July 13, 2009
Causes of Frustration in the Search & Navigation Experience
On the web, regardless of the reason why we can’t find what we are looking for, our emotion is pretty much the same: we get frustrated, more and more rapidly over time.
As a result, two potential reaction are usually adopted:
- I prefer not receiving these services anymore until there is something better out there
- I will use it for now, but I will definitely quit as soon as there is something better out there
The type of reaction is usually more linked to the need we have for the service than our level of frustration (i.e.: we can be extremely frustrated, but continue to force ourselves to continue if we really need to find the information, while a slightly disengaging experience turns us off quickly if the service is not critical for us).
In this post, I try to identify the sources of these frustrating experiences when related to search & navigation and discuss the ways they can be solved.
As we can see in this diagram, a negative experience can be worse than no experience at all!
