How consumers value websites

December 22nd, 2010

A friend dropped some serious usability knowledge on me the other day, which I tweeted, and got some questions back as to what I meant. I felt it was worth a blog post as this is one of those design principles that is so obvious, yet most engineers and product people don't follow it nearly enough. The tweet was:

The value of a site is the value you get out of it divided by the value you put into it" via @dariusmc

So in other words, a person needs to get at least as much value out of a site as they put into it, if not a lot more, for the site to be valuable or useful to them. Let's look at a few sites:

  1. Google. People usually spend a few seconds on Google, and then leave to whatever site they were looking for. Highly valuable.
  2. Facebook. People spend a lot more time on Facebook, but do they get a lot of value? I'd call it more even money as sometimes you find really useful information or interesting content and sometimes you don't. Still much more valuable than most sites
  3. Twitter. While there is a lot of noise and you could waste a lot of time digging through all the tweets, I usually find interesting and valuable information on page one of twitter, as I follow interesting people. So pretty valuable.
  4. Amazon. Highly valuable and time saving if you know what you want. More valuable than most online ecommerce sites if you don't know exactly what you want as their search functionality and reviews make research possible. But with so many options it's still often easier to walk into a store and talk to a knowledgable salesperson. Highly valuable for most cases./li>
  5. iPhone. Apple is always touted as the masters of design, and I think this value formula helps explain why. Why did so many people buy iphones in the past few years? Because the value you get! Any kind of information you needed, it was much easier to get on the iphone. Having a full web browser enabled this, and custom apps made it even better. Anything you need is a few quick taps away: email, yelp (restaurant recs), books, news, weather, movie showtimes, and more.
  6. The New York Times. On the homepage I see hundreds of links and small font, and lots of stories, 90% of which aren't interesting/valuable to me. I have to dig to find stories about subjects I find interesting. But the content is high quality when I do find it. So highly useful content, but as a website not as valuable to me - thus I never actually visit it - I instead rely on finding articles that friends send me via email, tweets, facebook, or even reading my rss readers
  7. Rss readers. These used to be highly valuable to me, but as the number of of feeds I follow grew, I can't keep up anymore. It takes too long to sort through it all. Not very valuable (to me) - thus I've largely given it up.
  8. Goodreads: I'm clearly biased here, but I actually think we can vastly improve our value. I believe Goodreads is better than any site there is at recommending books. My to-read list is 222 books long! But our issue is you have to put a bit of effort into the site to add friends, and browse their books to find those books. I think if we could improve the time it takes a person to find good book recommendations our overall site value would improve, by the formula about. Would love to hear feedback on this, of course!
Posted by ochandler Filed in

6 Responses to “How consumers value websites”

  1. Andy G Says:
    December 23rd, 2010 at 04:25 AM Goodreads is already so good at recommending books that when people ask me for book recommendations I simply refer them to the site.
  2. Ann Rumsey Says:
    December 23rd, 2010 at 04:59 AM Goodreads makes it pretty easy to find books and recommendations of specific books. I am an eager consumer of the information found on the site and find the value add to be high! I have been stumped a few times when looking for people to converse about a recent book I have read in a group setting within a book thread. I am not sure how you could make that easier though. I'll post comments that raise a few replies and then the thread dies. I see this happen to others too with books I have no reason to comment on, so don't. Perhaps an impromptu group could form, comprised of the people who mark a book read with a thread that could start and go on as more people read and start conversing. ;)
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