The Right Trigger Words

April 24th, 2008

The Right Trigger Words

CNN.com’s designers have gone out of their way to make their work difficult. They could have built a very simple home page with just their logo and a handful of links:

  • The Most Important Story
  • The Second Most Important Story
  • The Third Most Important Story
  • An Unimportant, Yet Entertaining Story
  • Yet Another Story about Michael Jackson

If this was CNN’s home page, the designers could go home and not have any work for weeks. After all, what is a news site’s home page but a list of links to the most important stories? (And the unexplainable insatiable curiosity about Michael Jackson’s latest antics.)

Yet, these links aren’t effective for users because they’re missing a key component: the Trigger Words. Trigger words are the words and phrases that *trigger* a user into clicking. They contain the essential elements to provide the motivation to continue with the site.

> The Move-Forward-Until-Found Rule

When dealing with information, a web page can do only one of two things: either it contains the content the user wants *or* it contains the links to get them to the content they want. If a page doesn’t follow this rule, then the users stop clicking and they aren’t likely to find their target content.

CNN.com’s home page follows the Move-Forward-Until-Found rule: sony ericsson k 810i Almost one-third of the home page is content — the most important story of the moment. (Because it’s news, this content is updated every 15 minutes, Холодильники giving the CNN developers plenty to do all day.)

The rest of the page contains dozens of links, in case the top story on the home page wasn’t everything the user wanted. These links only work when they contain the right trigger words. It’s CNN’s mastery of trigger words that make it so interesting.

> Dissecting Detailed Descriptions

A few years ago, we studied a handful of users while they searched for specific items of interest on large web sites. These were items *they* were interested in and no two users searched for the same items in this study. Each item they searched for was on the sites we were studying.

Before every user started their search, we interviewed them extensively about what they hoped to find. We had them describe their targets in excruciating detail. We recorded every word they said. Then, we set them off on their hunt, recording every page they visited on the site.

After seeing which users succeeding at finding their target content and which didn’t, we analyzed each page they visited thoroughly, including the home page. Part PYRAMIDA HEE 96 600 мм of our analysis including studying the words they used to describe their targets.

It turned out that users were far more successful at finding their targets when the description words, which they told us *before* they saw the site, appeared on the home page. In <a href=”http://rozetka.com.ua/ru/products/details
(more…)

Categories: culture, panasonic, photos, reviews | No Comments