May I Have Your Attention Please? (Review)
When I started this minidegree through the CXL Institute, I had no idea what was in front of me.
The amount of content to go through is enormous. And the course “total time” allocation is way off base compared to mine — and yet I continue to push forward.
This past week (number three for those keeping track), I jumped into the lessons under the course called “Attention Basics.”
My first thoughts on the subject have to do with how CXL handles the course material’s delivery. It doesn’t hold my attention. If you are someone who can read off of a computer screen for hours on end — this course is for you.
I can’t. I love to read but doing so on a computer screen for long periods is incredibly tedious. When I am reading to learn something, I tend to read slower than usual.
This is not to say that the CXL minidegree is not worth my time. It is. The course is jam-packed with fantabulous content that is sure to elevate my writing and online marketing efforts.
I now know how to position and deliver course material so that my students aren’t craning their necks and peering into a computer screen for long stretches of precious time.
In this week’s lessons, I read about:
- First impressions
- Internal versus external factors
- Cognitive load
- Eye gaze patterns and
- Online reading habits
Let’s dive in, shall we?
For obvious reasons, as online marketers, we want to grab our audience’s attention and keep it. This is more challenging than twenty years ago when I started taking my online business efforts seriously.
Today, with the chatter and chaos happening on the “interwebs,” we must know how to raise attention, connect with our audience, engage them, and bring them into our world.
When we do, the first impression is everything.
First impressions
According to the course material, we have 30–50 milliseconds to make a great first impression. Wow! No pressure there when it comes to website design, right? Once we make that first impression, good or bad, it is difficult to change.
The four factors that influence first impressions on a website include:
1. Visual design — is it clean, modern, welcoming, and engaging?
2. How you position your value proposition — do this wrong, and you’ll lose them forever.
3. Compelling imagery and graphics — connect to the offer, just enough to make an impact, and photos of humans should be friendly.
4. A trustworthy personal “touch” — use a common language to your audience, use a picture of yourself, personally connect with your audience.
All of this makes perfect sense, yet how many of us ignore these factors when rushing to get that website set up?
What I found interesting in this lesson is the mention of oxytocin. I don’t think I have looked at copy and marketing material from this perspective, but it fits.
Oxytocin is the “love hormone,” and it is mainly responsible for building trust between people. When done right, oxytocin can trigger oxytocin in our audiences, and when this happens, the trust factor goes up.
Internal Versus External Factors for Gaining Attention
There are essentially two routes to gaining our audience’s attention — internal and external.
External factors are objective and outside of our audience’s control. Some examples of external factors are:
- The intensity of something such as lights, sounds, colors
- Change in intensity or quality
- Movement on the page like a video background or a gif blog post
- Size of elements on the page
- Contrast of elements
- Novelty / uniqueness
- Repetition — give them the same content in different ways
Internal factors are subjective and driven by the individual.
- Interests
- Habits & attitudes
- Motives & psychological states
- Emotions
- Past experiences
The key here is to make sure that you are grabbing their attention and not distracting them. If you go overboard on the external factors, you could turn your audience away.
Cognitive Load
This part of the course was interesting and based on the Cognitive Load Theory developed by John Sweller in the late 1980s.
Cognitive load refers to the volume of information that our working memory can hold at one time. Sweller believed that working memory is limited, so we should avoid overloading it with activities that are not directly related to learning the content.
When it comes to websites and online marketing, our goal is to put the customer first. We should ask ourselves, what can I do to make it as easy as possible for the individual to take the desired action?
An example of a website with a high cognitive load is Facebook. Try getting in touch with someone at Facebook for customer support. It’s not going to happen easily.
On the flip side, Google is an example of a site with extremely low cognitive load. You get to that site and know exactly what you need to do.
When you reduce your online audience’s cognitive load, you will increase conversions because you have made it easier for them to take action.
Note: There are three forms of cognitive load discussed in the CXL course material, but I won’t go into detail here. You’ll need to take the course like I am.
Eye Gaze Patterns
When was the last time you thought about the eye gaze patterns of your website visitors? It turns out that this information is an essential element to consider when designing online content.
For this lesson, the CXL instructor talked about a study that looked at website users’ eye gaze patterns. The easier the task was for the user, the more likely they were to look away to different screen areas.
Knowing where your users are gazing on the screen will help you design the most effective layout. You will be able to put what’s most important in front of them and guide them to any call to action you may have on the page.
It was noted that directional cues significantly influence users of a website. In one study CXL Institute conducted, they determined that more users looked at the call to action on the screen (an opt-in box) when a hand-drawn arrow was pointing to it versus having a man looking away from the form. Something to consider when planning your next opt-in landing page.
(Side note: It was a bit ironic that the instructor for the eye gaze lesson was on camera and looking off-screen. She never once looked into the camera, and we only saw the side of her head. She appeared to be reading her lines. For the three minutes of the lesson, I wanted to see what she was looking at.)
Online Reading Habits
Similar to the eye gaze data, it is important to understand how website users read the screen. There were three patterns discussed, each of them building on the prior one.
The first is the F-Pattern. This pattern is what it sounds like. The reader starts in the upper left corner and reads to the right. They jump down the page and read to the right again, but this time maybe not so far. They might go another line down and read the right, but they eventually stick to the left side, checking out the beginning of each line to find something of interest.
If their scanning of the F-pattern fulfills their needs, they will move to the Layer Cake Pattern. This pattern is when they will quickly explore horizontal lines to see if the content is of interest. They mainly focus on headlines and not the actual body of the text.
If they are still interested in the content, they will move to the Spotted Pattern. This pattern is when they will look for the main ideas on the screen.
One pattern not mentioned in the CXL course is the Z Pattern. You can learn about that pattern at the USF Health blog.
To implement this knowledge, you need to do one thing on your website: make your content scannable. To do this, you can use bold words (like I did above), bulleted lists, colored fonts, and quotation marks, to name a few options. Do whatever it takes to make sure content stands out on the screen following the patterns outlined above.
So that’s it for this week’s lesson roundup. I feel like I need to ramp up my study time and increase my hours on the material. There are 22 lessons, and I have completed two in three weeks. Stay tuned to see how I accomplish this over the next couple of weeks.
