Is Your Website A Workout?
Every Saturday morning, my husband runs on our treadmill for three hours.
This is not normal…well, let’s just agree it’s atypical.
Most people do not enjoy working out as much as my husband…and the truth is?
Neither do your customer’s brains.
Website usability expert Steve Krug’s First Law is:
“as far as is humanly possible, when [a visitor] looks at a webpage, it should be self-evident. Obvious. Self-explanatory.
[a visitor] should be able to ‘get it’ - what it is and how to use it - without expending any effort thinking about it.”
Your customer’s brain resists burning calories like a chess grandmaster to make a buying decision about your widget.
photo credit : Carlos Esteves | Unsplash
Why is that, exactly? Well, your customer’s brain has a couple of daily goals:
make sure to not get host body eaten by the current equivalent of a saber-toothed tiger
conserving calories to power a potential run from the aforementioned saber-toothed tiger
I really didn’t buy the whole “brain burning calories” business until my husband told me that grandmasters of chess can burn a whopping 6000 calories during a single tournament match. For those of us sitting on the sofa? That’s a hell of a lot more calories than you’d burn were you motivated to run a marathon.
Chess is played on the ass and it’s not exactly aerobic…so clearly there is something to brains being able to torch some kcals, right?
But just like most of us don’t want to run a marathon, our customer’s brains don’t like risking their host’s well-being by burning precious resources figuring out how to buy something on the internet.
So your customer’s brain is focused on conserving those thinking calories.
If your website makes that brain run a marathon to figure out how to buy your widget? You are going to miss out on sales. A lot of sales.
How can you avoid the calorie conserving click away?
The simple answer is by keeping things simple.
As Steve Krug points out, when designing a website and writing the words on it, your ultimate goal is to “remove the question marks.”
While using cute or clever navigation names or adding in just one more font may seem harmless, over the course of a webpage, all those little moments of confusion or overwhelm add to your customer’s daily cognitive workload.
And eventually, their brain says, “Whoa! Maybe this widget isn’t worth it.”
On the internet, your competition is closer than you think. Most likely just one click back to the search engine results page where they first found you.
To win more sales and set more appointments, make sure your website isn’t a brainteaser. Keep your words clear and your page designs clean.
When you focus on delivering your message with clarity, customer brains stay in the game.