Is Creativity Crushing Your Digital Performance?
If you're experiencing digital performance problems with your website, the culprit may be something you've never considered: design. Designers push web technology extremely hard to buoy their creativity and developers often respond by executing their designs without question.
This can stir troubles. Loading a web page can take too long and bother users, who expect content to be delivered instantly. Still, designers often use so many fonts, images and fancy design tricks that they actually create performance issues. Therefore, in many instances, technology must push back.
Design tactics create performance issues and, in the process, turn off users you depend on to visit your site and buy your goods and/or services. Here are five design modifications that can maximize your digital experience and performance:
1. Drop the animation. Many brands have learned very slowly that the internet isn't a broadcast medium. Users simply aren't captive and awaiting the message you want them to hear. Yet web animation usually is an attempt to draw the visitor's eye to a brand's message. The problem is that visitors come to you to view your product or services, not to be entertained.
Indeed, when animation is moving on the screen, the typical user will assume things are still loading. Exceptions exist, of course, and animation can create an engaging and immersive experience. However, most of the time animation is a one-time idea that attracted someone because of its various elements, from fade-ins to light effects. Most brand-site animation contributes to poor performance while also misusing the medium.
2. Skip the carousels and other flashy tactics. Carousels — i.e., those series of rotating images with a bit of marketing copy and calls to action — suddenly are everywhere as brands like the ability to market several products or promotions on their website at once. Carousels are performance killers, however. They require more complex technology than straight HTML to achieve the fancy rotation controls and effects.
As a result, carousels often take several seconds more to load than a static image. If you use carousels, keep them simple (i.e., use just a few images) and forego the elaborate rotation effects and content.
3. Remember social can be antisocial. Social media is important to selling, but too often marketers overdesign pages while hurting performance. They sprinkle icons generously and even feature scrolling social messages on their pages. But does it work?
Internal metrics suggest these tactics may do more harm than good. For instance, while the icons and tags should appear in the background, that's not always what happens after the main content is loaded. Furthermore, in-line social icons that pop in late and bump other content around leave sites looking crowded and unorganized.
Balance the use of social calls with the value you get from them and the impact they make on performance. Pare the number of places you use them. Also, use a static icon until it's clear that users want to engage via social media.
4. Be fussy about fonts. Favor a font that modern operating systems/browsers have built in, such as Arial and Times New Roman. Use a web font, which is a custom font for your brand that the browser can download and install on demand. Web fonts have an impact on the first page of an internet session; they really look better than native fonts, which normally don't present much performance impact.
The major problems emerge when a web page uses three or more unique fonts, such as normal, italic and bold versions. Each carries a load penalty and can trigger erratic multiple-font loading times on Internet Explorer. A possible solution: Try a native font in the design phase. If it can't fulfill the brand image you desire, use one or perhaps two unique web fonts.
5. Load what users want — no more, no less. Here are some basic performance guidelines. With page loads, as long as you're not rendering content above the fold for more than a second or two, bring down items that a user is very likely to need soon, such as navigation thumbnails. With in-page loads, actions such as dropping down navigation menus and displaying tabbed content must occur with no delay. With in-page features (e.g., video streams or interacting with product photos), a user might be interested in them even if it takes a second to load.
The biggest rule is this: Don't burden all users with content load that only a small percentage of them are going to use. It all comes down to satisfying the user.
Rob DuRoss is a digital performance consultant at Lochbridge, a provider of enterprise and emerging technology services.