The Right Trigger Words

By Jared M. Spool Dec 9, 2009

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CNN.com's designers have gone out of their way to make their work difficult. They could have built a very simple home page with just their logo and a handful of links:

The Most Important Story
The Second Most Important Story
The Third Most Important Story
An Unimportant, Yet Entertaining Story
Yet Another Story about Michael Jackson

If this was CNN's home page, the designers could go home and not have any work for weeks. After all, what is a news site's home page but a list of links to the most important stories? (And the unexplainable insatiable curiosity about Michael Jackson's latest antics.)

Yet, these links aren't effective for users because they're missing a key component: the Trigger Words. Trigger words are the words and phrases that trigger a user into clicking. They contain the essential elements to provide the motivation to continue with the site.

The Move-Forward-Until-Found Rule

When dealing with information, a web page can do only one of two things: either it contains the content the user wants or it contains the links to get them to the content they want. If a page doesn't follow this rule, then the users stop clicking and they aren't likely to find their target content.

CNN.com's home page follows the Move-Forward-Until-Found rule: Almost one-third of the home page is content — the most important story of the moment. (Because it's news, this content is updated every 15 minutes, giving the CNN developers plenty to do all day.)

The rest of the page contains dozens of links, in case the top story on the home page wasn't everything the user wanted. These links only work when they contain the right trigger words. It's CNN's mastery of trigger words that make it so interesting.

Dissecting Detailed Descriptions

A few years ago, we studied a handful of users while they searched for specific items of interest on large web sites. These were items they were interested in and no two users searched for the same items in this study. Each item they searched for was on the sites we were studying.

Before every user started their search, we interviewed them extensively about what they hoped to find. We had them describe their targets in excruciating detail. We recorded every word they said. Then, we set them off on their hunt, recording every page they visited on the site.

After seeing which users succeeding at finding their target content and which didn't, we analyzed each page they visited thoroughly, including the home page. Part of our analysis including studying the words they used to describe their targets.

It turned out that users were far more successful at finding their targets when the description words, which they told us before they saw the site, appeared on the home page. In the tasks where users successfully found their target content, the description words appeared on the home page 72% of the time. When users were unsuccessful, their words only appeared an average of 6% of the time on the home page.

Description words are a major type of trigger word. This study indicates that if those trigger words are found on the home page, users are far more likely to get what they are looking for.

Trigger Words as Search Keywords

Another interesting fact from that study: In those tasks where the users didn't find their target, they were far more likely to use the site's Search function than in those tasks where the description words appeared on the home page. When the words did appear, users usually clicked on the associated links instead of using Search.

In fact, when users did eventually go to Search, they almost always typed one or more of the description words as their search terms. It makes sense to us that users would use their description as their search term. This was when we realized the failed searches in a site's search log are important clues to understanding the users' trigger words.

Getting Scent from Flower Displays

It would be silly for the CNN.com home page team to change to the generic links above. However, you'd be surprised how often it happens. One of the more outrageous examples is the site for the popular Staten Island landscaper, Wiesner Brothers. After clicking on the landscaping link at the top of the home page, the user is presented a page for which the only links are the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8, representing different showcase projects from the landscaper.