Do You Overstimulate?
This post was made Oct 31, 2007 by Carlos del Rio
Most web users have short attention spans. So you need to cater to this in your design and copy on landing pages.
For design this means generally means minimalism. Reducing the number of color that you employ make the visual processing easy. You can easily make the most important parts of your page the most interesting by using bold (or contrasting) colors from the main body. This includes your call to action and action point (e.g. submit buttons).
Note: Because of a broken image I have had to edit this post.
For example page color can beused almost exclusively to draw attention to action point, value of the offering, and call to action. Some successful pages employ very little copy other than the bullets or caption to the image. Visitors only need to commit a few seconds to see what is being offered. They either see the value of the offer or they leave.
Unfortunately it is sometimes necessary to require a large number of fields. The more questions that you ask a visitor to answer the greater the amount of trust you need to build. If you are not a well know trusted brand this means you will need to sacrifice brevity to accomplish the goal.
One way to reduce processing time is to use pictures to communicate your points. I wrote about using pictures on landing pages a couple of weeks ago, so did GrokDotCom. The important point is that not only can a picture express complicated points quickly they can also control the scan pattern of visitors, making them more likely to take specific actions.
Because English speakers read left to right and top to bottom your most important concept should be in the upper left quadrant of your design. Eye tracking studies suggest that there is a Golden Triangle that 100% of visitors will see. If you are hitting 100% viewership of your important message or image you are putting your best forward. If you aren’t getting reaction you should strongly consider re-tooing your message.
Keeping landing pages simple:
- Use pictures
- Use bullets
- Reduce the number of fields in forms
- Maintain a consistent message
- Minimize required reading
- Reduce distractions
