Why do people go on-line?

Grant Leboff: I think it’s really important, when people start to look at commerce online and those sort of things, to understand why people shop online in the first place and understand those motivations. Perhaps you can give us a bit of a steer on the psychology of why people are going online in the first place?

Graham Jones: One of the reasons they go online is convenience. And I mean psychological convenience, not the convenience of just being able to do it because you want to do it. Psychological convenience means protecting your survival, and you protect your survival by doing things in the quickest way possible. So your brain is constantly looking for ways to do things in the easiest possible way, and online shopping makes your brain go ‘Aha! I can do this quickly’ – assuming the website does allow you to do it quickly – so that’s the issue.

Grant Leboff: That’s really interesting because if you think, well we know the reason why a lot of people are going online is this convenience – the least line of resistance – that kind of idea. So then how important is it to make sure that the website is fundamentally easy to navigate and understand?

Graham Jones: We know that people disappear from a website in half a second if it doesn’t immediately tell them what to do, how they can do it, and as quickly as possible. So what they are looking for are very familiar things. They are looking for the shopping cart to be on the top right, they are looking for the search box to the centre top, they are looking for the name of the company to be top left. These are all the kind of things that make it easy and quick to use, because all websites that work the same, then make it easy for people to know that they can do it quickly.

Grant Leboff: And what you think is the biggest mistake companies make when you land on their landing page or the homepage? It might have a shopping cart in the right place but what’s the one fundamental mistake that is repeated time and time again?

Graham Jones: Repeatedly you see websites showing people ‘Here’s 100 things you can do with our website’ and so people are just confused. You’ve got one function, one thing.

If you think of Google, what is it? One thing – search. Think of Facebook, what is it? One thing – talk to people. Think of YouTube what is it? One thing – videos. If you’ve got a website, that boasts ‘50 different things you can do on our website’, people go; I’m out of here I’m too confused.

There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order to facilitate the readability of the written English