Designing landing pages for web applications is one of the most difficult and yet most important tasks facing any product manager or designer. As the first face you show to the world, landing pages must communicate the mission, values, purpose, and function of the application in a matter of a few seconds. As we begin a journey to revamp our landing pages again, I’ve been thinking a lot about what the key drivers of successful landing pages are. In the end, it’s all about conversion – how much work can the page do for you. But on the way to clicking the ‘Sign Up’ button, there’s a lot that can happen.

Users end up at a landing page for all kinds of reasons, and with hugely variant degrees of preconceived knowledge about the product or service. Creating a page that speaks to everyone who visits your site is nearly impossible, but it’s a challenge that must be tackled. So how can we create a framework that allows us to think about the challenges of communicating with visitors without trying to single out each individual personality? I’m not convinced that anyone can answer that question, but there are two key aspects of the design that I’m thinking about as needs to address: emotion and information.

Emotion: Regardless of how much we like to consider ourselves intellectual beings, we’re hard-wired to have emotional responses to visual stumuli. The web, as a very visual medium, requires us to consider the way designs impact the emotional satisfaction of those that visit our pages. There’s an instant response to the overall aesthetic of a page, driven by things like color and symmetry. Designing landing pages that create an emotional response is, by its very nature, an art more than a science. But it can be tested – five second tests, word association questions, and eye-tracking are all tools that can be used to get a general sense of what creates and emotional response and what doesn’t. The thing to remember about the emotional component is that it’s the first thing triggered – long before any text is read or any language can be processed. In fact, it’s likely that the initial emotional response prevents the processing of text and language until it’s over.

Information: The other side of the equation is the need for users to be informed. If the immediate emotional response is positive enough to keep a visitor from closing the page, the cerebral aspect of their brains will start searching for clues that satisfy curiosity and setup expectations. What’s going on here? What do I have to do? What’s going to happen next? These are the questions that a user is asking him or herself when they encounter any new service or application. Answering these questions as specifically as possible is important, but over-specificity can drive people with pre-conceptions away. If the service is described as something that’s useful for people who need mustard-spreading widgets (they’re in high demand these days), then you risk driving away those who might want to use the product to spread ketchup. Beyond the language of the initial description, we want to make sure we provide enough information to keep those who aren’t convinced on our domain as they continue to consider their options. While I’ve thought before that providing fewer options for more information might lead to more conversions, in recent weeks I’ve come to believe that it’s more effective to keep someone on your domain for as long as possible, and provide them with as many chances to convert as possible. If they’re not sure, I’d much rather have them click through to a ‘Learn More’ page than hit the back button and leave me forever.

Finding the right balance between emotional response and information expectations is difficult and probably impossible to master. But thinking about the ways that people respond to the design of your landing pages is critical to creating pages that convert well and create positive feelings for people that choose to convert. In the coming weeks we’ll be rolling out a new series of landing pages that can hopefully address these challenges in interesting and creative ways, and I’ll try to chronicle as much of that process as I can.

In the meantime, what are your own thoughts about landing pages? What do you look for as a user, or if you’re a designer, which challenges do you focus on? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.