Ring Central encourages user interaction to boost time on site, sales

Ring Central, which provides hosted telephony services including voicemail, virtual office and VOIP lines, uses a sleek Web site full of dynamic features that engage users to learn more about the firm’s products and services in an effective way.

Using a fresh shade of blue as a base and orange tones for a complementary accent color, Ring Central’s design also includes textured backgrounds.

The homepage of the site uses three vertically-arranged tabs to showcase the main product lines. This type of dynamic effect does a great job of encouraging users to interact with the site’s content. This is particular true with a site such as this that needs to drive users to buy a product or service. Interestingly, direct mail marketers use this same technique when they include stickers and other labels for recipients to paste onto reply cards.

Likewise, Ring Central also makes what is otherwise a boring features matrix interactive by shifting the colors and styling when a user clicks on a specific plan.

Another strong point of Ring Central’s site is its extensive list of features, another technique that boosts the time users spend on the site. Not only does a long list of features make the service look impressive, it increases how long users spend on the site learning about the products and services. Ring Central further breaks down each service into an overview page, a “How It Works” page and FAQs section, another way to effectively organize information and keep users actively clicking.

That said, it is a fine line between offering too much information on too many features, but in general, as long as the information is relevant and well-organized, the Web as a medium is optimized for displaying a large quantity of information.