YouTube is a life saviour, a channel to drive human interest through audio-visuals, but sometimes buffering kills the excitement. However, a pop-up of playing ‘Snakes’ can engage you and makes your buffering time more fun. Wow! Now that’s interesting.
Waiting for something except your girlfriend is annoying, but when we shop for groceries or apparels, the waiting to get it billed may not seem an overhead as we get involved observing other things. Checkout counters are packed with attractive goods, mostly chocolates and magazines to capture your attention so that you are not bored and they get some extra sales too. Clever eh? 😉
But the situation is quite different online. When you are trying to find flights or buses and it’s taking time to load, you probably would feel like scratching your head. Aberdeen Group study highlights that “A one-second delay in page load time equals a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction” That’s huge! Similarly, Google also gives a lot of weightage to page loading time in search rankings. But sometimes the delay is unavoidable, and for those cases, you can engage your customers’ eye using these three clever ways:
1. People appreciate when you make an effort
Users can wait even a little bit longer if you have been able to engage them in a positive conversation about the product or showcase how much effort has been put into making the product. Splash screen is a powerful example, a welcome screen that doesn’t provide actual content, but offers some intuitive or background information about the brand.
Another good way to engage the users is by bringing more transparency about the process going on behind the screen. For example, Hipmunk, a flight booking site gives the user a visibility about the different flights being searched at the same time. This little act of distraction makes users forget the loading time and also boosts their credibility.
2. People are happy when they are busy
Doing nothing and just waiting make people impatient and unhappy. If a task requires your user to wait, give them something interesting to do on their own instead of staring at the blank screen. Watching progress bar move in a steady manner keeps you involved. Facebook also applies a clever trick of displaying dummy text on the screen while loading takes place slowly in the background.
For example, loading the most relevant results on a shopping website takes a lot of time, but people use intuitive filters to reach their desired products, without any help. This increases more efficiency, decreases the chance of errors and engages users.
3. Backend Intelligence Brings Frontend Brilliance
Users have been accustomed to the concept of ‘instant‘ everywhere in life, from instant coffee to instant product delivery. Users tend to care more about speed than all the bells and whistles you have added as features. Nearly half of the users expect a site to load within 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds.
There’s a breaking point and it’s crucial to know that. If loading relevant results will burn a lot of time, avoid that and load a mix of results instantly. Instagram app is super snappy, you feel your images upload instantly after you take a picture. Is it? No, its design tricks you into believing it’s loading faster than it actually is. It does a magic in the background, images were still getting loaded while app asks you to apply filters, add names and tags.
Try unique methods above CSS and JavaScripts
Buffering time is an important aspect of your digital experience, it has to be addressed. You can try relating it with the salt in your meal. If it’s proper you don’t notice, but if it’s more, you yell at your cook (if it’s not your wife 🙂 So, ignorance is out of question. These 3 are our top used tactics to engage users during loading but don’t limit yourself to only these, surprise them with unique and creative interactions to make their journey more fun. Cheers!!!
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