Are You Ready for the New Ruthless User?

by J Hruby, Director of Marketing

In a recent presentation to Minnesota’s LifeScience Alley™ trade association, John Wooden, Fredrickson Communications’ director of usability services, joined me in describing how user experience testing can support and enhance a business’ marketing efforts. One part of the presentation seemed to furrow a few brows: We asserted that the days of the casual website visitor are long gone—if they were ever here at all. The new breed of site visitor is ruthlessly task-driven, aiming to quickly find what they are looking for and move on. We introduced the audience to the New Ruthless User.

OK, so maybe there isn’t really a new breed; it’s just web evolution at work. The emergence of the New Ruthless User (NRU) is the result of the ever-expanding size of the web and the huge amount of content that’s available. If you think about your own experience with Google, the problem is that even a fairly narrow search returns thousands of results, of which only a few are of real interest to you. You might view the rest as web litter that’s cluttering up the path.

But we still need to sort the web wheat from the web chaff, so in order to see which websites really offer what we’re looking for, we have to make quick decisions about whether or not a website offers anything of value. We make these decisions within seconds of scanning a web page.

I’m a ruthless user, you’re a ruthless user

Consider how you use the web, and I think you’ll agree that you, too, have become an NRU. Most of us simply don’t have time to read every web page that you open in order to make objective judgments about the information it contains. Instead, we develop a web-enabled sixth sense. We open a website and our web sense takes over. “Is this site that I’m looking for?” Yes/no, stay/go. We either keep reading or we hit the Close or the Back button. We make the decision in seconds, based on criteria that we don’t really think about or understand. Now that’s ruthless! But that’s the direction the web has pushed us in.

Also, think about your expectation these days when it comes to the web. What’s our response to almost any question these days? Google it! It’s that simple.

We expect—-or maybe it’s even stronger than that; maybe we even demand—-instant access to the exact information we want, exactly when we want it. ELearning guru Elliott Masie calls this “fingertip knowledge,” and increasingly, we expect that whatever we need to know will be at our fingertips, whenever we need to know it. It’s just become an article of information-age faith that the information we want is out there somewhere. Or at least it should be out there. And we should be able to find it by simply typing a few words in a search engine and clicking. Ta-da! Instant knowledge.

I want it all and I want it now!

Now, think about what happens when your expectations aren’t met. How do you feel when you look for information on a website and you just cannot seem to find it?

Let’s say you look everywhere on a company’s website, but you cannot find its address or phone number. What happens? Increasingly, we get frustrated and sometimes even angry. “What kind of company is this? They can’t even have this basic piece of information on their website. Do I really want to expend more effort trying to do business with a restaurant that forgets to put their address on their website? I guess I could call and ask for directions, but forget it. There are plenty of other places to eat.” And the mouse moves toward that dreaded Close button. Click.

Again, that’s pretty ruthless. And it’s also a pretty realistic vision of our expectations of the web, and what we do if we can’t find what we want.

If you have responsibility for a website or web content, you may wonder whether you can do anything to maximize the chances that the NRU will find value on your site—something worth staying for. The answer is “yes,” once you think about and understand the things that catch and hold this New Ruthless User’s attention. There certainly are adjustments that website owners and content creators can (and should) make.

My intention here is not to delve into specific must-dos, but rather to encourage you to look at your site through the eyes of the New Ruthless User. Ask yourself this: How well does our site meet the expectations of our New Ruthless User?

If you’re not happy with the answer to that question, contact us and let’s talk about an improvement plan. There’s too much at stake to let the NRU click the Close button.