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Psychology for Predicting Internet Behavior Patterns

Authors:
Nadejda Abramova
Olga Shurygina
Alexander Kondratiev
Ivan Yamshchikov

Keywords: user segmentation; cognitive psychology; Internet behavior

Abstract:
Yandex[10] is an international search engine with more than 19 million users daily only in Russia. In order to improve their daily search-experience and make interfaces more user-friendly, Yandex carries out a great number of research activities. This research was aimed at finding a reasonably fragmented audience segmentation that should be based on psychological principles and be automatically processed. We assume that every person has his search behavior characteristics that could be explained by some stable psychological type. By search behavior we mean all the actions the users undertake to find the answers on the Internet: request formulation, quantity, timing and duration of clicks and views, returns to the pages visited before, the habitual usage of tabs and windows, navigation within the service and so on. Using cognitive psychology, we have managed to create the segmentation that has certain predictive power and, therefore, could be used in industrial applications. Based on the qualitative, as well as on the quantitative, analysis of the user-behavior, we have developed two binary scales that split the audience in four groups. The first scale “Analytic – Synthetic” could be roughly characterized as a scale describing the style of information processing, that is more natural for a user and classifies the attention markers. The second one “Logical – Ethical” deals with the informational priorities. We describe these two scales and show how they can be found from the users’ behavior. We give a brief explanation of how interactions with the service could be improved based on the knowledge of user’s psychological characteristics. Though all results obtained are based on a specific service and can vary from country to country due to the cultural differences, we strongly believe that these two scales, addressing the fundamental priorities of human personality, could be applied for other products and services. Moreover, understanding of general principles that guide the behavior of each user group could help generate user behavior hypotheses to other behavior researchers.

Pages: 95 to 98

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2014

Publication date: July 20, 2014

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-3972

ISBN: 978-1-61208-361-2

Location: Paris, France

Dates: from July 20, 2014 to July 24, 2014