Using Information in Bigger Way

Have you ever wondered how a Website captivates you? It is more than likely it is because the content on the site looks like a good meal and indicate that it’s an easy catch. This intent is very purposeful from the designers who want their site to be caught and visited. Web designers who know about the foraging theory, or adaptive strategies understand how to make your interactions faster and stronger.

Pirolli was one of the founding fathers on the Information Foraging Theory and worked at Palo Alto Research Center in 1992. The idea a few years back was deliberate in trying to keep you on the page longer. Now, as the Web audiences have matured, Website content has also changed:

· Support short visits to your website
· Be a snack (fast downloads and create stickiness)
· Address user's immediate needs

Like animals foraging for food with time and energy constraints, humans forage for information looking for answers. The problem is that we in a glut of information with no time to sort it all out. Humans have naturally adopted adaptive strategies to optimize their intake of useful information per unit cost. The Information Foraging Theory aims to model and predict our evolutionary behavior in adapting to an increasingly complex world. The book both models our behavior in mathematical formulae and validates its predictions empirically to refine the model. Armed with this knowledge, designers can make informed decisions on web designs before they make a heavy investment in implementation.

What Is Information Foraging?

Unlike cognitive engineering models of the early 1990s where tasks were analyzed in well-defined domains and user interfaces, people seeking information are largely shaped by the structure of the content, that is, their information environment. People routinely sift massive volumes of information under deadline pressure to make complex search decisions under uncertain conditions. We are constantly evaluating the expected costs and benefits of our actions in this largely probabilistic textured information environment (Brunswik 1952) to maximize our gain of valuable information. Pirolli calls this behavior information foraging.

Information foraging strategies optimize the use of our time and effort to gain valuable information. We satisfice, getting a good enough outcome under uncertain and limited conditions (bounded rationality). As in the real world where animals forage for food, the online world of the Web is a patchy environment with information arranged into clumps. Patches of useful information reside in different websites, it is our job as "informavores" to seek out the richest patches and extract useful information. As we forage for more information, it becomes harder to find additional useful information as we pick off the "low hanging fruit." Diminishing returns cause us to "feed" at a patch until our rate of gain of useful information falls below the perceived average. Once we think the grass is greener in another "patch," we switch pages, websites, or search criteria, seeking out more fruitful patches of information. Pirolli's mathematics describe the environment and predicts with some accuracy our behavior in the Web's patchy environment.

The optimal information forager "maximizes the value of knowledge gained per unit cost of interaction." We select designs that improve our returns on information foraging. This natural selection implies that sites that have high information scent and usability would fare better than sites that have lower scent and usability. This gives an entirely new meaning to the survival of the fittest when applied to the Web.


Experts in the usability industry: Spool, Perfetti, and Brittan (2004) have also supported that users searched for a scent trail and followed it toward their content. "As the scent got stronger, they grew more eager. When they lost the scent, they backtracked until they picked it up again."
Spool and his colleagues recommend using trigger words that will be recognized by the user. Here are some of Spool's recommendations from the "Tao of Scent" (2004)

• Communicate information scent through explicit links, those which match the information found in the link
• Trigger words cause users to click, users expect these words on the destination page
• Link text should be between 7 and 12 words long
• Links should lead to information that is more specific
• Links should accurately describe what the next page contains
• Provide feeback about where the user is in the site structure
• Avoid jargon and cute marketing terms (use short words)

Use Search Analytics

Using search analytics helps to "close the loop" between designer and user expectations. Giving users what they are searching for, in the terms they are searching with is one way to ensure higher conversion rates. Regularly analyzing search results is one way to ensure you are not missing topics and "trigger words" that your customers are searching for. Scent is as much an issue in search as it is in navigation."