Howz your "screen scrolling IQ," dear charity?
File under: How people scroll on different screens
Will they or won't they scroll? Depends...
Know Thy Screen
Christine Gilliland, the Copy Coach at The Fundraising Academy + the only person in the world who currently holds 3 Phil Pysch certificates from the Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy...
...well, we had a major gossip, Chris and me. Industry gossip. Releases my inner curse monster; she ripostes in her nicely Canadian way: "I mean, jeepers creepers." Gossip Pong. Shop talk. Having fun.
At one point, we were both staring at a newly launched homepage, for an organization we admired.
Our tradecraft question: Was the new homepage built to succeed with its customers...or was it, alas, a massive audience failure, especially from the POV of visitor convenience.
Here's the thing....
When new visitors arrive at an unexplored homepage, they stand poised at the top of fundraising's "sales-lead funnel." Every charity should understand and worship the funnel and its stages. The funnel is how you nudge first-time website visitors toward "true believer-ship," a.k.a. becoming donors.
Asked AI: "How soon do new visitors quit a home page?" AI replied:
First Impressions Matter: Users often decide within seconds if they will stay or leave.
Loading Speed: Pages that take longer than 3 seconds to load can lose up to 40% of visitors.
Content Relevance: If the content doesn’t match user expectations, they may leave immediately.
Navigation Ease: Complicated navigation can frustrate users, leading to quick exits.
Visual Appeal: A cluttered or unattractive design can deter visitors within moments.
BTW: You'll also want your home page to please donors who are returning to complete a task—to make, say, a memorial gift, an annual gift, or to adjust the size of their monthly amount. Pleasing donors is simply good UX. Good UX raises more money. It was suggested you worship the funnel. For max. response, worship the "user experience," too.
The truth about scrolling
Let's get back to Chris and me wondering: Was this new home page a well-constructed sales-lead funnel? Or not? Turns out, the answer depended completely on one thing:
How people scroll on horizontal (desktop) screens vs. how they scroll when the screen is vertical (iPhone).
Is the scrolling behavior on a smartphone different from the scrolling behavior on a desktop computer's screen?
Consider the image on the right. It's called a "heat map." This particular map reveals the typical viewing behaviors of a website visitor encountering a homepage for the first time...when staring at a horizontal screen. The black lines show where the visitor would need to scroll to see "more." The top quadrant is the area on screen called "above the fold."
Heat maps show us where—and how long—visitors look at a web page that has caught their interest.
Red indicates where most visitors' eyes will linger longest on a homepage. Yellow is also attentive, but shades quickly and dramatically into white. White shows where almost no eyes go.
Heat maps show that very few eyes ever dip below the fold on a desktop device, thus making the TOP of your home page—which every visitor sees—FAR more valuable if you're trying to get some message across than the bottom—which almost no one sees.
On my desktop screen, which is horizontal and never vertical, the homepage we looked at was a disaster.
• ...the scrolling on desktop screens ≈ (where heat maps show that very few eyes ever dip below the fold, thus making the TOP of your home page {which every visitor sees} FAR more valuable than the bottom {wch no one sees}) ≈ was different than the scrolling on a smartphone.
• So asked the internet: "Do people scroll more on their smartphones than on their desktop screens?" This was the answer from my AI pal:
To understand scrolling habits on devices, consider the following points:
Users typically scroll more on smartphones due to their portable nature.
Mobile screens encourage quick, frequent interactions compared to desktops.
Social media apps on smartphones are designed for continuous scrolling.
The touch interface on smartphones makes scrolling more intuitive and engaging.
Desktop usage often involves more focused tasks, leading to less scrolling.
Studies show that mobile users spend more time on apps, increasing scroll frequency.
Mike Duerksen added a postscript: "Average gift changes, too, between desktop and mobile. So does conversion rate (skews larger on desktop, for both). Generally speaking, of course. Not a prescription."
The article above contains some limited tho useful AI contributions. Otherwise, a human wrote it.
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