Imagine a row of 20 plates all spinning on sticks. There is one person frantically running around trying to spin all these plates, trying to divide their attention between all the plates. Running backwards and forwards trying to keep them all going.
Quite a stressful thought, isn’t it? But we bet it also sounds quite familiar. Even while writing this blog, I was distracted at least 6 or 7 times by emails and messages from the rest of the team!
A few months ago we attended a Vested coffee morning and one of the panelists, behavioural psychologist Simon Moore, spoke about how people create a list first thing in the morning. As soon as they see how much there is to do they start to cross off tasks that are less important, already dropping things if they are going to be too difficult or take too long to complete. This only highlights further how short our attention is, especially if a task is going to be particularly hard or take a long time.
If we go back to the plate analogy, you need to make them spend a little extra time at your plate, attract and keep their attention rather than either moving or or simply dropping your plate. So we thought of two simple and easy things that you can do to make sure your site can keep them interested. So here are our tips to keep your audience’s attention.
Quick loading time to keep their attention
Did you know? In a blog by HubSpot (updated in 2019), they found an 80% decrease in a sites conversion rate when the loading time was increased from 1 to 4 seconds – which highlights just how quickly clients expect sites to load!
So how can you keep your page loading time down? It’s easy to forget to crop and optimise new images going in for that weekly blog – it quickly adds up and can affect your site performance – which Google will penalise in the near future.
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The easiest way of doing this is ensuring that your site structure is easy to navigate. Make sure that your clients don’t have to click through too many pages, or go through too many steps before they are able to access the information they need.
For this there is an unofficial rule called the Three-click rule. This says that a user should be able to access all the information they need on your site in three clicks, which isn’t much when you think about it. When designing your site map it is worth trying this out, seeing how many clicks it would take a user to move around the site. Obviously this won’t be achievable for everything on your site but it’s a good benchmark to try and work to.
Of course, there are many, many more considerations as to how to retain a user – and encourage their return! Design, UX, UI, CX, parallax, silent spacing, the list goes on. We’ve guided many a client through the best-practice methods, while also experimenting and analysing with many others. Get in touch if we managed to keep your attention all this time!