Marc-Oliver / Digital Brand Experiences

From Macro to Micro Interactions – How the Web Usage Changed

This post is part of Marc-Oliver’s Digital Traveler post series – Digital Brand Experiences and Ideas for the Tourism Industry.

In recent years, there has been a fundamental shift in the way people use and access the Web, and while user behavior on websites hasn’t changed a lot, the ways users interact with, consume, and consult the Web in general have changed: New user patterns, desires, and perceptions have emerged along with more efficient web services, social networks, and the ability to access and request data streams in a location-based and time-sensitive manner – on the go.

After 15 years of Web usage, our natural instinct is starting to change, in which we gather and access information.

From Macro- to Micro-Interactions

There have never been so many different ways to book a flight, order a book, or find a job online as there are today. The options of online services are endless, which creates a very unstable digital universe and makes Web usage in general unpredictable and hard to measure. The current trend is to go from macro interactions to micro interactions, by using devices, tools, and web services that support rapid browsing* (Study Weinreich, Obendorf, PDF).

In this context, a simple online activity like job hunting has become a complex setup of accessing different types of websites and services, conducting a variety of tools and administrating multiple types of interactions—all at the same time. 

Job Search As a Multi-Dimensional Interaction

Job search once was a very rudimentarily online activity for job seekers. A few major job portals like StepStone, Monster and Workopolis once controlled the market and made it quite comfortable for users to browse through company listings. The list entries linked to the company’s website and that was it. A few years later industry specific job portals popped up and forced job hunters to visit additional domains like go2hr.com for tourism and hospitality, krop.com for digital creatives, or if you were an academic you went to AcademicJobs.com, just to name a few. The market for job portals just got a little bit more competitive and job seeking more complicated; there were way more sites and services to consider if you wanted to to stay on top of all job offers. Not every company updated their listings on each site and service.

Now, social networks like LinkedIn are once again rearranging the overall user patterns for most of the job seekers and job providers – although, not all industries reflect that trend. Headhunters are taking job posts from official company sites and trading them back and forth – from platform to platform, from person to person. Once powerful, centralized job sites like the above mentioned are now losing influence again, due to this transition.

Another interesting thing happened within this domain, although somewhat on the sidelines. Savvy Web users dismantled services like Google, Twitter, and Foursquare and are using them for different purposes — in some cases, to get a new job. And who knows how long this system will remain stable, up and running.

On the Web, the only constant is change. Now, statistics show, that people access the same few sites 90% of the time, but that number changes when they accomplish specific tasks, like job hunting or, even a more popular one; travel planning.

Websites had become part of an overall Web experience, embedded in an unstable, increasingly complex framework of interactions, competing with an innumerable amount of other web sites, mobile services and data flows.

Web usage affects web sites usage.

The travel industry is experiencing a similar effect: New web services and travel platforms arise day by day and affect user traffic and behavior. Most importantly, they affect the overall web-experience of “Trip Planning”.

In India for example, the Indian Railways website had for years dominated traffic and the experience of booking a trip online via their site, but this is starting to change. New web services and travel platforms are pushing into the market and starting to reorganize India’s online travel universe. People now have more options to choose from and experience the popular online activity “Trip Planning” in many different ways.

Another interesting and still ongoing study found that checking consumer-powered web sites had not only affected most Russians in their decision-making process, but also influenced their online behavior on other sites. Quite often, they arrived at official tourism sites heavily opinionated, and consequently, were less patient with the content and the navigational elements. They already made their decision somewhere else; now they just wanted to confirm information chunks officially or book quickly. This example shows you specifically how changes and transitions outside of your own domain can affect user behaviors inside your web site.

The Bottom Line

Reports and studies show great hope and value and gather lots of quantitative data on web site usage, purchasing decisions, the degree of adoption of various digital behaviors, the involvement with online social networking, media consumption patterns and what not. What this data doesn’t expose is how those multi-dimensional micro interactions affect the web usage in general, nor how users map tasks, layout functionalities and bundle up activities.

To go back to the online travel sector: We know how the consumers use Google as a search engine to start their vacation planning. We also know how many visitors end up on tripadvisor, what they do and how it affects their decision making process in specific areas of the world. But, we don’t know how they puzzle, segment, conduct and combine different travel services to accomplish multiple tasks and fulfill selective needs.

What makes them browse the Seattle’s Four Seasons web site, sign up for an RSS feed with the latest deals from San Francisco’s Westin & Spa, and two days later compare apartment prices in Portland on craigslist, then finally book a treehouse in Montana via the mobile service airbnb?

Raising these questions was the objective of this article. It is now up to web site owners, user experience designers and information architects to positively re-assess the strategic role and value of their web sites and services as part of popular online activities, that are getting more and more complex, divided, segmented and transformed into multi-dimensional micro interactions.