(Dieser Beitrag ist nur in Englisch verfügbar.)
Each year Avenue A | Razorfish compiles a lengthy publicly available report to help their clients understand consumer behavior in the digital world. This year’s report offers great insights e.g. on media spending, social influence marketing, the progress of (local) search and online video.In regards to user experience (UX) the following three chapters are especially interesting to read:
Does The Home Page Still Matter? (p. 34)
Avenue A | Razorfish’s research shows that the loss of the homepage as a central entry point is between 50% and 75% even for top web sites. As an additional key site metric the traffic distribution should be monitored and every page should be treated like the homepage.
From a UX standpoint this will have quite an effect since online advertising will have to move from the homepage to every single page occupying prominent screen real estate. It also makes it more challenging to keep a consistent yet flexible user experience across all fragmented artefacts like widgets (e.g. YouTube) or RSS feeds etc.
The Connected Class (p. 48)
Avenue A | Razorfish conducted interviews with 25 people between 18 and 34 with a high propensity for using a variety of digital platforms. For UX the following three findings are important to consider when dealing with community websites:
1.) Proliferation of the profile and the “Digital You”: People are willing to maintain multiple profiles on multiple platforms (or even on just one) to express different sides of their personality.
2.) Proliferation of the platform: People are embracing multiple devices serving specific purposes even if the capabilities do overlap.
3.) Proliferation of communication: People are choosing the communication method based on the (value of the) relationship forming a sort of social hierarchy.
The Social Technographics Profile (p. 103)
The report features a way of grouping people by their adoption of social technologies. Established by Forrester Research it basically resembles a ladder with (from top to bottom) the following six overlapping groups:
1.) Creators, who publish at least once a month (blog, YouTube, website, etc),
2.) Critics, who react to published content (comments, ratings, reviews, etc),
3.) Collectors, who save and tag bookmarks (de.li.cio.us, web RSS readers, etc),
4.) Joiners, who participate or maintain profiles (MySpace, Facebook, etc),
5.) Spectators, who consume self-published content (blogs, videos, etc) and
6.) Inactives, who do not consume self-published content.
Besides being a great classification system while working on community websites, there is also an interactive tool to drill down into the detailed data of the study. By choosing age, country and gender one can conveniently see the distribution of the particular online population into those six groups.