Additional website faux pas to avoid
The information economy is making attention-deficit syndromes de rigueur. Making sure visitors can perform some reward-based action while waiting for a page to load is crucial to increasing transactions. The longer it takes for a visitor to interact positively, the less likely they are to do so. Colors, sounds, animations -- everything plays a role in different measure based on your audience's psychology.
For example, the Barbie site loads and Barbie starts talking. Her banter is followed by a movie with sound. The CEO of an international firm told me that he is offended when a site starts making sounds at him. In an office situation, he said, that's distracting to co-workers.
I accept his statement because of the psychology behind it. The Barbie site isn't for adults in a work situation. But what about sound on sites in general? Most adults don't object to a website with sound provided that it starts softly and they can control the play and volume. Show obvious volume and start-stop-pause controls, and most adults are happy to listen.
Colors are often another design faux pas. It's pretty well documented (see the bibliography) that the more colors and more varied the palette is, the longer it takes for the brain-mind to determine what it's looking at. Again, this is great if the reward is recognized and worthwhile -- not so great if the visitor is left expecting more and getting less. The Barbie and Expedition Africa sites use colors extremely well for their audiences -- the Barnes & Noble site, not so much so. The colors are too male oriented (except where they want you to look).
Most people might consider using gender-dominant colors to direct focus a solid strategy. But remember that this site takes a long time to load without much reward offered in the interim. A solution to this would be to have some static yet engaging text appear to hold the visitor's attention until the screen finishes loading. The text should serve as both prelude and preview to the animation so that visitors are rewarded for their time.
Summary
Designing correctly is actually much easier than designing incorrectly. Regardless of rich media, content type, website function, and all the rest, it comes down to:
- Knowing the audience and knowing them well. Don't guess. Observe and understand.
- Reward them for their time, especially if it's time waiting for something.
- Use sociality concepts to draw visitors into your site. You don't have to go nuts with social tools, but you do have to be pro-social.
Final note: NextStage has an automated online tool that does a great deal of what I did during the iMedia master class and in this article.
Joseph Carrabis is CRO and founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global.
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