TLDR: Clear research result: creativity has a strong effect on satisfaction with websites if usability is right. Serendipity is the secret to success for effective digital communication.
Serendipity, an English term, describes something similar to a lucky coincidence, a beautiful coincidence.
In communication and advertising, serendipity describes the secret of success of good creative communication: it surprises positively. If recipients succeed in being pleasantly surprised, the brand and reputation of a company are also rated much more positively.
"Surprise your audience!"
"Surprise your audience" - that's what everyone wants, and it's more than 100 years old hat in advertising. You'd think that a concept called serendipity would also be firmly entrenched as the secret to success for digital communications. It isn't.
The communication world 1.0, the web, is still dominated by the search paradigm of the founding days. Internet is the big archive where everything can be found, you just have to search for it. "Do you know what you want? Then search for it"- is still the essential anchor for website navigation concepts. Rich in surprises, on the other hand, is the communication world 2.0, social media. Here, information can be discovered because it finds its own way along the graphs. This concept can be transferred to websites to some extent.
A surprising online KPI
The concept of using website impressions to showcase things that were not searched for is still in its infancy. No wonder that the introduction of a KPI called "Serendipity" came as a surprise to many participants in the communication benchmarking "Web Excellence Forum". The idea: the better the measured value for "serendipity", the more effective the communication on the corporate website.
To measure this metric, we ask website visitors on more than 25 websites not only whether they found what they were looking for. But also whether they found something interesting that they were not looking for.
The analysis of more than 150,000 online surveys on the corporate websites of major companies, shows a clear result. Serendipity is one of the strongest drivers of website quality.
Driver analysis: What influences satisfaction with a website visit?
Conclusion: Surprise the best
Can 150,000 website visitors be wrong? Not likely. Usability is necessary for success, but serendipity is the key to being among the best.
Every creative agency should be happy to hear that. Surprise your website visitors - with interesting and attractive content!