An important factor of making a successful website is understanding the motive of the average user of your website. Why do users use your website? Can you make changes to your website based on this knowledge?

Common Motives

Finding out the motive of users on your website is fairly easy. Here are a few examples: If you run a blog, or a similar type of website that has articles, the motive of your users is probably to learn about your selected topic. There are features on a blog that allow the users to interact, but there are a lot more people that will read your blog than people that will read your blog and then comment. If you run a forum, the motive of most users is to meet people, and probably discuss topics under the broader topic of your forum. For example, if you run a sports forum, you will have users that will want to discuss football, rugby, cricket, etc.

There is no one answer for this. It all depends on your specific website. Something like a blog or a forum is simple, but for more advanced type websites, such as social networks, it’s harder to understand why a typical user uses your website.

Why is it important that you know the motive of your user?

You should spend time developing your website based on the motives of your users. For example, you don’t think that Facebook became so popular because Mark Zuckerberg spent so much time working on the developer API for Facebook applications. Of course not. Facebook became so popular because it’s creators spent a lot of time making it an easy to use place for people to connect with their friends. They knew that people who used their site wanted to connect to their friends, that was their motive for being there, so they focused on that and made it happen.