Abstract
The world is changing to become more focused on online information. As such, websites, particularly those that market written and photo-based content to viewers, must carefully analyze how they manage information to maintain viewership on their websites. The average person will not spend long on a website unless they find something interesting, so it is important to employ techniques that will grab attention immediately; however, the longer a user spends on a website, the more likely he/she is to stay, so good content is a must as well. This is especially true as Internet usage becomes increasingly more popular on mobile devices, and websites must conform to mobile-friendly standards in order to maintain a consistent viewer rate, as mobile viewers are even quicker to leave a website once opening it. The interesting thing, then, is that the content is less important than the design and presentation of that content.
Website Content: Maintaining Viewership Through Design
The Internet is a constantly changing environment, making it hard to pin down what, exactly, happens to be the best strategy to market on it. Studies have been conducted on eye patterns, header information, clickbait, and a variety of other techniques to get a glimpse into human interaction on the web—a medium that is much harder to track than any other due to the distinct lack of face-to-face transactions as revenue is made—but little progress has been made because the Internet, and the devices we use to access it, changes so quickly. Unlike static media such as books, magazines, newspapers, and even television, movies, and music, the Internet is a fluid information source, and the strategies that influence its usage change more in a few years than the strategies employed for books have in the last century. But, even in an environment where information absorption changes so often, and the most viewed types of content are forever in flux, there remains some consistency as to what draws the eye. It is, therefore, imperative to focus on taking advantage of those consistencies through webpage design to draw the reader to the content, as the content will not work in and of itself.
First Impressions
First impressions are the most important for a website. According to a data analyst webpage, Chartbeat, as referred to by Farhad Manjoo (2013), about 40 percent of webpage viewers click off the page immediately after opening it. But, a lot of viewers won’t even get to the webpage if the real first impression is not made. That first impression occurs in the search results.
Two surveys by Mediative, reported by Kellogg (2015) in 2005 and 2014 indicated the ten-year change on how people view the search results page on Google.com. In 2005, viewers followed a pattern termed “The Golden Triangle.” This shape is how a viewer’s eye interpreted information on the page. The eye started in the top left corner, went straight down through the first few results—not scrolling the page—and then went back up and across to delve further into the information on the top two links. But by 2014, the Golden Triangle era had ended, leaving in its wake a more linear approach to viewing the search results page. Viewers focused on mostly the left-hand side of the page and also viewed more results on the first page. This all occurred in less time, though, with average time spent on the results page dropping from 15 seconds in 2005 to about eight in 2014. Figure 1 indicates the heatmaps from the surveys. According to Petrescu (2014) survey findings indicated that the first link of a search result saw a 72 percent click-through rate (clicks on a link). This shift represented a change, both in the viewers, and in the Internet itself. As it has become more popular, certain sites are known to be more reputable, so just knowing the name of the website does more for the site than anything (Search Engine Ranking Factors, 2015). On the Internet, being popular is akin to having the best information.
Figure 1: The Mediative heatmap indicates how viewers’ eyes track on the search results page.
This data confers the necessity of the first impression of a website: Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is essentially the steps taken to ensure that a website appears at the top of the list for search results, not including paid placement. The factor that most affects that search result is keywords: words located in the search that are also embedded somewhere in the website’s code that lead the search engine to point the searcher to that website. The more words a site has in common with a search, the more likely it is to appear at the top (Liu, White, & Dumais, 2010). That’s not all, though. Some other factors include click-through rate—websites with more visitors appear higher—user ratings, links on the webpage, length of content, readability, etc. (Search Engine Ranking Factors, 2015). Another factor in SEO, particularly on Google, is mobile friendliness. In 2015, Google shuffled its results page to reflect the changing of Internet browsing to smartphones by moving websites that are mobile-friendly to the top of the results page (Winkler, 2015). The size of a screen affects how a webpage can be viewed, and as more people view information on smaller screens, it is important to have a website that is compatible with the consumer’s method of consumption. According to Condliffe (2018), 23 percent of people accessing the Internet did so from a mobile device in 2010. In 2018, that number jumped to 84 percent. It is just as important as SEO, then, to have a website that changes design based on the size of the screen on which it is viewed.
