I have to make a confession, this post actually comes from an anecdotal experience that I had recently that made me think about a book that I’ve just read. I’m sure many people will have heard of Malcolm Gladwell and his book titled ‘The Tipping Point’. Now the recent and more traumatic event that reminded me of this book was the occurrance of small, furry creatures parading in our small Parisian flat in the middle of the night. My fiancé was not the least bit happy. So I had to first find out where they were getting into our rented accommodation and then find a way to trap them. What I eventually used is something called ‘Mouse & Rat Glue’ and some very tasty Sardinian cheese.
What has this to do with web design, strategy or analytics. Well quite a lot really. Let’s expand on this analogy, the mice are effectively the lightfooted browsers of the internet, that barely leave a footprint and rarely stay in any place for a long time. The cheese in this case is the content and the glue is the trap to keep the browsers for longer. This separation of content and trap is quite different from the train of thought that it is indeed the content that keeps the browser at your website. In fact, in the case of my ‘better mouse trap’, the content, or cheese in this case, was in fact the thing that attracted the browser, or mouse, to the trap. Once the mouse was in the trap, it was difficult to escape. Now to literally translate this to a website design would be unethical, but obviously there are morally correct methods of extending the amount of time a browser stays on your website, and it doesn’t really stop there. If we could measure these different ways against some well-known metric such as bounce rate, we could indeed understand better browser behavior and design websites accordingly, with these sticky, invisible traps.
I intend to investigate this more and include more insight into this idea in future posts.