind them to see how they
navigate on the site and what actions they take on the keyboard. Look at the
videos in detail afterwards and try to understand how they click and why. Then
try to figure out how to re-design to get the visitors where you want them, and
bring new people back in for a test.
If you are not able to bring people around you can
start to use Google Analytics (which I’m sure you already are for monitoring
traffic, or similar) for navigation analysis. In Google Analytics you can under
the Content-tab find Navigation Summary which gives you a good general overview
of how people navigate. Here you can see how many of your visitors that click
where on a certain page.
But the best is to bring in some people, give them
some food and beer and have them navigate away on your site. It might take you a
day or two, but if you haven’t done this before you are most likely in for a big
surprise…
Tags: google analytics, user behaviour