Customer's Attention Review

As we continue this journey of learning about digital psychology and persuasion with CLX Institute mini degree, we are going to be talking more about first impressions, display ads on your website and whether you should have them, human decision-making process and what really affects our decisions and a lot more.

If you have a website and have regular visitors on it, do you display ads on the website? If you do that, then you need to know some interesting insights that will allow you to gauge the attention of customers and make them do the desired action on your website.

I’m sure you might have yourself observed this that when you are on a website, display ads can be distracting and put you out of focus. Sometimes, you might even forget what your purpose was for visiting that website. Studies and experiments have shown that the greater number of ads on the webpage, the more distracting it is for the users. However, if there is a huge display ad, then the addition of smaller ads doesn’t affect the focus to the extent as the big ad does. The level to which the users feel distracted depend on a lot of factors: advertiser of the ad, size of the ad, number of ads, colours used in the ad, emotions of the users towards the thing being advertised and a lot of other factors.

So, if you want to maximise user’s attention on your website and make them do the required action, minimise the display ads on your website.

Talking about keeping users attention and building trust, we have to talk about first impressions and why they matter so much. The look and feel of the website are the first thing that users first come across. It can either be a step in building trust or destroying it completely. If the design is distracting with a lot of unnecessary elements on it, the font is not readable, the design is not flowing well and other things, that just say to the user out loud, ‘Don’t trust ME!’ That’s why it’s very crucial to have a design and feel that eases the users while they are going through their website.

Some of the tips that can help you make good first impressions:

Visual:

1.     Avoid unnecessary clutter from the website. It makes very hard for the users to navigate through the website.

2.     User familiar and conventional design. This means if people have a perception of how an e-commerce website should look like, use that for your advantage. They will be more likely to believe and trust you as you are confirming to their experiences.

Your Value Proposition:

1.     The webpage should make it very clear what’s the purpose of the website. There are four ways that you can customise that:

a.     Headline: Tell straight away the end-benefits. This builds interest and curiosity.

b.     Sub-Headline: Here you mention the specific explanation of what the offer is and who is it for.

c.     3 bullet points: Bullet points are a great way of presenting information and stating the benefits. They are easy to read and reaffirms the benefits of your offer.

d.     Visual: Use relevant high-quality images/graphics to convey the message. Anytime, images speak louder than words. So, don’t forget to use stock images/illustrations for your advantage.

If you just focus on improving these aspects, you will have a better experience for the customers than most other websites. And just working on this aspect can massively boost the user attention on your website or webpage. Talking about attention and what makes the people pay their attention on something is dependent on a lot of factors. Some of them that might be helpful for you to understand your customers better are:

External:

1.     Intensity: Human beings are sensory animals. Any intense experience with any of the senses can get their attention. For example, a loud sound, bright flashlight, strong smell and you get it.

2.     Changes in intensity: We, as human beings, have evolved to see changes in patterns. If there was some movement in the bushes and change of sounds, we knew to be aware of the animals in the wild, right? Similarly, we can use changes in intensity can get our attention. For example, if you are in a room with loud music, you get used to it. And now somehow, the music is stopped, does it have your attention? It has, right? That’s what change in intensity does.

3.     Size: Something that are ridiculously huge or something that’s very small have our attention. Don’t you notice an elephant while it’s walking?

4.     Contrast: We love to compare things and see how one is better/worse than the other. This could also mean before/after effects of a product and other things that show contrast. A small white dot on a black paper, shows contrast.

5.     Repetition: We like things that are familiar to us and that’s why we pay attention to the things we have already come across.

Internal:

1.     Interests: Whether something will get your attention or not is also dependent on if that thing interests to you or not. If you ask me, if understanding how operating system works is interesting, I’d say no and probably it will not get my attention. But if you ask if whether understanding our brain and how it functions interests me, heck yes, it does. I want to check out what you have to offer.

2.     Habits and Attitudes: Human beings are creatures of habits and whether something will get my attention or not depends on if it’s obstructing or supporting an existing habit or attitude.

3.     Emotions: Emotions play a huge role in decision making and what we pay attention to. The more emotions we have for something, the more we’re likely to pay attention to it.

4.     Past Experiences: Our past experiences with a certain kind of product or service also affects our attention. If I had a really great experience with your product, it’s highly likely I’ll pay attention to your message. But if no, I don’t think I’ll care enough about it.

So, these are external and internal factors that control our attention mostly. What are the factors you think you need to work on to make sure you get your customer’s attention?

These will give you a basic idea how you can get started with grabbing your users attention and make then make them take the desired action. Do let me know if you found this article helpful and what strategies you’ll be using to enhance the experience of your customers so they stick around for longer!