The Website
The first impression of the website itself is also important. According to Liu et al. in 2010, the time users spend on a website is denoted by a negative aging Weibull Distribution. The Weibull Distribution is usually used for mechanical components to determine how long it would take them to fail. In this case, the variable was reconfigured to be how long it takes for someone to leave a website once it is opened. The fact that it ages negatively refers to the disparity between good and bad sites. Users leave bad sites immediately, but the rate at which users leave slows and steadies considerably as time goes on. The survey found that the highest percent chance a viewer has of leaving occurs almost as soon as the webpage is opened, meaning that the viewer immediately found something they didn’t like, whether that be a clunky home page, an odd color scheme, a weird logo, a clickbait headline, or even the loading time. All of these can factor into a viewer leaving a webpage. But, the longer a viewer is on the page, the less likely they are to leave. In essence, the website has about ten seconds to get the viewer’s attention. If it has failed to do that, the viewer has left. Fortunately, after those first ten seconds, the viewer is more likely to stay than leave, so long as your information is relevant, formatted to be easy to read, and relatively short. Figure 2 below is a graph that displays the particular distribution for the survey.
The hard part, then, is determining what to do in order to grab a viewer’s attention immediately. The unfortunate answer is that there is no clear-cut way to get the job done. But there are a few things that do help.
Figure 2: The Weibull Distribution from the webpage survey. As time increases, viewership becomes steadier, so the first ten seconds are the most important.
The first thing to know is how viewers track information on a webpage. The eye moves in a set path depending on the content, usually one of two different designs: the Gutenberg diagram, seen in Figure 3 below, or the aforementioned Golden Triangle. While the Gutenberg diagram is more geared towards photos, videos, and artwork, and the Golden Triangle is generally more often observed with text, the important thing is that both diagrams start at the top left corner.
Figure 3: The Gutenberg diagram depicts the movement of the eye as it views a webpage.
Once you know how information is consumed, plans can be made to best take advantage of the nature of the viewer’s mind by playing to the subconscious pattern. First, make sure the information is placed in the correct spot. Start with the most important thing in the top left corner so that it is the first thing a viewer will see. Next, take advantage of things that naturally draw the eye, such as a large logo, a header, or a navigation bar. These are the things that people spend the most time staring at when they open up a webpage, at about six seconds of view time per each item. (Dahal, 2011). It is also a good idea to have a place for action to be at the terminal area (Anthony, 2018). The last thing a viewer will see is more likely to leave an imprint, as viewers spend nearly as long at the bottom of a webpage as they do on the logo, header, and navigation bar.
Once the critical 10-second threshold for viewership has been passed, the problem becomes getting the information across that must be purveyed. The crux of the matter is that the words on the site don’t really do as much to cover it as one would think. While word count does play a factor in how long a user will stay on a site—the more words and information there are, the longer a reader will spend on the site—it is hardly conclusive that the word amount is actually an important factor. Weinreich, Obendorf, Herder, & Mayer, (2008) found that the number of links as compared to dwell time on a webpage moves in nearly identical fashion to the word count variable, as seen in Figure 4.
Figure 4: The number of links and number of words move in a similar pattern in reference to dwell time on a site.
That inconclusiveness becomes doubly apparent when paired with the finding that, at an average reading speed of 250 words per minute, most viewers can read only 25 percent of the total words on a page with an 800-word article if they spent no time at all doing anything but reading (Nielsen, 2008). This is a clear indication that readers are skimming information rather than actually reading it. To avoid having readers skim through and miss important details, the presentation of that information must be conducive to the Internet reader, who wants quick chunks of information and not long paragraphs. Weinreich et al. (2008) said, “the ‘scannability’ of information and hyperlinks as well as their intelligibility seem to be essential for the usability of web pages” (p. 20).
