User experience (known in Internet circles as UX) will make or break your online business. When site visitors arrive on a page of your site and leave quickly, we call that a “bounce.” It isn’t a fun metric like it sounds; a high “bounce rate” means more users are not finding what they need to stay on your page or site.
Internet marketing mogul Yoast places three interpretations on a high bounce rate:
- The user quickly found what they needed and left.
- The user found nothing inviting to engage their interest.
- Your audience doesn’t fit the content or purpose of your page or site.
Why does this matter? Marketing executives believe that more customer engagement leads to improved customer loyalty (80%), increased revenue (76%), and higher profits (75%).
In other words, when people become engaged with your site, they are more likely to buy your products or services and you make more money.
The Importance of the Mobile Experience
Before we look at factors to raise your user attention and lower your bounce rate, we need to emphasize the vital importance of your site’s mobile experience. Regardless of whether you sell products or services, your site users’ experience on mobile is absolutely crucial. Here’s why:
- Smartphones are used in approximately 63% of all online retail sales.
- Nearly 3/4 of the worldwill use only smartphones to access the internet by 2025.
- 85%of adults think that a company’s website when viewed on a mobile device should be as good or better than its desktop website.
- 57%of internet users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed website on mobile.
- 52% of customers are less likely to engage with the company because of bad mobile experience.
Interpreted simply, if users have any trouble navigating or engaging with your mobile website, they are GONE! No second chances – because your competitors have likely already learned this lesson and offer a superior mobile UX.
Factors to Raise User Attention
With your mobile and regular sites, there are numerous development and design tactics you can incorporate to raise user attention and keep people engaged with your site pages. Let’s look at the most common.
Speed
Flash back to Lightning McQueen’s pre-race meditation in the Disney Pixar movie Cars from 2006: “Speed…I am speed…” Internet users and Google all hate slow websites. Basically, if your site, traditional or mobile, doesn’t fully load in about three seconds, you lose. Users chalk it up as a bad UX and move on. Several issues can affect loading speed, including images, interactives, and other design or backend elements.
Interactive Design
Users love a site design that is simple but flexible and allows for some engagement. One example would be a choice for how much content the user wants to see. A box or series of boxes with images contain short titles that describe the content. Hovering over or clicking the box reveals more relevant content. Even simple action boxes (Click Here or Learn More) that change color when a user hovers over them lend some variety to a static page. Other options include webinars, podcasts, videos, and other content that users can enjoy.
Novelty Features
Use eye-catching novelty features to convey information quickly and in more interesting ways. “Break up walls of text that will bore people quickly, insert images, videos, facts, statistics, quotes, and other novel elements to keep the experience fresh throughout, and your message can be significantly more appealing.”
Engaging Content
No matter how you present your content, the information itself should be tailored to capture the attention of your target audience and be of high quality. Users should find something to use every time they engage with your site pages. Blogs, landing pages, video, podcasts, and any other content should be highly relevant and instantly usable.
Reduced Clutter
This can also help with speed/loading time, but eliminate anything from your site pages that does not directly communicate your message with your visitors. Too many ads, textures, moving images, pop-ups, and other distractions make the UX complicated and annoying. Google has had success with such a simple design for a reason, and many major sites have copied their efforts toward simplicity with great success.
Experienced Johnson City Website Design
1-FIND offers superior website design right here in Johnson City to help your local business engage with users near and far. Featuring local SEO, responsive design, mobile options and more, we can design an engaging UX for your users to raise profitability from your website. Contact us today to learn more.
