Last week, a friend told me about the Blue Ridge Run, a 200 mile relay race through the Blue Ridge Parkway. As he recounted the turn of events that landed him an open spot on a local team, he said that he’d spent an hour “playing around” on the website before deciding to sign up.
My ears perked as I imagined a) what the analytics might look like for a site that had enough content and interaction to spend upwards of an hour consuming; or more likely, b) what a webmaster might assume after seeing an out of range visit of 00:59:42 on a site that probably averaged visits of 00:01:37.
“What exactly did you do for an hour on this website, Don?”
After giving me a puzzled look, he confessed that he didn’t spend the entire hour on the website. He’d spent an hour on the topic, which was the Blue Ridge Run… oh, and also long distance relay races… and local runners that might be potential teammates… aaaand the history of the Parkway… and Google maps of Virginia and North Carolina… and running shoes… and travel accommodations.
And then I thought of something I hadn’t really thought of before.
Often, we are just one stop in a person’s larger quest for information… or tennis shoes… or whathaveyou. Speaking for myself, I sometimes look at my site(s) as a be-all-end-all sort of destination, instead of diversion or quick stop. How might our websites change if we designed them to serve as spring boards to and landing strips from other (potentially completely unrelated) websites? How much could our users’ experiences improve if we anticipated their offsite needs and acknowledged them onsite, even if that meant sending them away? What are the potential rewards for this sort of UX approach?