<aside> 💡 Why are things always in the last place you look for them? Because you stop looking when you find them!
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How we think people use the website?
When we’re creating sites, we act as though people are going to pore over each page, reading all of our carefully crafted text, figuring out how we’ve organized things, and weighing their options before deciding which link to click.
How people actually use the website?
What they actually do most of the time (if we’re lucky) is glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles the thing they’re looking for. There are almost always large parts of the page that they don’t even look at.
<aside> 💡 We’re thinking “great literature” (or at least “product brochure”), while the user’s reality is much closer to “billboard going by at 60 miles an hour.”
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Why do we scan?
When we’re designing pages, we tend to assume that users will scan the page, consider all of the available options, and choose the best one.
In reality, though, most of the time we don’t choose the best option—we choose the first reasonable option, a strategy known as satisficing. As soon as we find a link that seems like it might lead to what we’re looking for, there’s a very good chance that we’ll click it.
Book Recommendation: Gary Klein’s book Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions
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