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Where should you put your most important content?
Web page real estate is precious. You've got a logo, tagline, navigation, salient images, can't-miss content, important content, and not-as-important-but-still-necessary content that all has to fit on there somewhere. Complicating things further, marketing, branding, legal, and various other departments compete for representation on the homepage.
Looking for some guidelines on where it should all go? We've got them for you here.
- Vertical viewing: Users spend about 80% of their time viewing the part of the screen that is "above the fold," meaning the part they can view with no scrolling, swiping, or paging.
- Horizontal viewing: Users spend about 70% of their time viewing the left side of the screen, specifically the area that is between 300-500 pixels in from the left. Users are trained to expect navigation on the left side of the screen, so they are more attentive to the screen after allowing a 200-300 pixel margin for it.
The testing that led to these conclusions was done in 2010 on a 1024 x 768-sized monitor. We'd assume higher resolution screens would cause the viewing pattern to stretch or shift to the right .
What's the bottom line? User attention and interest peaks at 300 - 400 pixels. To conform to user expectations, keep navigation on the left, your most important content just to the right of the navigation, and less important content furthest to the right. Put all of the most important content above the fold as users give just 20% of their attention to content placed below.
Source: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/horizontal-attention.html
business
Patience is a virtue that’s not embraced by web users
As if we didn’t all already know we’re an impatient people, an infographic put together by OnlineGraduatePrograms.com last week helps quanitfy just how our distaste for waiting impacts website conversion rates.
The takeaway is that minimizing time on task is vital to a successful website routine. If you’ve gotten users to your site and convinced them to take the next step with your company, congratulate yourself on clearing two big hurdles, but don’t stop there. If you don’t move them swiftly and efficiently through the next steps, you might ultimately lose their business.
Consider these statistics:
- Google found that of the 3 billion searches that are done in a day, slowing the response time by just .04 seconds reduced the number of searches a day by 8 million.
- One in 4 users will abandon a web page that doesn’t load in 4 seconds.
- Half of mobile web users will abandon a page that doesn’t load in 10 seconds. Moreover, 3 out of 5 of these users will not return to that site.
- Of the $24 billion in revenue Amazon enjoys every year, $1.6 would be lost because of a 1-second page delay.
Speed isn't the only factor impacting website usability. Contact Is It Easy? to learn more.
business
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