Our minds seems to gravitate toward novelty. Not only does a novel experience seem to capture our attention, it appears to be an essential need of the mind.

Novel means unknown, and what is unknown demands attention of our brain. Once the new thing is known and understood, then we look to find another unknown to master.

Once a visitor arrives on the page and starts reading, the novelty factor disappears within seconds. It's all the same, in uniform style. Boooring!

What can we do to improve the novelty factor here? How could we spice it up to improve the attention it will gain?

If you have text-heavy content you want users to read - like a long form sales copy - you have to use novelty to keep their attention and get as many people as possible to read it.

Here's an excerpt from a text-heavy long form sales copy:

Check out a simple makeover:

In order to keep your website visitor's attention sustained, you need to present novelty every second. Small changes in background color, text positioning and added images make the whole thing more interesting to go through, resulting in increase in sustained attention.

Different trumps the same

Our brain pays close attention to patterns, and quickly learns to ignore anything that is routine, repetitive, predictable, or just plain boring.

Finding changes in the patterns used to be about life and death (noticing enemies or animals in the distance, changes on the horizon). Now the same trait ensures people will ignore sameness and pay attention to different.