Today's consumers have more choice than ever, especially online. Competing attractions are just a click away, so it's vital to engage your audience's attention and give them a reason to stay on your site – and want to come back to it again and again.
This elusive component of web design is often referred to as 'stickiness'. Stickiness is important for various reasons.
"Getting a user to return frequently is more cost-effective than trying to convince new users to come to a site," points out Pod1 ecommerce strategist David Hefendehl. Once users are engaged, "adopters will help you to spread the word and promote your site," adds Abduzeedo founder and designer Fabio Sasso.
The right kind of sticky It's critical that stickiness stems from positive user experience, leading to loyalty and users not wanting to leave. "When designing, never think of literally getting people stuck," says cxpartners principal consultant James Chudley.
"I've heard of nasty UX where important information has been made deliberately hard to locate, 'trapping' users. Instead, focus on users' needs and serve them well. As a result, you'll get the kind of 'stickiness' you want."
Also be careful who you use the phrase 'stickiness' around, adds Digitaria senior web analyst Dexter Bustarde. "It's a popular web industry term but it carries a natural negative connotation to most outside the industry," he points out.
When talking to clients who don't themselves bring up the phrase 'stickiness', Bustarde suggests using the term 'essential' instead. "Having an 'essential' site is aspirational, while still capturing everything web developers and marketers think of when using the term 'sticky'."
First impressions
Design is integral to a site's stickiness. "People react to gut instinct," Chudley says. "If a site doesn't look professionally designed, they won't stick around – particularly if they're looking to buy something."
Bluhalo's marketing and business development manager Jocelyn Kirby concurs. "Looks matter," she says. "First impressions count. Before contemplating a return visit, a user must engage with a website." In providing a user with what they're looking for, in a usable format that looks good, you're partway towards achieving stickiness.
The ideal is to not make people think. "Optimise a site's design to deliver the most intuitive user experience, and deliver the desired end result to the user with little effort," continues Kirby. "This contributes to the likelihood of the user returning."
Of course, good first impressions are just the starting point: you have to make them last. A strong design is one that doesn't just look pretty but guides users and encourages them to interact or share.
"Visuals and branding are important, but what's important is how those visuals and branding are integrated with the structure underneath the surface layer," says Bustarde. "You can have a gorgeous looking layout, but it has to work. If a visitor clicks on what looks like a compelling button but it doesn't really do anything, you've hurt yourself twice: you've presented something that feels broken and discouraging, and you've missed out on the opportunity that was created with your great visual cue."
Style and substance
Underpinning visuals and structure is content, arguably the most important single component when it comes to stickiness. To get repeat visits BKWLD's director of interactive production Dan Fields suggests "putting what's most useful and compelling in the most logical, strategic position".
Fields points out that once a 'visual language' is created and a user knows where to find sticky content, it's easy to train them to find it, helping to ensure they'll stick around. In the fight for eyes and hits, video is definitely worth considering.
"We're constantly visually stimulated, and video often achieves engagement where text and imagery cannot," says Kirby. "Regularly updated videos maximise repeat visits from people looking for new content.
"Since video hasn't seen the amount of contribution text content has, early, enthusiastic adopters will reap the benefits in natural search rankings, given the relatively low amount of existing competition compared to blogs and websites."
However, video by its nature takes time to consume, and so Chudley warns that it "should be of a duration commensurate with the nature of what's being conveyed," adding that he recently saw a 25-minute video for a web service that should have been a quickfire elevator pitch. The result: zero stickiness.
Social engagement
Compelling content within a strong, usable design will guarantee some stickiness, then. But the relentless march of Facebook and Amazon suggests that reactive design is increasingly important.
Sites that react to users' needs can result in longer session times and encourage return visits. Customisation involves a personal investment on behalf of the user, and when someone has given time to a site, they're more likely to become loyal.
"The method to choose depends on your site and audience," says Sasso. "If you can automatically provide reactive design, that's often better than making users customise things themselves, because that comes with a learning curve."
With Facebook having trained people to click on 'like' buttons, a low level of active participation should be fine for most sites to increase stickiness.
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Melissa Bennett suggests this will soon become commonplace. "Facebook plugins vary from enabling users to 'like' or recommend things to allowing users to make comments and show profile pictures of friends who've already signed up – they're essentially letting brands encourage users to explore more," she says.
"And what I see when looking at a site with a Facebook login will be different to what a friend sees. In the future, sites will be completely relevant to individual users. This will make them extremely sticky: by making content relevant and contextual, catering to what we want to see, a site will create loyalty."
However, Bustarde warns that anyone focusing on a similar kind of targeted content must "avoid the creepy sensation that comes with seeming to know too much about your visitors" – a problem Facebook's arguably having to deal with.
Other means of social engagement can also enhance stickiness. Hefendehl cites Gurgle.com, the Mothercare-backed community for first-time parents. "It's run as a non-direct sales channel," he explains. "By identifying a need for a core target market, the site offers sticky content in the form of help for parents."
Others tap into existing networks such as Flickr, YouTube and Twitter. "These are all great tools to achieve extra stickiness," says Jonathan Smiley of design company ZURB. "People come from these sites and spend incredible amounts of time on ZURB.com. Why? Because they want to learn more after viewing one of our videos or reading our tweets."
