Engaging people in your organization through your website doesn’t just happen. An important aspect of website design is developing emotional connection with your audience. Emotional connection is what encourages your audience to return to your webpage. What creates a sense of emotional connection between your audience and the information on your website will vary by your specific users and context—but it aims to help your audience see how the information affects them in real and concrete ways and how the information will be useful to them. For example, if your website is trying to convince people in your county to develop better stormwater pollution prevention practices, including photos of recognizable landmarks in your community that have been affected by stormwater pollution can help your audience see that stormwater is a problem in their own community and that the issues addressed on the website concretely affect them where they live—those images can motivate your audience’s interest in the website.
But emotional connection is about more than placing a few images on your page—allowing true interaction-allowing users to create a space and place for community and to engage in productive inquiry activities that are important to them will create the kind of connection with your audience that keeps them returning to your website. Think about the websites you use most frequently—you don’t just read information, you learn something that allows you to do something that is important to you. My favorite example of effective emotional connection is on a site for bird watchers. The developers—a group of environmental science students—created a series of pages where users could learn to identify local birds by sight and sound and then enter information on an interactive map about where and when they first spotted each type of bird during the year. The result was that the website offered an intricate view of local birds’ migration patterns across the state—data that would not have been as rich if only the folk developing the website had noted the bird sightings. But this aspect of the website did more—it suggested to users that their own knowledge was valuable—and it gave users a reason to return to the site to see new updates.
Creating effective emotional connection means that you understand who your audience is and what is important and useful to them—not just what you want them to know.
How you develop your website reveals how you envision your audience—as passive receptors of information or as participants who bring valuable information of their own to the website. Which kind of website keep you returning? (For more information on creating a relationship with your audience, see Anne Wysocki’s fabulous article: Impossibly distinct: On form/content and word/image in two pieces of computer-based interactive multimedia Computers and Composition 18(2001) 137-162.)
