On a visit to the Saatchi Gallery recently some work caught my attention and, more importantly, held it for some time. It was the final gallery and I had reached the stage of glancing at a picture and forming short appraisals in my mind and moving quickly to the next one, “like it”, “very green”, “reminds me of sausages” etc.
This type of scanning and moving on is very similar to our online behaviour for tasks such as judging search results and assessing whether a page is worth reading based on a scan of the headline and first lines of a paragraph. Anecdotally, the more time we spend online the the shorter our attention spans become. (There hasn’t been enough research to have hard data though preliminary studies are strongly hinting it could be true.)
What was so special about the piece of work that made me stop and stare? It looked like a blank canvvas with just a few spots of colour. You can’t even see what the picture is unless you spend time looking and letting your eyes pick up the detail and your mind ‘join the dots’ to see the subject of the pictures. Then you are rewarded by a subtle outline and detail forming a whole scene.
We have SEO and multiple links that take visitors to our sites, like visits to the gallery, but how should we hold the attention once we have it? Good content, for sure, but obscuring information such as in the painting is unlikely to work given what we know about online browsing behaviour. I’ll leave you with something to think about, is there a way of tantalising visitors to hold their attention and does that tie-in with return visits to your site/gallery ?
For further research I suggest spending some time looking at the wonderful works of Maaike Schorel and see what insight they inspire.