Let's start by saying the first 3 seconds
is the most important for capturing your visitors
attention. I refer to it as the golden moment.
Okay let's get right to it, someone from somewhere has just entered your website, you have just seconds (or some would argue milliseconds) to capture their attention and give them a reason to stay. This is where every client in the past has turned to me and asked; How can we accomplish this, and is there a method?
Well there's a three point checklist that every visitor mentally goes through, even you.
- First, Do I continue viewing this page or not?
- Second, Do I like the page or not?
- Third, Do I believe the information or not?
And as you know from your own experience, just one
No to any of the questions above, and quick as a click
they are gone.
Now if you really think about it there's a lot going on in the mind of the visitor, so let's break it down to a 10 second timeline to help you better understand what's going on.
- First, What happens in the first 3 seconds?
- Second, What happens between 4-7 seconds?
- Third, What happens between 7-10 seconds?
It's important to note that these time periods can overlap.
Studies conducted by NextStage and others have demonstrated that (in general) people respond to daily, non-critical information within 10-15 seconds of first receiving that information.
First, Attraction
The first 3 to 5 seconds is the period where you have to affect or influence the viewer so they'll stay. Your visitor is using this time to decide if the information is something there interested in. (Some studies indicate this interval is actually at the millisecond level). In any case, this is the attraction phase of information interaction. The clock is ticking so don't waste their time, put your most interesting information and/or most eye catching graphics prominently up front.
Remember at this point people are not evaluating the usefulness of the information. They,re just quickly scanning the page and considering if they want to continue exploring the information in order to learn whether or not the material has value to them. To put it another way, they are considering how much time they want to invest and if the investment is warranted.
When you were quickly scanning this information on this website prior to slowing down in reading it, you were in the Attraction phase.
Second, Engagement
OK, lets assume the visitor past thru the initial 3-5 seconds stage and is still with you. Now the next stage is where your visitor is determining if they can understand the material well enough to justify the effort and time to comprehend the information. This normally takes approximately 4-7 seconds.
This is the engagement phase of interaction. This is a pivotal moment, your information has to go from "being pretty" to "being useful".
If you're still reading this, at this point you've
stopped scanning and have slowed down and started
reviewing this information, you're trying to quickly
determine if the information makes sense and is useful
or fills your needs. Even though you haven't determined
its usefulness yet, you are most definitely mentally
engaged with the material. Literally, this material
has engaged your attention.
Third: Actionability
Once again let's assume your visitor has made it to the actionability stage of this process.
This stage occurs around 6-8 seconds into the engagement. This is when your visitors are coming to their own conclusions on how to respond to the information being presented.
This is the actionability phase of interaction, information containing specific actions (save the material for later, reread immediately to clarify, et cetera). You can actually stretch this time out to 10 or even 15 seconds before the decision centers of the brain determine the best action to be taken for the viewers' individual needs. At this point your visitor is engaged and beginning to become consciously informed of what action to take.
They have slowed down and have already read sections of your material and are actively looking for key concepts and ideas which they can use.
Now in your case, maybe you've decided that this article is worth a read, but not now, so you'll probably bookmark it to read later.
In either case, you are acting on or taking action on the information in this article.
Therefore your materials must affect or influence
and than engage and cause the visitor to take action
within a 3-10 second time period. Today in our time-crunched
world most people will barely give you those 10 seconds
unless they're certain they're going to find some
value in the information presented.
........................................................
Let's dig a little deeper.
We've taken our 10 second timeline and broken it down into three distinct periods of time. We've discussed what happens in each period of time.
Now we'll discuss the differences between subjective
experience and objective experience and how they play
in to our visitors' engagement of your web site.
Now most people are more familiar with objective experience, so we'll start there.
Objective experience is simply those experiences that we all have and everyone can agree to. We all saw something happen and we can all agree on what we all saw happen. Objective experience is what our judicial system of law is concerned with: we all saw that lady slap that cop; we all saw that motorcycle run into that car.
Our objective experience is good for society, however it is not very good for us as individuals, because we all exist and survive in our own private world of subjective experience.
Subjective experience is our own very personal, private, internal understanding of things.
We were born into our own private subjective experience and will die in our own subjective experience. And everything that happens to us in between those two events is our personal subjective experience. We think and love, laugh, cry, and grow old in subjective experience. We eat in subjective experience, we sleep in subjective experience.
It's unique it doesn't rely on the beliefs and ideas of others. If you like it or not, the majority of your day is spent in your own subjective experience (the cars we drive, the people we associate with, our tastes in food and clothing, mates and partners, and so on).
In fact we are the sum total of our subjective experiences.
These differences are very important because we humans respond to information subjectively and on a non-conscious level before our conscious mind responds to that same information.
In conclusion, what this means to anyone making money from or responsible for website marketing is that you have at most three seconds to get and keep your visitor's interest and attention, and you have to figure out how to do this without the visitor knowing you're doing it.
Because as soon as they figure out you're watching
them, their experience goes from totally subjective
to mostly objective, and they're no longer engaged
in what you want them to do (probably make a purchase
or otherwise convert while they're on your website).
These 1-3 second, 4-7 second and 7-10 second intervals, action, engagement and actionability, are the science behind building super-sticky web pages and marketing materials.
Today's science provides tools which can measure such behaviors which we can use to optimize our marketing materials such as our website and/or printed materials. One such company is NextStage's and their TargetTrack tool. I only mention this because I have suggested them to my clients in the past and had good results.