The important thing is to ensure the sense of community always remains – poor management of social media can harm perception of a brand, which can wreck stickiness. With communities in place and visitors returning, it's useful to examine additional outreach possibilities, although Hefendehl says to be mindful that most people aren't techies.
"RSS readers are good to push content out, but are limited to a very small percentage of people who use them and understand what they do. Newsletters and email marketing are more effective tools to get users back to your site. A carefully planned email strategy will pay for itself in no time."
Even better, he says, is to find a way to enable user-generated content: "Everyone loves seeing their content published or their comments picked up by a website's owner."
Getting the design and content right are key when making your site sticky, but so too are technical factors. If your site is slow to load, users might not even bother waiting, no matter how much amazing content it contains.
Assuming this hurdle is overcome, ongoing speed must be maintained to hold a user's interest. "The longer people stay, the more engaged they'll become, ultimately increasing the chance of their desire to return," says Bluhalo's Steve Clarke.
Strike a balance
But remember that web design is a balancing act – don't get spooked and rip out or oversimplify your content in the name of stickiness. "People are willing to wait for something, within reason," points out Bustarde.
"For instance, most people don't mind that Netflix's online movie player takes a minute to load, because they're expecting to be with the site for hours." However, at the other extreme, the same wait for 30 seconds of content would be a poor experience.
Fields also recommends that designers resist temptation to shove 'sticky' hooks above the fold. "Thanks to long scrolling sites such as Facebook, people are no longer afraid to scroll," he says. "Sometimes, telling a story and creating pacing on a page is good. Just as stories have conflict, climax and resolution, why shouldn't a website sometimes use that same convention?"
One shouldn't underestimate users, argues Fields, and warns against confusing a short attention span with the notion that users don't want content. "The important thing is to ensure that content throughout your sites is of a high quality – that, ultimately, ensures users will be willing to wait, engage and return. Speed and pacing are especially important for mobile sites, although 'sticky' in the mobile domain rarely equates to 'more time' – instead, less is more in this space.
"Keep things simple," recommends Code Computerlove founder Louis Georgiou. "Have content targeted for the device it's consumed on, remove noise and visual clutter, keep options relevant and obvious, and make things light and quick," he says.
Hefendehl agrees, suggesting sites offering quick access to important information to ensure return visits. "A bad example is Transport for London's site, which loads too much content when accessed via a smartphone," he says. "By contrast, National Rail offers exactly what you need on the go, allowing easy access to train times and destinations."
Whether on the desktop or mobile, fast sites demonstrably lead to increased stickiness, which can in turn increase revenue. ZURB's Bryan Zmijewski explains that the agency has seen revenue bumps on ecommerce sites of up to 30 per cent simply by making pages load faster.
Speed testing
Objectively measuring a site's speed is fairly simple, thanks to modern tools. Clarke recommends Firebug, which "provides a list of how long each element takes to load, helping to identify those causing delays and enabling you to focus on improving specific content load times."
Hosting provision also plays an important role in delivering good speeds. "Load testing will give you an idea of the capacity of your servers," he says. "A poor result indicates that the server needs to be optimised or that additional server capacity is needed."
Sometimes, this can pay rapid dividends. For example, Hefendehl explains how Pod1 upped the number of UNIQLO UK servers for Christmas, to cope with increased demand, and the resulting site speed bump helped conversion rates rise by 50 per cent. Unsurprisingly, UNIQLO subsequently decided to retain this server setup.
Unfortunately, measuring how site speed affects visitor engagement isn't always as straightforward. "Many analytics tools recommend placing code at the bottom of a page, but on slow sites the tool may miss the fact someone's even visited," says Bustarde.
"For sites you know are going to have a relatively long load time, one possibility is to let your analytics tool track when a visitor first arrives and then treat their first action on the site as a sort of mini conversion."
Hefendehl also argues that measuring a site's stickiness differs depending on its business objectives. "It could be time on site; it could be returning visitors per campaign; it could be number of transactions; it could be cost per acquisition," he suggests. "There's no general rule for measuring this."
To that end, don't be too reliant on time-based feedback alone: in fact, says Chudley, doing so can be dangerous. "You can get a skewed impression of site success," he points out. "A client once delighted in telling me that user visits averaged over 20 minutes. In reality, his service should have led to short visits but the site was hard to use and people were getting stuck…"
Ideally, look for a range of indicators when judging the stickiness of a website, and make them relevant to the site. If the site is designed to offer quickfire information, look for short visits with people returning regularly. If the site aims to keep people engrossed for hours, ensure that's what's happening.
If you're providing interesting content for people to grab, the tracking of downloaded files in tandem with return visits and growth might be enough to indicate a site's success regarding stickiness.
"This will all change from site to site, but should detail whether visitors are doing what you expect," says Bustarde. Having stickiness as your overriding goal requires the strategy of proving value.
In the end, what some visitors find useless and trite, others will find essential. It's your job as a designer to aim the right content at the intended audience – and to ensure that everything sticks.
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