On a word-based website, the presentation of the words is most important; information is useless if the viewer will not read through a huge chunk of text to find it, and they won’t. Breaking up the information into clearly designed sections with informative headers will help navigate a reader through the information. Shorter chunks are better, too. While there is no conclusive evidence that the Internet has lowered human attention span, it is clear that people do not navigate the Internet like a novel: no one sits down for hours scrolling through one webpage. Most viewers don’t even get more than 60 percent into one, according to Manjoo (2013). Defining information becomes like eating a pie. Give one person the entire thing and he/she will never be convinced they can eat it; cut it into small slices and place them on the table one at a time, and he/she will never know they made it through a whole pie by the time he/she has finished it. Just in case, though, putting the important information first is good, both to ensure that a viewer will get to it in case he/she gets full too early, and because it has a good chance of acting like a great first line in a book and hooking the reader for the entire piece.
Limitations
The biggest limitation for this is certainly the jumbled mess that is the Internet. While information on this subject is boundless, the organization of it is miserable and entirely too focused on certain niche websites, such as libraries. In addition, because the Internet changes so quickly, information from even five years ago can be incredibly outdated, and depending on the variables used in research, even information that should be the same can come out completely different. A lot of this information also has issues with dedicated viewership, which can’t be accounted for throughout such a wide topic. To really analyze this data properly, it has to be done on a page-by-page basis, which is mostly impossible. Another limitation is the fickle reality that is the human brain. Considering the enormous variety of factors that influence the most minute of decisions, it is nearly impossible to accurately portray any statistic for this topic. Really, the most difficult thing is that website design is much more like an art than a science. While there are certain things that the masses find more appealing, and there are groups of people who like some designs over others, it is mostly subjective, and each viewer will be different.
Future Studies
In the future, it would be good to be able to more deeply analyze this information on a site-by-site basis to gather more accurate data. Statistics are difficult to categorize, but it might be easier if a more pointed survey was done. If I had more time, I would have designed a usability survey focusing on two websites with the exact same information but with different design tactics employed to have a clearer view of what the deciding factors in webpage viewer maintenance actually are. Some things to focus on would have been photo placement, video embeds, links and advertisements, the logo, and graphic design. Each would be changed one at a time so that they could be categorized independently of each other. If I really had the time, I would even consider doing this for all types of websites, such as video platforms, blogs, news, and miscellaneous to help further categorize the findings and make them more efficient.
Conclusion
The artistic nature of website design makes it difficult to efficiently categorize every “best” practice, but because the human brain works in patterns, there are certain steps that can be taken to efficiently achieve the goals of a good site with the information available. One of those few steps is to design something that is user friendly. A design that is both easy on the eyes and the brain will be the most beneficial to a viewer who wants to find the information he/she is looking for without bleeding eyes and a headache. While the content is the end goal of the viewer, that information will never be found unless it is made relatively easy, so a clear design will be the most helpful in ensuring a website makes it to the top.
References
Anthony (2018, April 09). Why Users Click Right Call to Actions More Than Left Ones.
Condliffe, J. (2018, January 23). The average American spends 24 hours a week online.
Dahal, S. (2011). Eyes don't lie: Understanding users' first impressions on website design using eye tracking. Missouri University of Science and Technology.
Kellogg, K. (2015, October 21). Google SERP Eye-tracking: 2005 vs. 2014.
Liu, C., White, R. W., & Dumais, S. (2010). Understanding web browsing behaviors through Weibull analysis of dwell time. SIGIR '10 Proceeding of the 33rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 379-386. doi:10.1145/1835449.1835513
Manjoo, F. (2013, June 06). You won't finish this article.
Nielsen, J. (2008, May 6). How little do users read?
Petrescu, P. (2014, October 02). Google organic click-rhrough rates in 2014.
Search engine ranking factors 2015. (n.d.). Retrieved February 17, 2018.
Weinreich, H., Obendorf, H., Herder, E., & Mayer, M. (2008). Not quite the average: an empirical study of web use. ACM Transactions on the Web, 2(1). doi:10.1145/1326561.1326566
Winkler, R. (2015, April 21). Google gives boost to mobile-friendly sites. Wall Street Journal.