UI
In Thailand, the average time spent on the internet each day
is a whopping nine hours and 38 minutes (https://coconuts.co/
bangkok/news/thailand-spends-longest-hours-online-world/). Crikey!
Although, that’s awesome if you have an online business, right?
Not so much.
As online content is more accessible today than it’s ever been
before, users are much less willing to dedicate time to a cognitively
consuming app or website when there are likely a hundred more
that might be less confusing. Put simply, screen addiction is having
a huge impact on our society and users are becoming far less
willing to sieve through bloated and confusing user interfaces in a
frantic attempt to reward themselves with something interesting
to read, play or watch.
Scientists call it the “dopamine-driven feedback loop” (http://sitn.
hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones-battle-time/),
where rewards in the form of gaming wins, interesting information
and ‘likes’ triggers the release of happy hormones.
Where many users today are becoming more and more
impatient, the need to cut the crap and deliver what users really
want is super important. But what can we do to reduce cognitive
load, make users pay attention and listen to what it is that we
really have to say?Here are my top tips:
O Eliminate visual clutter
O Improve performance to win more seconds
O Simplify text to make it more understandable
O Create a linear experience to aid scannability
O Make your marketing call-to-action less obvious
O All-in-all, cut the crap and focus on value and usabilityOI, PAY ATTENTION!
IN-DEPTHsteps taken along the way, so you can learn from a
real-world case study.
IDENTIFY A CAUSE FOR CONCERN
First of all, how do we know when something’s
wrong? Assuming that you (or your team) doesn’t
have unlimited time, money and resources, we
naturally have to be choosy about how we spend our
time, so identifying a cause for concern is the first
step you need to take.
Google Analytics is a terrific way to do this. I’m
sure you’re already more than familiar with Google’s
analytics software and the fact that it’s totally free
but you might not be aware that Google Analytics
works for native mobile applications as well.
A valuable metric to start with is the exit rate, ie
the percentage of users who leave the website on any
given web page. We can drill down into this metric to
see which web pages users are leaving at. In Google
Analytics, navigate to Behaviour (left sidebar)>Site
Content>Exit Pages and then toggle the Exit Rate
column to reorder the results in descending order.
After identifying a web page or collection of web
pages with a seemingly high exit rate (for us it was
product pages), it’s time to dig a little deeper, which
requires a change of tools.
THE IMPORTANCE OF QUANTITATIVE AND
QUALITATIVE DATA
Just FYI, there is no ‘desirable’ exit rate, only
whether or not we think that it can be improved. It’s
also worth noting that observing a variety of metrics
and even combining them with user feedback is
likely to yield more insight; for example, we cross-
referenced our exit rate with acquisition data and
found that exit rates were much lower when the user
was a direct hit! As it turns out, some users were
pinning the tab and then returning to checkout days
later (although many were not).
And the reason? In user interviews, users told us
that deciding whether or not to buy one of our ebooks
was too time-consuming, which led us to begin
discussing a ‘Remind me later’ feature/solution. But
we first wanted to address the main concern: why
was making a decision so stressful?
CONDUCT A QUICK SELF-TEST
What we want to do next is use a tool like Crazy Egg
(http://www.crazyegg.com/) to see what users are
focusing their attention on, with the use of heatmaps
and scrollmaps. Before we do that, though, I want
to show you a neat little trick that highlights which
elements are demanding the most attention.
Open up the web page, then open Developer
Tools (if Chrome) or Firebug (if Firefox), then add Above Identifying causes for concern in Google Analytics