How to retain attention with design
You won’t have users if you don’t have their attention
The average user’s attention span around the time smartphones came into play was around 12 seconds. Today we’re seeing the average attention span lowering to about 8 seconds. That doesn’t present much time for you to captivate your user and encourage them to continue interacting with your website.
It can be slightly more challenging for many information-heavy websites to deliver the essential details without losing your readers. But when we incorporate images into our designs, we’re 65% more likely to remember the information than if we had content only.
Determining how you’re going to hold a user’s attention depends on what you want to do with your user’s attention. What are you providing them and why?
Some questions to ask yourself:
- Why should people use your product?
- Why do you deserve their attention?
- How long do you need their attention, and how does your product differ from your competition?
- Why do your visitors use similar products?
- How can you help make the user’s experience more self-explanatory?
Finding the answers to these questions can help determine the next steps with the methods you’ll decide to encourage the user to continue using your website.
User research
You can do all the research you want on your competitors and read all of the literature you can to help you plan for your user’s experience. But if you’re not conducting physical user research with actual personas and users, you’re likely going to fall short in solutions for your problems.
- User interviews: Collect information from real-life users about your product or competing products. You may find that your questions might change once you begin working with actual humans.
- Usability testing: Incorporating Hotjar or Lucky Orange tools can help you get insight into how users interact directly with your product.
- Contextual inquiry: Finding a user who is willing to allow you to sit with them while interacting with your product can provide a deeper understanding of how someone interacts, their distractions or disruptions in the flow you’ve designed.
Conducting human-based research can help you determine what elements to incorporate to assist your users through the flow without getting distracted.
Design elements for attention
Now we’ve conducted our research, we’re noticing how our product is being used and where we tend to lose our users before they complete the actions or consume the information we’re focusing on.
There are plenty of design patterns and elements that can be utilized to help maintain focus.
- Micro Interactions (I wrote about this recently as well)
- Progress meters
- Gamification
- Declutter
Many other methods exist, but let’s focus for a bit on these few suggestions.
Micro Interactions
Use small gestures of positive affirmation within your design to let your users know that they’ve made the right decisions. Something as simple as dragging your screen to reload content with an elastic effect returning the content to its original placement can be intriguing to your users.
Some many styles and transitions can be applied to buttons or inputs. Using simple swipe or glow interactions for selecting icons or saving forms can be ideal as well. If you have a particular element, you’d like to draw attention to, giving it a small movement once it’s shown can help draw attention as well.
Progress meters
If your flow is incredibly long, you could always consider introducing a graphical display of progress to let your user know how many more steps are remaining. This might help give some sense of relief or provide a gentle encouragement toward completing the actions necessary.
Using progress meters is undoubtedly something you’ll want to consider testing later on. It’s got the possibility of being negatively received.
Gamification
Including a point system into your product, if possible, is a great way to make your users both stay on the site and return later. Giving them a way to increase their level, complete objectives, or compete with others is a lovely way to maintain attention and encourage returning users.
Here are some examples of gamification in websites.
It’s imperative to fully envision your plans for adding gamification to your product from start to finish. Your users shouldn’t be disoriented during the process, and there should be a clear definition of how the user’s success is measured. Make sure to continue to track your user’s movements to improve later if need be.
Declutter
If your website is overrun with advertisements, too much texture or depth, your user might not be able to focus on the content or goal intended. Take Medium, for example. This website is immaculate and pretty. Minimal distractions and millions of users.
News sites are notoriously famous for being overly complicated, cluttered, and hard to focus on. Which is typically the opposite of what they should be striving for.
At the time of writing this, Forbes has some intense overlay on top of their content. This didn’t allow me to see the articles and interact without dismissing the overlay (which took a few seconds to scroll rather than close). Beyond this, Forbes has some sort of moving meter to the right that caught my attention. It keeps moving periodically, which distracted me from reading their breaking news headlines.
Conclusion
It’s your responsibility as a designer to provide a simple product to understand and get the job done. We need to design for humans and advocate for their needs and intentions. When we do this well, we will notice better analytical success rates within our products and measure whether future changes are positive or negative, and correct them.
UX is on-going with changes in human intent and behavior over time. You should want to continually improve your product’s usability rather than rely on your users to change the way they interact.
Did you know if you hold the “clap” button a while, that more people have a chance of seeing this story? — I also have a mailing list if you’d like updates on newly published stories.
