Modes of Information seeking - Monitor and Being Aware

The third blog in my series of three about Marcia Bates Modes of Information Seeking and how it can be applied in e-commerce.

Monitor

When customers monitor, the mindset is Directed and Passive; the customer already knows they are interested in a product but want information or products suggested to them.

We see this in two situations in e-commerce:

1.     Customisation - the action of explicitly choosing products they want to see information about, usually via email

2.     Re-visiting - Visiting specific pages to see what’s new on the site

An example of customisation is when a customer signs up for an email list choosing a specific product category. It could be ‘What’s New’ or a particular product category like ‘blouses’ on a fashion website.

When designing navigation for a large electronic retailer in Australia, we saw the re-visiting pattern. We noticed a high volume of customers in Gaming visiting the ‘Upcoming’ page to see and pre-order games. They were actively checking the site in the product categories they loved to find new products to buy.

The features to design to support this mode are:

• Email lists that customers can actively choose. They should be specific enough to be engaging, but not too granular that they need a lot of manual creation by the digital marketing team ‘All shirts and blouses’ one I would like to see on the Witchery site

• Creation of ‘New’ or ‘Upcoming’ pages organised by newest products first

• Creation of product landing pages that are optimised for search engines

• Allowing bookmarking of pages and only products to support refinding and therefore monitoring

Being Aware

Being aware is the most subtle mindset of them all. The customers place themselves in a situation where products or information is suggested to them, but are not actively looking for an item to buy.

There are two situations where this happens on e-commerce sites;

1.     Personalisation – when a website suggested products the customer may be interested in based on their previous purchases, purchases of others, or similar product categories. It is passive because the customer did not choose to see these recommendations

2.     Advertising – when an e-commerce website advertises to the customer on other websites based on previous behaviour.

Customers do not explicitly go looking for these products, but recommendations and advertising will trigger a visit to the site if they are in the right mindset. In my own experience, there is a particular skincare brand that advertises a 20% discount on purchases to me on news websites. If I need one of their products, seeing the advertising reminds me to buy them, and get the discount.  

If you are interested in learning more about IA, please join me at my IA masterclasses starting 20 July 2021.