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6 Tips to Avoid Overwhelming Visitors

It takes skill, talent and an aesthetic eye for good web design, but it also takes a keen knowledge of how people learn and absorb information. This is because without a good understanding of how to engage your visitors, you can overwhelm them with too much information and turn them away.

As a business owner, I am sure you have had occasion to teach your employees about some aspect of your business. To successfully teach, you know that you cannot overwhelm your employees with too much information all at once. You also understand that using different teaching media can aid your employees to understand and retain the required information.

So all you need to do is to use these skills that you already possess and incorporate them into your website design. To make this all come together, here are 6 tips that you can initiate on your website, so that your customers won’t feel overwhelmed and leave, but will remain on your site and increase your conversions.

Declutter.

Take a long hard look at your website and remove any media, flashing banners or information that could distract your customers from responding to your call-to-actions. You might think that all your graphics are interesting, but if they lead to cognitive overload, they are not serving the greater goal of conversions. They could even slown down your website, resulting in a negative user experience.

Present information logically.

Too much information or information that is too complex leads to overload. So break your content into smaller chunks and give your customer the ability to decide what they want to read. In some cases, this can mean a complete redesign of your website.

We also recommend using headings and subeadings to break up your content. This makes your content scannable, and users can find the information they’re looking for faster.

Mix it up.

Be sure to present your content in different ways, using text, images, graphics, infographics if appropriate and illustrations. This has been shown to reduce cognitive overload, so you can actually present the same amount of information, but using different techniques.

Keep it interesting.

Instead of using the same template for every page, use different layouts for different pages. Templates make adding content to your website fairly easy, but it can also be boring and the essence of what you are trying to portray can be lost within this boredom. The last thing you want is for your brand to come across as uninteresting, so use different templates for high-level pages and give your customers a fresh, exciting and exciting visual experience (but keep it simple).

Add multimedia.

Use a slider or a video to extend your information and make it more visually stimulating. You don’t want to overdo this, but if your content can be enhanced by a video, then mixing graphics and text is a great way to reduce cognitive overload and engage your customers.

Use good design principles.

After all is said and done, there are a few basic design principles you must incorporate into your web design. These include making sure the text is large enough to be readable, that the fonts themselves are legible, having a clear layout to each page with headings and summaries and lastly, having sufficient white space so your pages do not appear cluttered.

In conclusion, the way to make sure that your customers are not overwhelmed by your website, is to have a clean, simple design with a logical and inspiring layout, and content that is engaging. All of which will go a long way to helping you increase conversions and your ROI.

Have other ideas on not overwhelming visitors or need help yourself?  Contact us at (02) 8211 0668 or info@cornerstone-digital.com.au.

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Michael Lam

Co-founder of Cornerstone and web junkie, Michael knows just how to diagnose your online problems and remedy the issue. An online enthusiast who believes in technology as an enabler of growth, Michael worries about all the details so you don't have to.