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Striving for an “F” Online
Will you read this article all the way through? Probably not. Here’s the punch line: You know that in your gut, but can’t prove it. Well, let’s try. Answer these 3 questions first. Now, open your browser and pull up one of these pages from your site. How many words are on the page? Seriously. Go ahead and count them. Now multiply that by 20%. That’s the number of words your average visitor reads, according to a recently released study(1). If your page contains 500 words of text, your visitor will read 100 of those. Eye tracking studies(2) tell us that people view a web page in an "F" pattern, and focus on information that's presented in headline, subheads, first 2 paragraphs and bulleted lists.” They quickly scan for information related to whatever search brought them to the page. Next question. How many text links appear in the most heavily read copy of the page? Clicking hypertext links is the most used feature on any web site.(3) Your web site and users are NOT the exception to this rule. Last question? Where is your navigation, logo, text? A study by Neurofocus(4) says that if your logo and navigation are on the right, and your text is on the left, web site users will have a harder time processing the information on the page. Their brains aren’t wired that way. A web audit can help you identify problems like this. So, are your most important and popular pages failing? Do you even know which pages those are? Do you need help with conversion on your site? If so, send me an email (heather@npadvisors.com) and we’ll set up a time to talk. (1) Jakob Nielsen: “How Little Do Users Read?” in Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, May 6, 2008 May 2008 | ||
