One Great Tip to Improve Your Conversions
Whether you have an ecommerce site or promote offline services to your customers, there is one thing every website owner wants to see: conversions.
It’s not enough to have thousands of visitors to your site, you need as many visitors as possible to follow your call to action. You want your visitors to do something on your website – buy a product, sign up to your newsletter, make an enquiry – and your website needs to be designed so that they want to do it.
I went to Dr Mike Baxter’s excellent talk on Improving the Ecommerce User Experience at The Internet Conference last Friday, and while he had lots of great advice there was one fact that stuck in my mind. Visitors decide whether they like your website in one 20th of a second. And if they don’t like it, they won’t convert.
So how do you know if they will like your website?
Blur it.
Use photoshop or search for an online photo editor and blur your web page until you can’t read the text.
Dr Baxter explained that by blurring your site you avoid the tempation to read the text on your website and can focus on the design. You can see if your colours are harmonious and can tell what your customers see when they first visit your site. If you have a well designed site, your eyes will go straight to your call to action. If they don’t, you may need to consider a redesign.
At Hallam Communications we’re planning a web redesign so let’s see how our website measures up. Here’s how it looks normally:
And here’s how it looks once it’s been blurred:
Was your eye drawn to the bright orange box on the black background? Good. That’s our primary call to action. The three other orange boxes all contain key messages, but aren’t direct calls to action, so they stand out less.
In fact the only concern is that your eye might be taken straight to the image of Susan’s smiling face. Lovely though it may be, looking at her isn’t going to tell you what we need you to do on our website, and this could be affecting our conversions.
Go ahead and try this on your website to see how your web design measures up. Remember you need:
- A harmonious colour scheme
- A clear call to action
- To draw attention to the call to action through colour, white space and placement.
So go ahead and blur your website and seeing if your design could be damaging your conversions.
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Katie Saxon
This post was written by Susan Hallam - 
Follow @susanhallam
6 Responses to “One Great Tip to Improve Your Conversions”
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Interesting stuff.
I’ve just ‘blurred’ our homepage and it looks like I need to do some work.
Thank you.
Without wishing to be deliberately contrary, this really didn’t work for me. I just didn’t “see” the orange box until I read the bit where you mention it. I think all these bits of research claim to know how people respond and where their eyes go need to be carried out much more scientifically with controls on bigger cohorts of people to provide anything that is statistically valid. Even then, there are the issues of ad blindness and users who are expert at scanning text and ignoring graphics and colour to consider in making any such assumptions before you change your site’s design.
I thought Dr Baxter was full of great advice, but the “blur” was also one of the key things I remember from the session! He had some excellent examples of blurring shopping carts and making sure only the “Next step/Pay now” stands out!
)
Great way for SMEs to check if their most important call-to-action in obvious enough, and definitely a tip we are passing on to our businesses as well
Firstly – let me preface this comment to state that I am well aware that my website is far (and I mean FAR) from perfect. In fact one of the reasons I read this blog is indeed to get it sorted.
But I have to say that I am sort of with the the above poster (David Bradley) regards the orange box. My eyes went straight to the blurred face, and I only looked at the orange box wafter I read the explanation about it below.
I think many web browsers naturally loo to the left nowadays, as it feels like because of Google we have alsmost been trained to view the search results on the left, (and even to some extent ignore the adverts on the right!).
That said, this is all anecdotal, and there is a guy who is prolific in internet marketing who has actually done eyetracking analysis of where on a web page screen people look, using a special piece if kit the subjects wear over their face. I believe his name is Jakob Neilson and he has a book out called Eyetracking Web Usability (available through most big booksellers).
However, blurring the screenshot of our web pages is a great idea – but we have to remember that no matter how good a website looks, the content has to be top notch to match.
The sterotypiocal ‘dumb blonde bimbo’ or the male equivelent (himbo?) may gain the attention initially, but most of their lustful admirers will soon lose interest when they find out that their is little substance beyond their good looks.
Enjoy the view
I would like to add that, at my age, I’m delighted to be called a dumb blonde bimbo, and any lustful admirers can be assured that there is plenty of substance lurking behind these good looks!
LOL Susan – Having attended one of your workshops I couldn’t agree with you more. But of course I was uing the bimbo/himbo refernce as a metaphor for anyones website out there, and not the individuals behind them. Yep – make sure your websites look goood people, but also make sure they have valuable, relevant and well presented content (just like yours does Susan) or people will be fleeing to the next website in the google search results quicker than you can say Pamela Anderson.