Unlocking the True Value of Digital with User Flows

From 2003-2005 I spent a lot of time observing people of all
ages and walks of life use the web across many different sites and verticals. I
watched their facial expressions and body language as they surfed. I watched their
mouse movements and the locations of their clicks.  I asked them to put their brains on speakerphone and listened
to what they had to say – and noticed what they didn’t say. The sessions were
videotaped and I spent countless hours watching them over and over again dissecting
every action in an effort to understand the way people control and navigate this
medium.

What I learned:

1. Web behavior is determined by goals not who the
   people are
2. Every click has a goal associated with it
3. Success means anticipating and messaging to
   these goals, moving the person forward and creating a flow
4. People have “tunnel vision” when they are moving
   forward in a flow

The last piece is incredibly important. What is tunnel
vision*?

• People don’t think of the online experience the
  same way web professionals spend their time thinking about them
• People focus on completing their goal and little
  else
• If elements of relevance are not in the context
  of focus they are likely invisible
• People pay attention to detail only when they
  have found what they are looking for — even then it is only detail related to
  what they want to see

Tunnel vision in the flow is why 62% of people still cannot
distinguish between Paid and Organic Search results. Tunnel vision in the flow is why no one clicks on banner ads. Tunnel vision in
the flow is the reason online marketing can be so powerful when you design ads,
pages and campaigns with the customer goals in mind, not your business goals.

Nothing has changed in web user behavior the past 5 years to
adjust these findings. In fact, everything that has happened since continues to
validate them. The continued effectiveness of Email, the dominant rise of
Search, the fall of display CPM and the death of Behavioral Targeting 1.0 (of course the dream doesn’t die so we’re rehashing BT again and I’ve made my
feelings about that known here).

Taking a step back, this all makes a ton of sense. The web
is the first medium where people can easily navigate discovery and recovery paths for information and commerce. Applications like eCommerce, Search and Email are flow enablers and that is what
gives them so much value. In fact, almost all of the value in the web is
created and captured within the flow of people’s goalstreams.

In stark contrast to the flow creation and capture channels mentioned
above, many publishers have looked at the world one impression at a time with
the central node of their Information Architecture being the homepage. The
rise of Search fractured this idea and the rise of Social compounded it.  There is a real threat this singular and
generic thinking will continue to hold back publishers and display advertising because
their manufactured content hierarchies do not correspond to the reality of how
people consume the medium.

Even now with the unbundling of impressions and data little
advancement is taking place in publisher environments understanding online
flows. If display is ever going to “tell a story” as advertisers want, it is
going to need more than one realtime bid on one page view to do it. What is
required is a sequence of clicks and associated messages relevant to the goal that
move intelligently downstream in parallel to the flow being created by the user.

This idea is no different than the Query> Ad>Landing
Page>Call to Action flows that are enabled by Search. I find great irony and
satisfaction in the fact that Search and the flows created off it are the most
effective story telling medium in online advertising. Maybe then, it should be
no wonder why it is the most successful.

Another great channel when it comes to creating flow is mobile
applications. Apps are all about the flow mechanics and the optimization of
goal paths. It’s no surprise people have been so taken by apps with this basis
in multi-step experiential strategy and design. Apple’s next great frontier as
they move into Advertising is predicated on the matching of relevant
multi-touch messaging and every publisher I know is already jealous of the CPMs
they command. And don’t think for a second flows can’t be cross platform. In
fact they already are.

Everyday, each of us creates numerous flows. With our
blinders on, each click of every flow we self-segment on our path towards goal
fulfillment. For too long digital advertising and marketing (Search Marketers
guilty as anyone) have looked through these paths, isolating each digital step.
If we are truly going to advance as a medium we must first be able to recognize
and capture these flows and then help people by anticipating their goals and
making goal fulfillment easy. I have no doubt that the sum of each and every
web experience and user flow is greater than the value of its parts.

* Credit for these definitions belong to my friends at Creative Good.