(Stacy Lynch) For the past several months I’ve been trying to answer a simple question: "If you want to really wow people online, what should you focus on most?" Research is expensive, leadership energy is at a premium and there’s a desperate need for prioritization at every level.

From that question emerged a just-released Media Management Center study that answers some very fundamental questions about what matters most online and what it takes to cut through the overwhelming amount of information.

And overwhelmed is how many users feel online. When it's a subject they care about, the Internet's seemingly infinite volume is wonderful. When it's not, it's a nightmare. People varied greatly in how successfully they seemed to manage the volumes of information available. Particularly in the news realm, users urgently sought ways to get what they wanted (and only what they wanted) with the least effort.

As we listened to dozens of heavy Internet users talk about their experiences online, it brought to mind a term coined by Walter Lippmann back in 1922: "cognitive miserliness." What Lippmann described was the way human beings process new information with the least mental effort. Human beings look for shortcuts to sort and sift new or unfamiliar information quickly. People try to relate new information to things they already know, stick to familiar territory and limit the amount of information coming in. The more knowledge and experience they have, the more quickly and efficiently they can process information. The less they know, the more likely they'll feel overwhelmed and disoriented when encountering something unfamiliar.

It was as if Lippmann were describing how users are coping with 2008's Internet. All around the Internet, users are being "cognitive misers" in the sites they choose and how they choose them. Particularly when it comes to news - widely seen as ubiquitous and largely "all the same" - users aggressively employ ways to limit or manage the amount of information they’re dealing with.

One important aspect of cognitive miserliness is how knowledge and experience impacts the challenge. For heavy news users who bring a large amount of knowledge to the table, the experience and expectations are wildly different from light news consumers. Rather than point toward universal solutions, this study shows how important it is to understand who the audience is (and isn't) when designing Web strategies.

What I found in my study is that the most important thing for news organizations to learn is to respect 'cognitive miserliness.' Web sites that understand and help users cope with information online win; those that create work for users suffer.

The results of this work were just published: "WHAT IT TAKES TO BE A WEB FAVORITE," is based on joint research by MMC and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Download the complete study at www.mediamanagementcenter.org/webconsumer.asp.
And let me know what you think.


Stacy Lynch, a consultant and MMC associate, was formerly Director of Innovation for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and research manager for MMC's Readership Institute. She teaches in various MMC programs and has created a new MMC seminar on customer focus that will debut October 5-8, featuring not only the Web favorite research but also not-yet-released additional research on what makes consumers think sites are "easy to use."