Okay everyone, let’s face it. Website visitors are the laziest species around!
With an attention span of 8 seconds on average, designing your website to allow your audience to delve deeper into your business online is more important than ever.
“Over 70% of small business websites do not use call to action buttons.”
Surprised? If you are, then you are probably using CTA (call to action) buttons. If you are asking yourself “What is a call to action?”, then you are likely part of the 70%. From our experience, over the last 10 years, I can safely say this statistic is perhaps conservative.
Why Design For The Lazy Visitor?
Quite simply, you are looking to keep them on your website to increase the possibility of them being a new client. If you have been paying attention to our other articles regarding bounce rate, trust, credibility, and engagement, you will understand the importance of taking your personas through a journey.
“Surely, I Should Give My Audience More Credit?”
Do not do this! In order to ensure your visitor gets the most out of your website, you must assume they need to be spoon-fed. Seriously. Your audience does not care, and has 5 of your other competitors open in other tabs ready to go to at any moment. One frustration too many, and they are gone.
Top 5 Ways To Design For The Lazy Visitor
Here are the top 5 ways you can design your website for the lazy visitor:
- Call To Actions – I consider calls to action to comprise of three elements – a title, sub-text to qualify the title and encourage a user to click on the third element; a button in a contrasting colour to your brand to make it pop.
- Chunking – chunk your content to make it easy to digest. Don’t know what it is? Go here.
- Design a journey – once you have your personas, their goals, all your credibility items and trust collateral, you need to map out your users journey from Google right through to a contact form, sprinkling that journey with each of the above.
- Cross-pollinate content – This means including snippets of relevant content on your website that link to other areas of content. For example, on each team member profile; include links to case studies that each team member worked on.
- Infographics, videos and imagery – where possible, allow the eyes to relax with context-relevant high-quality engaging imagery, engaging videos and infographics to avoid textual fatigue.
Need Help?
Designing for the lazy visitor is not easy, and there are a number of other factors you need to consider. However, as always test and measure the effectiveness of your changes.
If you are looking for professional advice on how to design a great user experience, give us a buzz at Burning Fruit.