I’m designing a flyer to be targeted to as broad a demographic as possible. I’m making it double-sided to increase the amount of information that it can contain (the font size of the text will be roughly 13-15 pts on A5, so I’m sacrificing a single-page design for ease of readability).
However, I’m worried that consumers will see only one side of the flyer and miss that it has a second. Is it common practice to include some sort of indicator, such as an icon in the bottom corner, to indicate that the flyer is double-sided? Is it a good idea to do so? Is there any data on how people usually deal with double-sided flyers?
I’m in the UK, if that helps with regards to the data.
Answer
People will naturally try flipping it over if they feel that they are looking at an incomplete part of a larger whole. Ideally, you’d like to take advantage of that — you want the user to flip the flyer as a natural stage in their discovery process, rather than because they’ve been explicitly told (i.e. by an icon in the corner) to flip it over. This is the path with the lowest cognitive load and greatest user agency, and it allows the user’s discovery process to happen at their own pace.
The layout of your information, then, should trigger this natural process. This may take some experimentation.
Try printing out your flyer and finding a few people to test it out on. Just hand them the flyer and ask them what they think — but what you’re really watching for is whether they turn it over and look at the back of their own volition.
Some factors to consider:
- It may be counter-productive to divide your flyer into two topics, with one topic on the front and another on the back. With this layout, each side acts as its own self-contained resource for that topic, rather than acting as two incomplete halves of a larger whole. Since each side is self-contained, users might not flip it over because they aren’t searching for anything.
- It may be advantageous to divide the sides of the flyer by level of detail, or by abstract introduction vs. actionable information.
- If your flyer has a border, rather than letting its design elements extend all the way to the edges of the paper, I am inclined to think this may have a negative impact on the user’s likelihood to infer that there is a back side. (I don’t have any data to support this, however.)
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Hashim Aziz , Answer Author : Woodrow Barlow