There is enough time but not for wasting. Time is so precious that it is customarily evaluated with money, thus you have no right to fritter away your user’s time, especially online. Whenever any customer visits your website, they should feel their time is valuably utilized and not worthlessly wasted. People are now-a-days spending so much time online that they demand each instant of their interaction to be worthwhile, in fact they don’t have time to waste time. Are you saving your time by depleting your visitor’s time? As a designer it is vital to raise this question in your mind. In a pressure to meet deadlines or budget, web-designers often take shortcuts by endangering user’s time. They actually go with timesaver techniques which eventually turn out to be the biggest timewasters for users. What is the use of a website that doesn’t hook up the users? Websites with prolong page-loading time, asking for senseless information, baffling navigation are often despised by the customers and they instantly take an exit from such sites.
So if your website is not getting adequate traffic, ask yourself what mistakes you are committing, is it because of shortcuts, your users are taking flight. Let’s explore some web elements due to which your user’s time is considerably getting wasted.
Poor web performance:
Slow websites are not only boring but frustrating too. As broadband has become universal, web-designers have become lethargic. In order to save time and effort, they are finding cheapest ways in image optimization, JavaScript libraries, HTTP requests for which the users have to ultimately pay heavy price. In desire to save your time and effort, you make your visitors suffer.
Solution: Optimize your website performance and save your customer’s valuable time and also get benefited with improved search engine rankings.
CAPTCHA:
Why do the users need to prove that they are human? Of course aliens are not going to use websites. CAPTCHAs are the greatest time-wasters and if you are not able to type it write then you might go on with struggle and waste time uselessly. CAPTCHA is a result of neglecting the problem of internet bots.
Solution: Server-solutions are available to filter the automated requests. This matter can also be solved with the honeytrap technique.
Complicated passwords:
Sometimes the user himself forgets the password due to its complexity. Passwords are becoming day by day complicated. Security is crucial, we are not denying but is the mixture of uppercase, lowercase, special character and number password, a better solution? Typing a lengthy word or sentence could have been better than this jumbled form. They are much easier to remember and does not waste the user’s time in thinking.
Solution: No need to come-up with a password with all keyboard categories. You can ask for lengthy sentence or at least warn the users beforehand that what kind of password your website demands instead of notifying them later and asking to change again and again.
Painful form filling process:
Sometimes in the desire to help the users, you may make their work more complicated. In some forms if you enter the postal code or mobile number, it auto-fills the related form spaces but there are conditions applied. Some forms demand spaces between code numbers and some do not. As usual user gets confused. By the way, how does it matter, if you include space or not as long as code or number is right? Re-entering is totally time wasting and painful too, especially in case of mobile web.
Solution: You can explore some alternative form control procedures or ask the developer to code according to user preference.
Search can be tedious too:
Search is meant to be time-saver and make your search easier but if it doesn’t work effectively then the users may be in trouble. Search is time and again used web element hence it is important that it gives the user their expected results. Sometimes due to spelling mistakes, the search becomes invalid and the users in quest of right spelling may waste much of their time. Even in case of country-picker, searching for the country becomes a time-consuming task. The drop-down list is probably designed to save time but it can waste surprising amount of time in searching.
Solution: Even if the user commits spelling mistake, the website can provide search options similar to the typed word, instead of compelling them to type the correct term. In case of country-picker, you can incorporate ‘remember me’ functionality or keep the most common countries at top of the list, to make the search uncomplicated.
There is an array of web factors which are timewasters but with little modification you can save much of your user’s time. So identify such aspects and start working on it, to escalate your web traffic and make your user’s experience memorable.
