Three Ways of Using

A client and I were discussing "the user experience" and their new web strategy. Most of our clients are Colleges and Universities and their resources/thinking about strategy for the web tends to be very tool focused. Thus, you get a lot of discussion about 'web sites', 'micro-sites', 'blogs', 'communities', etc. and less discussion about the aims and goals of a particular element of the marketing plan.

I suggested that maybe any discussion of user experience really needed to start with figuring out what kind of 'attitude' you want viewers to take to a particular web asset. From there, you figure out how best to foster that attitude and turn it into results.

From our experience, there are major 'attitudes' that viewers take towards a given web asset/project. These attitudes often get combined, but generally one of them is prominent (whether the client wants it or not) and the expectations that go along with that attitude drive the success of the project as a whole. Here are the basic attitudes we see:

Spectating: In this attitude, visitors treat your site like they treat most television. They expect to be entertained or informed 'passively'. They are not captive audiences and can switch you off as soon as you no longer make their spectating worthwhile.

Participating: Here visitors expect to influence what happens on the site. At its most basic, participating in a web site involves searching for a product and buying it. In more elegant forms, participating shows up in wikis, video replies on YouTube, and forum/chatroom threads.

Adjudicating: Whether we like it or not, most visitors are constantly judging the quality of your offerings. Face it, the world of information swirls so chaotically around us that we can't help but constantly filter for "good/bad". Adjudicating functions include comments on blog posts, ratings, favorites lists, and so on. ( I needed another "ating" word to make it all work. So, uh... yeah.)

I'm not suggesting that any site or project supports only one of these three attitudes. Instead, I think that we need to consider how a particular project will create an expectation of supporting these attitudes singly or in combination. When you produce a web video series, you are most definitely saying, "Come and spectate!" and in doing that, you need to realize that the bar is quite high -- you're asking someone to give up the ball game or a walk with the dog to watch your stuff.

If you think this is a thread worth pursuing, let me know and I'll unpack the ways that sites invite different attitudes but ultimately fail to produce results thanks to unfunded emotional mandates...