Attention Span as an Important Factor in UI / UX of eCommerce Applications

Introduction

Humanity's capacity for concentration has declined over time. The severity of the problem is still being debated by experts (alarming studies indicate that the average attention span is only eight seconds!). What is undeniably true is that people of all ages are finding it more and harder to sit still and pay attention to one thing without looking at their phones or being distracted.

How you design a website will be greatly influenced by the decreased attention span of the ordinary individual. Why? because you have a decreasing window of opportunity to persuade users to interact with your content and stay on your website. They make a decision in a matter of seconds after visiting your homepage.

So in this blog, we have researched various papers, drawn key points and conclusions from them as well as conducted a survey across various users, and made conclusions based on them and later can be noted that these conclusions match those with the research papers

Research Papers:

Microsoft’s Research and Report of Spring 2015 - Attention spans Consumer Insights, Microsoft Canada

Key points:

1. Human attention span is dwindling - Researchers in Canada surveyed 2,000 participants and studied the brain activity of 112 others using electroencephalograms (EEGs). Microsoft found that since the year 2000 (or about when the mobile revolution began) the average attention span dropped from 12 seconds to eight seconds in 2013, which is less than the average attention span of a goldfish(9 seconds).

1] 3 types of attention:

• Sustained (Prolonged focus — Maintaining prolonged focus during repetitive activities)
• Selective (Avoiding distraction — Maintaining response in the face of distracting or competing stimuli)
• Alternating (Efficiently switching between tasks — Shifting attention between tasks demanding different cognitive skills)

2] Top factors that impact attention:

• Media consumption
• Social media usage
• Technology adoption rate
• Multi-screening behavior

3] Addressing all three types of attention:

• Sustained — Be transparent, personal, relevant, and get to the point.
• Selective — Defy expectations, keep it moving, and use simplicity to focus on your message.
• Alternating — Embed calls to action, be interactive, continue experiences onto other screens, and use sequential messaging

Full Article: https://dl.motamem.org/microsoft-attention-spans-research-report.pdf

First Impressions Matter: Why Great Visual Design Is Essential

Key Points:

1. People make snap judgments. It takes only 1/10th of a second to form a first impression about a person. Websites are no different.
2. It takes about 50 milliseconds (ms) (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they’ll stay or leave.
3. It takes 2.6 seconds for the eyes to settle on key areas of a web page.

The six website sections that drew the most interest from viewers were:

• The main navigation menu. Almost as popular as the logo, subjects spent an average of 6.44 seconds viewing the menu.
• The institution’s logo. Users spent 6.48 seconds focused on this area before moving on.
• The search box. Users focused for just over 6 seconds.
• The site’s main image. Users’ eyes fixated for an average of 5.94 seconds.
• The site’s written content. Users spent about 5.59 seconds.
• The bottom of a website. Users spent about 5.25 seconds.

Full Article: https://cxl.com/blog/first-impressions-matter-the-importance-of-great-visual-design/

Key points from attention span concerning eCommerce from different blogs

1. The most effective approaches if you want to increase the attention span and conversion rates are to use A/B testing, digital analytics, focusing on copywriting, and user-experience design.
2. It’s possible to improve conversion rates by 35% if you improve your checkout design.
3. 73% of consumers will switch from a poorly designed mobile site to one that makes purchasing easier.
4. Making CTA buttons (like a Click-To-Call button) can create a 45% boost in clicks.
5. If page loading times change from 1 second to 3 seconds, bounce rates on mobile sites increase by 32%.
6. Slow-loading sites increase the abandonment rate by 75%
7. Exit-Intent popups have helped recover 53% of abandoning visitors.

Full Article: https://wpforms.com/ecommerce-statistics/

https://thrivemyway.com/ecommerce-stats/

https://cxl.com/guides/bounce-rate/benchmarks/

Product Promotion in an Era of Shrinking Attention Span

Key points:

1. The present-day challenge for the marketing companies is the noise created by promotion and campaign messages in the electronic and mobile media and the skewed time at their disposal for customers to gain attention!
2. Consumers who have more digital lives are actually getting better at processing information and then encoding that into memory
3. To get consumers ‘attention, tactics like branded content, native advertising, and useful, entertaining, and shareable content work best
4. It‘s really important that marketing communications be very clear, concise, pointed, very personal, and relevant, anything that will lead consumers to want to engage with the content.
5. Today, marketers don‘t always have the luxury of building a story, so they need to craft headlines that can say it all with a catchy message as clear and concise as possible.

Full Article: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315786448_Product_Promotion_in_an_Era_of_Shrinking_Attention_Span

Winning the Fight Against a Website User’s Attention Span

Key points:

The Faster the Better -

• Reduce server response times
• Condense images and media
• Prioritize visible content
• Enable browser caching
• Optimize CSS, HTML, and JavaScript
• Minimize redirects

Readers Follow An F-Pattern -

• A horizontal movement along the top of your content area.
• A second, but shorter, horizontal movement further down the page.
• A vertical movement, which researchers called a “slow and systematic scan” down the left side of the content.

3. Engage With Video Content-

• Homepage video
• Product demonstrations
• Brand story/history video
• Client testimonial
• User-generated video

4. Grab Visitors’ Attention with a Friendly Reminder

Full Article: https://www.towermarketing.net/blog/winning-the-fight-against-a-website-users-attention-span/

User Survey

After evaluating all these relevant papers and case studies, we performed a survey based on the user’s attention span and what are the reasons for the same while you are using or ordering from any eCommerce website or application. As we all know that Instagram Reels are trending a lot and have a big impact on reducing the attention span of a user. Therefore, we asked users about the duration required for them to decide if they want to continue watching it or skip it. We also asked the user’s about their attention when they view a visually appealing image, element, or any graphics on the website, which does let us know that good and a visually more appealing User Interface does have an impact on the attention of a user as well as on the conversion or click on ads of the e-commerce websites.

Survey Link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScheDr3-pxOB5dE0nEBf9tcuznIHA6UrJZEAiXULQLBXJDQdw/viewform

Survey Results

For more insights on results, you can download the sheet : https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KL3AHDA5LnnTgDYb7jcT9jEAjitt7AsjJ1wE069ddpw/edit

Conclusion

After evaluating the survey results, it can be concluded that Ecommerce companies can’t really count on customers to focus on their advertisements or other information for more than a few seconds without taking some sort of interest-piquing action or visually appealing User Interface. Shorter attention spans are a significant impact in how much media is consumed nowadays, despite widespread denial on the side of consumers. The most successful method to get beyond that obstacle appears to be to provide content, interface or experience that somehow resonates to those customers. However, using strong graphics or having a good interaction interface and experience may help the e-commerce application’s conversion rates.