The Canadian government is reviewing its website
standards. A couple of analogies are being employed to help civil servants make
websites that visitors find useful.
The first analogy is that of animals hunting for food.
Users, civil servants are told, are “informavores” who “forage”
for information.
Like animals, the look for an “information scent” online.
When they find one, they ask themselves: “Am I getting closer to the prey?” and
“is it an ‘easy catch’?”
The closer they get, the more they want o know: “How
‘rich’ is this hunting ground?”
The second analogy is that of snacking.
In one section of the new guidelines, web content writers
are encouraged to “Be a Snack” and to “avoid making readers/visitors sit down
for a full meal!”
Still with the eating theme, another goal is to “trim the
fat” by removing “redundant, outdated
and trivial” content from web pages.
The snacking analogy is backed up by a 2013 survey by Mobiles Republic, a global news syndication company in the U.S.
According to the survey, based on responses from over
8,000 News Republic app users, news consumption is rising, but people are
reading less—they are checking the news more frequently, but for shorter
amounts of time.
“Forget news reading,” says an article about the survey
in Adweek. “Today, it’s all about ‘news snacking,’ meaning people are checking
the news more often and typically on mobile devices.
“75 percent of readers with smartphones and 70 percent
with tablets check the news more than once a day.”
And how do people find the news? 73 percent said they use
aggregators, while social media (Facebook and Twitter) is on the rise.
At the
time of the survey, 43 percent of respondents said they used Facebook to check
news.
What does this mean for communicators?
Understanding the habits of people looking for
information on your website is key to developing the information that will attract
them—and keep them coming back.
And today many of those users are informavores who are following information scents so they can forage for a quick snack.
So make sure you leave lots of information scents throughout the Internet.
And whatever you do, don't offer a full-course meal.
1 comment:
Thanks for the post John. I use all three, an aggregator, FaceBook and Twitter. I'd argue that all three are forms of aggregation. The aggregator is populated with sites that I'm interested in. With FaceBook the aggregation occurs through what my friends are interested (with some unknown algorithm that FaceBooks uses to show me a selection of those things). With Twitter the aggregations is done by the people I follow. I check each one, at least once a day!
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