Smart Insights reports on how an EyeQuant team took a sample of 960 ecommerce designs and showed them to 500 users in pairs, asking which design felt ‘cleaner’. EyeQuant is a German neuro-technology company that specialises in quantitative user experience metrics.
Summary of conclusions:
- Not only did the 50 fastest growing ecommerce sites prove to be significantly ‘cleaner’ in design than the rest of the internet (as measured by the Alexa 5000), but the best-of-the-best (top 10) ecommerce sites noticeably outperformed the other high achievers.
- The most important thing is that the shopping experience on your site is better than realistic substitutes. If you sell fishing tackle online, the real ROI from clarity optimization is going to be in making your site cleaner than the other fishing tackle providers’ sites.
- Since studies suggest that the average user only reads 20% of the text on a page anyway, removing some of the less critical text on a page is a sure-fire way to improve the visual clarity of your designs.
- Users treat images much more favourably. Even if they have lots of visual content, images tend to be processed in the brain as a single, coherent picture, so users consider them to look much cleaner.
- One of the easiest ways to boost design clarity is to space it out more. Marketers often try to cram too much content into one screen view, particularly above the fold. Processing content in bite sizes is more pleasant for users, as long as they know where to look.
Read the whole article on Smart Insights- with case studies.
