One of the primary reasons visitors leave your website is what we call “visitor fatigue.” The term is often applied to museum visitors, and is a constant focus among curators. How to enhance visitor experience is an important consideration for both museum curators and “content curators” as it ultimately affects revenue for much the same reason.
For a museum, the longer a visitor sticks around, the greater the perceived value and the more likely they are to come back. Likewise, a visitor to your site is much more likely to stay when they are not fatigued.
How do you prevent visitor fatigue? Here are some broad concepts:
We coach our clients that “when everything is important, nothing is important.” Maintain focus on each page, especially your home page.
Eliminate Distractions
Distractions are like noise. Just as it’s hard to hear someone in a loud environment, visual “noise” requires more effort to navigate. Effort creates fatigue.
Use Soothing and Clean Designs
Simpler designs keep the main thing the main thing. In the words of French Novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupery:
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
Maintain a Simple Visitor Flow
Reduce decision points, and guide your visitors. When everything is important, nothing is. To combat this, help your visitor narrow what they are looking for, rather than listing everything at once. This doesn’t have to be by page, it can be visual groupings on the same page.
Use a bit of novelty to help your visitors remember key points of information. Your design should be interesting without being distracting.
Utilize an Interesting Design
Interesting designs prevent boredom. Boredom can cause fatigue just like clutter can. The key is adding small bits of intrigue—to keep visitors engaged—without detracting from the simplicity of your design. Supplementary images and splashes of color can be enough to engage the right side of the brain while the left side navigates your information architecture.
The more things on a visitor's mind, the less they are able to take in and retain.
Highlight navigational items to help your visitors easily recognize where they are on your site.
Help Visitors Stay Oriented
Keeping track of where you are on a website requires the brain to memorize the path it took to get to it’s current location. It also requires them to hit the back button if they feel like they’ve hit a dead-end. Instead of depending on your visitors to navigate your site by memory, we look to provide tools to help your visitors orient themselves on your website. Devices such as breadcrumbs, “vertical” breadcrumbs, highlighted menu items and others can help free up your visitors’ brainpower to focus on your website content, not where they are on it.