10 Ways to Design for Impatient Visitors

In order to increase the chances of your website’s content being read by your visitors, you will need to make a considerable effort to design with their impatience in mind. In this article we’ll quickly look at 10 ways you can prepare your site for impatient visitors. Since I’m assuming your attention span is as short as the average visitor’s, I won’t waste any more time getting to the list.

1 – Design Your Pages to Load Quickly

The #1 factor in determining whether impatient visitors stay on your site or leave right away is the amount of time it takes for your pages to load. Even a beautiful site with great content will drive impatient visitors away with slow loading pages. In this post I won’t go into the factors that influence the speed at which a page loads, but you can read Designing Pages to Load Quickly for that information.

2 – Use Effective Navigation

Help your visitors find what they are looking for quickly. Your navigational menu should be seen immediately and the navigational structure should be logical. Most visitors are not going to click through more than a few pages to try to find what they are after.

3 – Layout Your Pages to Display Important Information Prominently

Keep your most important information high on the page where it will easily and quickly be seen. Avoid cluttering the page with ads and excessive text and graphics. Effectively use white space around your content to quickly draw the attention of the reader.

4 – Make You Pages Scanable

Very few visitors will read your pages word-for-word, especially the impatient ones. Use headers, bold text, and lists to allow visitors to find what they want by scanning the page. For more information on this subject read 10 Keys to Effective Writing for the Web.

5 – Get to the Point

By eliminating unnecessary text and “trimming the fat” you can greatly increase the amount of visitors that actually read the content. It’s also important to make your point early on a page. Readers will then continue to read if they are interested, but they won’t fell like they’re wasting time getting to the point.

6 – Use Accurate, Strong Headlines to Tell Readers What the Page is About

A great headline draws the attention of a visitor as well as providing some idea of the subject of the article. Effective headlines will even catch the attention of visitors that are in a hurry.

7 – Use the Description Meta Tag

Some search engines display the contents of the description meta tag on the SERPs to let the searcher know what a page is about. Help potential visitors before they even get to your site by using an informative description of the page.

8 – Make it Easy to Contact You

Some of your visitors will want to contact you, but they will not want to search through your site for your contact information. Place links to your contact information in prominent places throughout your site.

9 – Provide a Site-Wide Search

Help visitors find what they are looking for by providing a search function for your site. Impatient visitors are more likely to try a search than to click through numerous pages. You can get a free site-wide search from Google.

10 – Avoid Flash Intro Pages

Nothing annoys impatient visitors more than slow-loading Flash intro pages. They may look nice, but they’re not practical for most sites. Even if you provide a “skip intro” link, that’s one more click that an impatient visitor has to make just to get to your site.