All notes
Research
7 min read
We measured 40 hero sections. Here is what held up.
A small study of forty landing pages, what visitors did in the first ten seconds, and the three habits that mattered.
Last spring we asked forty volunteers to open forty landing pages and tell us what each company did. We timed them, watched where they looked and asked what they remembered an hour later.
What worked
Pages that stated the product in one plain sentence beat pages with a clever slogan by a wide margin. Pages that showed the real product in the first screen were remembered twice as often.
What did not
Autoplaying video, rotating headlines and stock photography of handshakes made no measurable difference to comprehension. They did make people slower to scroll.
We now open every design review with the sentence, the image and the button, and everything else has to earn its place.
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