Website Usability: Interior Page Behaviors
Home Page & Interior Pages Usability Comparison
In this article we will be focused on the usability of a website’s interior pages. We have ascertained that in deep link navigation sites that use good SEO practices, as much as 40% of entry traffic happens outside of the home page. Another important factor is users normally read interior pages as opposed to scanning which is what happens on the home page. In fact one of the primary reasons I always create deep links is because website visitors read substantially more content on interior pages than they do on the home page. Again I am relying on the ever so important stat: “Average Time Spent”.
Looking at our 2 groups (check out Website Usability Testing if you don’t know what I mean by test groups) of usability testers, low experience users spend 35 seconds on the home page, but a full minute on interior pages! With the more experienced users it was 25 seconds on the home page and 45 seconds on interior pages. Keep in mind that the more experienced a website visitor is on the Internet, the quicker they leave if they don’t find what they are looking for ASAP.
The experienced group was also consistent in how little they were willing to scroll to find what they are looking for. These types of statistics are gathered strictly by recording the usability sessions, or from the testing document users created when recording wasn’t available. It is possible to gather some basic scroll stats using Google Analytics’ Site Overlay feature. There is a screenshot of it on my post: Website Usability And The Home Page. When looking at the overlay it shows which links were clicked on by users. By looking at links further down the page it is possible to get an idea of how many users click on links down there. Except for footer links (most experienced users expect there to be links in a sites footer and will scroll down to hit them) very rarely are lower content links clicked on.
One reason for the “average time spent on” to be higher on an interior page is due to the relevance of the page in the SERPS. Google and Yahoo will place interior pages higher than home pages especially when they are keyword heavy for a specific topic. That means that a visitor will actually read the page because it was more related to their task. This is yet another reason why it is critical that EVERY page on your site lets visitors know where they are, who you are, what the site does, what the page (or site on the homepage) is about and how it will benefit them.
Another interesting thing I saw in Google Analytics that was backed up by usability groups, was how so much more action happened in the content section of the interior pages. Most sites employ either a 2 or 3 column page structure with the center of the page being reserved for content. THAT is where users are looking for their answers. Most site visitors spend their time on the interior pages looking for something very specific and how to find it if it isn’t right in front of them. As a matter of fact putting together 2 reports on usability I did last year, I was amazed to find that almost 4700 out of 5000 interior clicks happened in the content area and NOT through the navigation!
Taking these ideas and implementing them is going to be the focus on the next articles. Now that we know how and why users look at the home page and interior pages, as well as utilize deep link navigation, we can start applying these lessons to real life scenarios.
