Draw Them In To Your Site With The Right "Scent"

Let me hit you with this one: Successful websites can be analyzed by understanding the visitor's sense of smell!

You think I'm kidding, right?

Yet, as crazy as it sounds this concept reflects scientific findings in human-computer interaction research which date back to the early 90's (a nearly pre-historic age in computer technology) at the Palo Alto Research Center in California. Back then Stuart Card and Peter Pirolli used the analogy of wild animals gathering food to better understand how humans collect information online. This led them to the concept of "information foraging." Hence the idea of information scent in predicting how people actually follow up on a spoor of data and then continue in following the path to hit upon the information they're seeking to find.

It's all so figurative, of course. But, that's what makes the analogy so appealing. You can't actually smell anything online (unless your computer keyboard becomes very dirty). But your eyes can translate what you're seeing and reading into a warmer feeling, which is akin to the scent a predator picks up as it follows a path to its prey.

The website developer's job is to make that scent appear when it should, to make it a bit stronger at every step, so the information forager continues on the right path and reaches his goal on your site.

There's an inversion of natural selection here. No prey wants to be caught; but your website does. You want your site to be easily found and captured. You want people to satisfy their quest on your site's pages and links. It's our job to make it as easy as possible. We want them to catch the scent of a successsful hunt and reinforce it as they click the links. To do this we make your site a nutritious meal (or even a delicious little snack) and allow the forager to sniff it out early as an easy catch.

Here are a few things we do to enhance the smell of success for information foraging:

1) Spend time on links and category discriptions. This takes some analysis and pre-production time, but it's very much worthwhile. With so many navigational options available through a search query, the hunter has too many choices at every step. She can loose the scent quite easily. There's work to be done here that you don't want to short-change.

2) Avoid using jargon and cute words that have no common usage or "scent." Slogans cannot be saught out ahead of time by people who don't know what they mean. Unless you have a universal household trade name, try to make use of short, common English nouns and verbs to in your headings, link names, navigational elements, and copy.

3) Keep it easy for the visitor to know where they are in your site at all times, and provide stimulating links and for them to continue their efforts in drilling down to interior pages and information that will satisfy their search.

4) Use informative product pages. Don't assume anyone knows your product names and model numbers. They won't know them or find them on their own. Too often product pages are nearly barren of any real meat (hence no real scent to smell).

5) Use great product photography with people shown enjoying product benefits. This helps the visitor identify with the information and understand how the product will help them.

6) Drawing the visitor with the right scent is a cummulative process. Make sure these message elements find their way into main topic pages as well as the "deep links" on your site.