Website Practices

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Wayfinding

Good website design leads to better user performance and experience, creating a positive image of the company. The main reason why users have a bad experience while visiting a website includes not finding what they want, having a difficult time using the website and outdated information. Humans follow a predictive model of wayfinding that can be applied in intelligent browsing interfaces (West & Leskovec, 2012). Wayfinding is a concept that encompasses all the ways people locate themselves physically and navigate from place to place. It can be divided into some different subcategories. Some of its main categories are cognitive mapping, decision generation, and decision execution. Improving wayfinding in AmCham Romania's website will be crucial to achieve a better user experience.

Cognitive Mapping

Cognitive mapping has to do mainly with the environment the user finds himself in at a specific time. It relates the layout of the site with the sensory activity of the user. For example, a site with a lot of ads makes the user uncomfortable and less likely to spend a lot of time on the site (Jankowski & Hamari & Wątróbski, 2019). On the other hand, if the site has a visually appealing display, the user immerses in the layout and relates the good layout with a good website. If a website presents a lot of superfluous information the user might feel overwhelmed with the amount of information presented to him and might feel confused when trying to choose the best path to get to the information he is looking for.

Decision Generation

Decision Generation is the part where the user generates a series of decisions that will complete his/her task. All of the decisions have two aspects to it: planned behavior and expected image. For instance, let’s say that the user has been browsing through several pages and decides that he wants to go back to the home page. If he finds the word “Home” written on the website he will automatically believe that by clicking on that word he will go back to the homepage of the website. The decision that he made on taking the fastest route by clicking the word “Home” is what is called planned behavior. The second he clicks the button, he expects to be redirected to the homepage of the website. The visualization in his mind of the website’s homepage is what is called the expected image.

Decision Execution

The last aspect of wayfinding has to do with decision execution. This occurs right after the expected image comes to the users' mind. The decision execution compares the users' expected image with what actually appeared on his screen. If the actual image matches his expectation, he is satisfied by the result. If instead, something goes wrong during this process (ex: he is not redirected to the home page or the home word doesn’t contain a hyperlink), the user will feel lost and annoyed with the poor quality of the site, and will leave him with a poor impression of the site.

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