Put like things together to avoid online tunnel vision
Web visitors don’t see things that are right on the screen. Selective attention makes them overlook elements that are outside their focus of interest.
Or so says Jakob Nielsen, usability guru and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group.
Tunnel vision in action
In one study, Nielsen’s group tested the website of Westfield, a retail property developer in Sydney. Researchers asked participants to find the year Westfield entered the U.K. market.
The answer is actually quite prominent: “2000” appears in the upper left of the box in a larger font size than any of the other information.
But visitors didn’t see it. They finally found the year in the last line of the text on this story.
Why tunnel vision?
Website visitors tune out information all the time. Nielsen has “a pile of thousands” of examples from recent usability studies, including dozens on banner blindness alone.
Why?
“Selective attention is really a survival instinct,” Nielsen says.
“If people had to pay attention to all stimuli in the environment, they’d never get anything done. They’d also be more likely to overlook something important, such as a big-toothed predator sneaking up on them. … It’s only human: focus on a few things and ignore the rest.”
How can you overcome tunnel vision?
The solution to tunnel vision: Position like elements together.
Nielsen calls this the “closeness gestalt principle.”
“When buttons, drop-downs, checkboxes, or other actionable GUI elements are too far away from the objects they act on, people don’t see them,” he says. “Often, users don’t realize what they’re missing and simply assume the features aren’t available.”
Get to the point faster
Because web visitors spend 80% of their time above the fold
Consider the numbers:
- Web visitors spend 80% of the time above the fold, or on the first screen of a webpage, and just 20% below the fold.
- Material near the top of a webpage gets 17x the attention of that near the bottom.
- The average difference in how users treat information above vs. below the fold is 84%.
But where’s the fold? Content that shows up above the fold on a 30-inch monitor can take as many as five screens on a smartphone.
Reach readers where their eyes are.
So how can you reach your readers where their eyes are?
At Writing for the Web and Mobile — our two-day hands-on web-writing master class on June 12-13 in Chicago — you’ll learn how to:
- Pass the 1-2-3-4 test to put your message where web visitors' eyes are. Tip: Try this simple test on your smartphone for best results.
- Make it a mullet — and 4 more steps for writing effective web heads. (No. 5 is the most important thing you can do to improve the ROI of your site.)
- Optimize webpages for Google and humans with our three-part test. Note: If you're still using SEO tricks you learned in the 'oughts, Google may be penalizing your pages.
- Don't drop the deck. Learn to make the most of the best-read element on your webpage.
- Steal headline-writing tips from the BBC — the source of the best news heads on the web, according to Nielsen.
Learn more about our
Chicago master class.
___
Source: Jakob Nielsen, “Tunnel Vision and Selective Attention,” Alertbox, Aug. 27, 2012
Leave a Reply