Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
9.1.3 Drop-Off Rates
Drop-off rates can be a particularly useful way of detecting where there might be
some usability problems on your site. The most common use of drop-off rates is
to identify where in a sequence of pages users are dropping out of or abandon-
ing a process, such as opening an account or completing a purchase. For exam-
ple, assume that the user must fill out the information on a sequence of five
pages to open some type of account.
Table 9.5
reflects the percentage of users
who started the process that actually completed each of the five pages.
In this example, all of the percentages are relative to the number of users
who started the entire process—that is, who got to Page #1. So 89% of the users
who got to Page #1 completed it successfully, 80% of that original number com-
pleted Page #2, and so on. Given the data in
Table 9.5
, which of the five pages
do the users seem to be having the most trouble with? The key is to look at how
many users dropped off from each page—in other words, the difference between
how many got to the page and how many completed it. Those “drop-off percent-
ages” for each of the pages are shown in
Table 9.6
.
Table 9.5 Percentage of users
who started a multipage process
that actually completed each of
the steps.
Page #1
89%
Page #2
80%
Page #3
73%
Page #4
52%
Page #5
49%
Table 9.5 Percentage of users who started a multipage process that actually completed each of the
steps.
Table 9.6 Drop-off percentages
for each page shown in Table
9.5: The difference between
percentage who got to the page
and percentage who completed it
successfully.
Page #1
11%
Page #2
9%
Page #3
7%
Page #4
21%
Page #5
3%
Table 9.6 Drop-off percentages for each page shown in Table 9.5: The difference between percentage
who got to the page and percentage who completed it successfully.
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