3 Aspects of a Website that gives a Strong Impression
I am sure you have experience this moment once too many times. You searched for something on Google and when the results comes out, you clicked on it and the moment you are on the website, you scroll and glance for just a few seconds before clicking the back button. If I ask you the last website that made you click on the back button, you sure wouldn’t have remembered it. And that’s the problem! What if that website was yours? All the effort and money you spent on getting the user to your site will all go down to waste, if your website can’t even hold the attention of your users for a minute.
Internet Users are not forgiving; they will make a split second decision without blinking if they want to leave your site before even moving forward to more stuff on your site. So how do we prevent this and make a killer impression for the users on your website?
Generally, I would split this down into 3 portions.
• Visual
• Relevance
• Loading Speed
Visual
Google has done an experiment on the role of visual complexity and pro-totypicality regarding first impression of websites. In the studies, the two key visual factors for winning over your users are Simple over- complexity and high pro-totypicality.
Simplicity over Complexity
Our eyes are the window to our mind and our mind dislike stuff that are confusing. When your mind sees a complex visual design, it seeks to understand by deciphering content and the structure of the website. Here I pulled out a representation of a complex design template:
I am very sure your mind wouldn’t even know where to start.
Now take a look at this:
Comparing with what you have seen initially with the landing page given later, let me know which website strikes you as one which you would want to continue surfing. It’s easy to make a choice.
Simple is beautiful.
High prototypicality (Familiarity of Website structure)
Humans are creatures of habit. It’s just the way we are. We sort for the familiar and seek comfort with what we have experienced before. We get very accustomed to the way different categories of the website displays and the structure itself and we somehow just keep liking it that way. For example, you would expect a search filter above the fold for websites that offers air ticket or hotel bookings.
[caption id=”attachment_141" align=”aligncenter” width=”900"]
Jetstar Homepage[/caption]
[caption id=”attachment_142" align=”aligncenter” width=”900"]
Airbnb Homepage[/caption]
Can you see the search filter clearly and familiarly positioned? When we land on a website that is different from our expectations, we often would feel uncomfortable and a natural resistance to the website will form.
When we talk about the user experience of a website, we are not just saying the design must be great. More often than not, it’s about how comfortable a person would feel surfing your site. That means you must ensure that there are proper call to actions, whatever is clickable should be designed in a way the user knows it’s clickable to ensure ease of navigation and quality user experience.
Relevance
Google is a big advocator of how relevant the content of the site is to what the user is searching for. Making sure that your content really fits also means that you might need to build more than one landing page other than your home page.Your business might be offering different services for different types of target audience. More landing pages mean that you will be able to target specific groups, and give attention to their specific needs on the page.
Here’s an example of some of Zendesk Landing pages
-Landing Page for Organic Search: https://www.zendesk.com/
-Landing Page for ppc : https://www.zendesk.com/product/tour
-Landing Page for enterprise: https://www.zendesk.com/enterprise/
-Landing Page for technical customers: https://www.zendesk.com/why-zendesk/customers/
Each landing page message is specifically speaking a different marketing message to a much targeted group of audience. Imagine if you push everyone to a single landing page, then how would your buyers find what they are looking for in a whirlpool of products or services you are offering? Relevance is important to improving user experience. Don’t make surfing through your website a herculean task. Being specific pays a lot.
Loading Speed
Loading speed is a no brainer but yet a lot of websites owners overlooked the importance of it. Our dependency on High speed internet and our hunger to consume content at a very quick pace has molded us into very inpatient users. If your website takes a long time to load when someone lands on your landing page, then the chances that they might leave is very high. Folks expect your website to load as fast as a blink of the eyes.
Akamai and Gomez studies on website loading speed make a huge reference while studying website speed. As old as it is, users are always yearning for a better experience as time goes by, which means that expectations are even higher now and you can’t afford to be diminishing.
The Akamai study had a talk with 1,048 shoppers online and published it in the ending of 2009. This study discovered that:
- 47% shoppers expect a loading time of 2 seconds or less.
- 40% will not continue shopping in your website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
- 52% agrees that their loyalty is depentant on how quickly the pages of the site loads.
- 14% will start shopping at a different site if page loads are slow.
- 23% will not continue to shop and some might even leave the computer.
- 64% of the shoppers will not return to your website if you load speed is too slow.
A Gomez report announced in 2010 — Why Web Performance Matters, had a conversation with 1,500 consumers and web users about their thoughts and opinion on website speed. It discovered that:
- 75% of online users will leave for your competitor’s site if the loading speed is unaccepted during peak hours.
- 88% of the suvyed consumers will not patronise your website again
- Almost 50% of the users felt that that have a low opinion the website if they go through a bad user experience
- More than 30% of the users will share their disappointing expereince with friend and people they kknow.
Going by these findings above, I am sure that you already know how your users and visitors will most likely feel about your website load speed.
Having an understanding of the impression your website has will make you know what your users need, and not what you think they need. They need to have a continuous good impression of your website to remain loyal to your business.
