Once upon a time, there was a customer who became so lost in a website that she found herself telling friends and family about the wonderful experience she had.

Why write an article that would encourage your customers to get lost on your website? Let me clarify the difference between getting lost as a result of poor navigation structure (bad!) vs. getting “lost” in the psychological experience of your website (good!).

Your company’s website is an opportunity for people to become engaged with your brand message through the interactive experience of exploring the content of your site.

The Power of Persuasion

Stories Persuade Personal Beliefs. Green and Brock (2000) define Narrative Transportation as one’s level of “absorption into a story”, involving imagery, affect (emotions), and focused attention. Their research revealed that people who become more highly transported into a story are more likely to develop beliefs that coincide with the conclusions made by the story, regardless of whether the story is labeled as fictional or non-fictional.

Taglines help people remember your overall message, but stories are necessary to transport customers into the “world” of your branding message.

Unlike traditional forms of media, the Web requires people to actively experience your brand—in their clicks, actions, and form submissions. In order to maintain a consistent and positive brand perception from your customers, your online product or service must be designed to resonate with users’ emotions and unconscious associations, in support of their goals for using your website.

The Role of Usability

In order for website visitors to become engaged in the interactive presentation of your story, your site must be user-friendly. Good usability allows customers to focus their attention on your content, without disrupting their emotional investment in your story. As people click through your website, they should be engaged by the content, and not encumbered by the navigation structure. The interface should be “transparent” to users, so that they can focus on achieving their goals and exploring your company’s story, rather than becoming confused or frustrated by the user interface design.

Distractions such as poorly structured navigation, broken hyperlinks, and slow-loading web pages, interrupt narrative transportation. More often than not, when your website breaks a user’s attentional focus due to poor usability, the user is likely to become frustrated enough to leave your website, or at the very least, their emotional reaction will overpower the potential for engagement with your story. This damages your brand – badly.

Making Your Story a Best-Seller

In order to determine how to tell your company’s story via your website, you must first get to know your intended audience, i.e., your customers. Too many organizations wrongly assume that they know their customers well enough to understand what motivates them. Often, this belief is based on the results from only one channel of communication with consumers, such as a marketing research survey.

I’m not disputing the importance and relevance of knowing facts about your customers, such as one’s age, opinions, and frequency of using a product. However, reliance on these facts alone falls short of truly understanding the patterns of thought and behavior that consumers will experience in the context of your product or service. Consumer opinions, when expressed as a product rating such as “Very Interesting”, do not explain what motivates a user’s behavioral patterns at a deep level. To engage users in your brand, you must understand their instinctive behaviors and attitudes as they relate to your product or service.

User Experience: The Heart of Your Story

User experience research can be thought of as filling in the “why?” to the “whats” that come from a typical market research survey. Marketing survey results are quantitative in nature, have a larger respondent pool, and produce statistically significant results, which may reveal “gaps” of understanding your consumers’ behaviors. These gaps can be filled by strategically conducting qualitative user experience research.

One reason that a survey is an insufficient tool for uncovering deep emotions and unconscious associations is that people often find themselves unable to articulate and express these thoughts when asked direct questions. User experience research methods like metaphor elicitation and participatory design exercises allow experienced interviewers to uncover these unconscious thoughts by providing respondents with the appropriate tools to communicate. These research findings evolve through a User Centered Design process to become user experience requirements for your website.

Common Threads of Experience

While market research often seeks to differentiate consumers, a primary goal of user experience research is to discover the common threads among consumers’ attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors as they pertain to interactions with your product or service. Through the User Centered Design process, these commonalities are woven into the “story” of a consistent user experience, which will become known as your online brand.

What story are you telling your customers? We’d love to help you find out!

The End.

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References

Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2000). The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of
public narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 701-721.