The primary requirement for a site owner is to understand the site’s overall goal, the important tasks the user expects to complete on the site, and the ease and urgency with which that can be accomplished satisfactorily. Most users are not going to just browse around a site—they want to get in, do what they need to do and get out.
A user commonly will want to complete just five or six tasks on a website and those tasks account for 80 percent of online activity. Browsing and searching are common to all types of websites, but other tasks—finding an article, signing up for a email newsletter, buying a product, checking on an order, changing a profile, submitting information… whatever—are different for the various website archetypes.
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For example:
- Content sites-the top task is to get more detail on a news headline.
- Commerce sites-the user is most often trying to complete a purchase.
- Retail websites-users are increasingly seeking to take care of customer service tasks at the website, such as canceling or returning an order or reporting a problem with delivery.
Mequoda researchers have found that users often will complete a task in an unanticipated way. And when that happens, it’s good. It means that the global architecture of the site provides multiple paths to the finish line.
