Ruthless end users and ruthless counter-measures

The usability guru Jakob Nielsen is roaming the web again with his annual report on web habbits. This time he makes an interesting point: The users are getting more and more ruthless online. More than ever they are only a click away from leaving your site - and perhaps leave for good.

I couldn’t agree more. But the important stuff is in thinking about the consequences this user behaviour could have for the way we produce and distribution on new media platforms.

First of all you have to ask yourself, what the real point of a massive website destination is in a time, when users get more and more accustomed to just finding what they want through Google? Why are so many still in love with the idea of building walled gardens, where they can lock people up for minutes and minutes on end, when clearly this is against the trend?

Second, you could ask yourself if its really important to do everything equally well, when it’s possible for the user at every point in time to find the best of what he or she may be looking for by just searching on Google? This is especially interesting for media companies, who should be thinking about whether there are rationalization opportunities in some of the content they produce. Commoditized feeds from various news agencies comes to mind - why do we really need them?

The third thing, you should be asking yourself is how to cope with this kind of user behaviour? No doubt there is a number of ways you could look at, but I would look at three to start with:

1. How can we focus our production ressources on only doing the things, we can do better than everybody else?
2. How could we adapt for search driven micro-distribution of our content?
3. How could we make sure that our monetization opportunties live inside the product bits and not alongside them?

The first point is key to cost and ultimately to the bottom line. The second point is key to distribution. And the third point is key to a viable business model. Everything else is secondary if not alltogether irrelevant.

Vad NU! is a consultancy company owned by Mads Kristensen and specialized in helping clients take advantage of the business opportunities created by new media. Click to learn how I can help you and your company.