The results of extensive web user research by Jakob Nielsen are written up by BBC and it’s a must read for web companies hoping to increase engagement with information seekers. The crux of the findings is that the average web surfer’s mindset is much more of an efficient hunter and much less a discovering explorer. Users are getting much more proficient at simply extracting the info or link they are seeking and ignoring everything else.

While web publishers continually strive to make their destination sites ’stickier’ and meaningful to the casual visitor, they may only be upsetting the visitor.

Web users were also getting very frustrated with all the extras, such as widgets and applications, being added to sites to make them more friendly. “People want sites to get to the point, they have very little patience,” he said.

In 2004, about 40% of people visited a homepage and then drilled down to where they wanted to go and 60% use a deep link that took them directly to a page or destination inside a site. In 2008, said Dr Nielsen, only 25% of people travel via a homepage. The rest search and get straight there.

“Basically search engines rule the web,” he said.

At Dogster and Catster we have two very distinct types of users. We have the community enthusiasts, people who enjoy socializing in our community on a regular basis. This type of user is not the use case Jakob Nielsen studied as they are here for entertainment and sociality. Our second type of user, the information and resource seeker is definitely in this category. While many of our information seeks are in a discovery and explorations mindset (such as ‘what kind of dog should I get’ or ‘I wish I could look at a bunch of cute cat photos’, many others are exactly the use case Nielsen studied people people trying to complete their web to-do lists ASAP.

Yet ‘the busy information seeker’ is an important category to us and has accounted for a big percentage of our growth in uniques. (In the last 9 months the number of visitors coming to our site from search engines has increases 60%) Since then we’ve been very focused on reducing the bounce rate of these new visitors. But we’ve also realized that if they don’t want to stay one second longer we shouldn’t get in their way. We can only help them to remember our name so after a search engine takes them to our site, they may come to us first when they have an ensuing pet inquiry. Though everyone obsesses over stats month over month we take a much more year over year view. So please, come to our site, get your info and leave. You’re welcome back anytime, 24/7/365 ;>