People hunt for information, quite often in the long grass and can become disillusioned if they see no progress, this reminds me of using AltaVista as a search engine in 1995!
I posted an interesting question on LinkedIn last week about the role that psychology plays in designing sites and have a got a fair set of useful answers. The most interesting talked about Jakob Nielsen’s theory of information scent. The basic idea is that human forage for information in a fairly lazy manner and as they hunt down the piece of information they require there is a balance between finding and reading. If the balance is too skewed towards work (finding) then they lose interest. Jakob goes on to list a few very good tips but it got me thinking.
If this is a forage then the stronger the scent, the greater the will to continue foraging and as many companies now integrate on and off-line information a great way to improve interaction would be to give tasters of off-line activity. E.g. “…request our brochure that gives far more information than you can find here”. Not, maybe, a very good example but you can see the point - it heats up the scent and therefore increases the drive to complete the call to action. Another example could be “register to our forum and read 20,000 comments about xyz product/service”.
This is fairly simple and we do this in many case now but we are not visualising it as a forage/hunt, we are trying to balance action with benefit when in many cases it is a far simpler case of balancing action with (foraging) progress. “This way to food” would be a great example of clarity but that assumes we know what the visitor wants and that, quite often, is an unknown so we have to either understand exactly what the visitor wants (and then post 10ft high signs) or try to understand what he or she wants and spoon feed them.
Alternatively we give the visitor a better view of the prey (information) so they can stalk (find) it with greater ease.
Oh yes, that’s usability, isn’t it? 
November 1st, 2007 at 2:03 am
Profiling visitors using psychology is pants for 2 reasons:
1) It sounds creepy and you will get a bad rep.
2) Its not gonna help - it introduces an unnecessary step / problem. For example you have to decide whether a visitor is say extravert or introvert (hard) then decide how to deal with the two types differently (hard).
Much better to measure the visitor along more functional dimensions - eg
“is she ready to buy a blue widget - or just researching widgets ?”
or
“is she an expert on widgets or does she need help on what kind to buy ?”
or
“is she price-sensitive - or just want the very best kick-ass widget ?”
These are easier to measure - and its easier to do something with the information.
For example for the novice we can provide all kinds of tutorials and buying wizards. For the budget buyer we can offer finance or an entry-level product range.