Our society is living in time of short attention spans and soundbites. People want things now, not later, and they simply won’t wait. In a world where people are busier, opportunities are greater, information is a click of a button a way, and next-day delivery is the norm, how can we catch (and keep) people’s attention before they move on to the next big thing?
When it comes to your website, this can be a bit of an issue. To make a distractible audience feel a desire to put in the effort of going through your site isn’t an easy task, especially with so many websites and digital platforms vying for their increasingly fleeting attention.
So, how do you do it? Well, it starts with design, and that starts with us. We have compiled five awesome website design tips that’ll keep your audience’s attention captive.
Novelty Is No Nonsense
Our brain is constantly receiving and filtering sensory information, blocking out everything that it doesn’t perceive as important and focusing our attention on what it thinks is. One of the key ways it directs our attention is with novelty. In other words, when something is new and unique, we’re more likely to pay attention.
In terms of a website, this means keeping things unexpected and original when it comes to layout and design. For example, splitting text up into different formats across the page rather than one long chunk is way more likely to grab the attention of your reader (or rather, your reader’s brain).
A popular way to do this is through infographics, in which information is split into bitesize chunks, laid out in a unique and quirky way, intercepted with little images and a variety of colours are used.
As long as you’re staying true to your brand, you can get as wild and imaginative as you want!
Plan for the Scan
Never expect that your audience is actually going to read through all your text – there might be a few who do but the majority will just be there for the headings and the pictures!
Plan your content for the scanners. Make sure that your headings are bold and contain lots of useful information, block out your main copy into readable chunks and don’t waffle. Whatever you do, make sure you keep things interesting! If you get bored reading your own website copy, then chances are your audience won’t even get past the first line.
One way to keep attention is to lay out your content in an ‘F’ pattern, which has been a proven shape that we naturally scan a page of text in. You can also use different design techniques, such as alternations in fonts and formatting of certain text, to attract your audience to the content you really want them to read.
Speed is Essential
You know what we said earlier about limited attention spans? Well, it turns out that your audience is so impatient to move on that even a delay of 2 seconds can increase your bounce rate by 50%. Essentially, you could be losing half of your potential customers because of 2 seconds.
By designing carefully and understanding what slows down a website and how you can help speed things up, you’re going to keep your customers engaged and focused on you. What more could you ask for?
Interactive Content
This kind of ties in with the idea of novelty, as well as the fact users love multi-media content and are usually suckers for anything interactive. Even something as simple as a ‘roll over to find out more’ can entice your audience to continue going through your website. It’s getting them to actively engage and do something rather than just serving them a ton of boring content, and that peaks their interest and keeps them focused.
Don’t Overdo It
Our final tip for today is to not go overboard. Sure, it might seem like a great idea to fill your site with a ton of interactive content, images, videos and lots of different formats of text, but this is complete overkill. Your website will look cluttered and your users will just click straight off. They wouldn’t even know where to start if they tried to!
Keep your design simple, but with enough to draw your audience in. It’s a fine balance between too little and too much, so play around until your get that perfect harmony.
Get Help
If you think your business might be suffering because you’re not too hot on this design malarkey, you can ask our team to help – we’ll be more than happy to! Design is our passion and we love to create beautiful websites that appeal to the audience you want to captivate.
