Website Design: Don't Be Afraid of Information Density
I know the contemporary look is to design "lots of white space" and have your users scroll down and down to explore content — content that is in 3 or 4 little blocks of simple phrases with feel-good images or loosely relevant graphic icons — it's all the rage and yes this visual strategy helps distracted and attention-span-challenged users consume little chunks of your message. I am seeing this design strategy proliferate as it seems to be the go-to layout problem-solver with little regard to who the actual user is and what their online needs are.
In designing for a particular high-tech website audience, I found that our user persona is highly educated and skilled, overworked, stressed, rather jaded, and more than a little cynical. You're not going to get this information from tallying user surveys or studying Google Analytics and the like. You get it from having conversations with real users.
The marketing department was spending time & resources on carefully crafted but pedestrian-level infographics, blog posts, and videos only to have them ignored or scoffed at by the IT audience.
My question: What do these guys really want? What are they looking for when they come to the site? Answer: They wanted real information as fast as they could get at it.
They want product technical specifications, diagrams (man, do they love their diagrams), data sheets, and technical briefs. And when we dug into this with Analytics — yes, the evidence was there for anyone who might be asking the right questions to interpret it. The "Solution Pages" with lots of industry buzzwords and marketing jargon were being ignored — as were the pretty-to-look-at-but-useless-to-this-audience infographic banners.
What's old is new again.
I remember early 2000's designing CRM and office management solutions in FileMaker Pro for small monitors before the invention of the mouse turnwheel — users had to click and move the right-hand scroll bar up and down to see offscreen content which was horribly disrupting. The lesson: pack as much information and user interactivity as possible into a single screen and make it organized and intuitive. Of course this strategy still applies to application design today. So why not on websites?
So in redesigning the APCON website, I used tabs, rollover animations, scroll bar containers, and slider animations to provide the critical audience with the information they really want as quickly and easily as possible. The result: a 476% increase in datasheet (our KPI) downloads — 300% increase in in-coming leads (Contact Us forms).
I would encourage designers and marketing pros to not get lazy about creating a relevant and information-rich web experience for your information hungry audiences.
Don't just lock into the "lots of white space with pretty photos and a little text" mentality if you have an audience who would benefit from specifications, data, informational diagrams, and informative video. Have fun with it — there are so many tricks available to get the user what they want in a well-organized and satisfying web experience: animations, rollover states, tabs, clickable diagrams, sliders, and more.
I have seen that taking the time and creativity to cater to these audiences pays off over and over again — better SEO, happier and more informed users, more solid in-bound leads. Don't be afraid to bust out of the design-trend-of-the-moment to deliver an information-rich experience. People love to get information and they can absorb a lot of it quickly if it is well-crafted and organized.
Here’s an example that achieved lead and revenue-building results:
APCON Website Case Study | See how much information is packed into each click?