Information scent & the myth of 3-clicks

 Web users are happy clicking if they are confident they are following a scent to their goal.

It’s a long time since I came across the 3-click rule but it reared its head the other day. The 3-click ‘rule’ is based on the ‘fact’ that web users don’t like to click and if they can’t find want they want  in 3-clicks they give up and try another website.

The evidence doesn’t back this up.  Research shows the opposite.  Users don’t stop clicking after 3-clicks; when Testing the Three-Click Rule researchers found that:

there wasn’t any more likelihood of a user quitting after three clicks than after 12 clicks… in our study, users often kept going, some as many as 25 clicks…

In the usability testing there was no correlation between number of clicks and successful task completion; no differences in the click numbers for successful tasks versus unsuccessful tasks; and no correlation between number of clicks and user satisfaction.

So if the number of clicks doesn’t matter, what does?

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