Evolution of a home page - why more is less!

My personal interest in GUI (graphical user interface) design and usability was recently rekindled when I watched a presentation by Barry Schwartz on Google Video (link). Professor Schwartz is the author of the book “The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less”.

Schwartz’s study deals with the notion that we have far too many choices in just about everything in our daily lives, leading to paralysis, stress and regret.

Many aspects of the “too much choice” phenomenon are highly relevant when it comes to application and web design.

Read on to learn how we implemented these ideas into a completely overhauled TheBroth home page, and discover how you can make YOUR site provide a better experience to your visitors!

KISS - going full circle

In the following, we’ll take the home page of TheBroth.com as an example of the “Why more is less” idea, and how you can incorporate some of these principles on your own site by following a few rules that are only marginally more complicated than the good old “KISS rule” - more of that below.

I shall begin by clarifying the term “home page” in this context - it denotes the page displayed when you visit http://www.thebroth.com/. This page is also often called “index page” or just “front page”.

Our initial home page, before we went live, was a very barren affair. For the longest time we struggled to even define what TheBroth actually is, and so we equally struggled with the task of communicating what TheBroth is on our home page. Here’s what it initially looked like, using the somewhat limited design skills of yours truly.

Some people on our team were rather critical about the simplistic design, remarking how it had a distinct “1998″ look to it - a little bit like Google, really.

Well so we ventured on, and when we released TheBroth beta, our next design looked a lot more elaborate and web2.0-ish, and it sported a real purrty “BETA” stamp on it (sorry about the cut-off screen shot). We pretty much tried to list every feature, and every possible angle of TheBroth, on the home page.

When we went live, we proceeded to list more and more of the ever increasing features and wonderful capabilities on the home page - all the things that WE wanted our visitors to take note of.

When reality sets in…

At the time of writing, nearly two months have passed since the launch of TheBroth. We had implemented more of the features we always wanted (chat, forum integration, better karma system… you name it) and we tried to squeeze it all in on our increasingly busy-looking home page.

It was “texty and wordy” before, and it got more texty still. What we all knew, but we all stubbornly ignored, was that nobody was ever going to read all that text on the home page anyway. Nobody!

At least one thing we did right, we had this big blue, ominously pulsating “ENTER MOSAIC” button and most visitors got that right and they clicked on it and they found their way to the actual mosaic. WITHOUT reading any of the pesky text, that is.

What visitors do is not necessarily what you’d like them to do

We learned from analyzing our web stats that most people don’t read anything. It can be quite infuriating, but it’s a fact. All they want is to get to the mosaic as quickly as possible and that’s that.

For example - we learned that the “How to play” link in the mosaic (which also used to glow and really stand out!) was largely ignored. Only 10% of all players clicked that link!

Same with the blog and forum - understandably, nobody is quite as enthusiastic about TheBroth as we are. Thus, from our point of view, hardly anyone cares about the developer blog, the history of TheBroth, or all these others things that we’d like to share.

What’s in the user’s mind when looking at a home page?

One group of people, probably the majority, comes to a site with a certain intent. They are trying to find some information, or a certain feature of the site, and it’s of course important to present a clear menu structure to facilitate navigation to the different sections of your site.

Another group of people comes to a site comparatively unprepared, following a link that says, “go to site “suchandsuch”, it’s cool”. It depends on the type of site which group of visitors will be larger. Since TheBroth is of the type “cool, inconsequential, but fun” site we probably get a larger segment of unprepared visitors than other much more purpose-oriented sites such as php.net.

When the type of “looking for cool stuff” visitors arrives at a site without any prior knowledge, they want to know only one thing: “What’s the deal?”

This thought or mindset could be equally well described using a number of similar expressions, such as … “Ok, where’s the good stuff…” or “So what is this site about…”.

Visitors with this mindset - and that’s all of them, including you and I, admit it! - won’t read through paragraphs of text.. they want to know what the deal is QUICKLY.

Lessons learned: When choice is not a good thing

Remove everything that most visitors of your site will never use, or don’t ever use. As much as you’re proud of your features, if nobody uses them, don’t use them to clutter your home page with features nobody cares about.

More text and more links means: More choice - and in this case, that’s NOT A GOOD THING.

More choice means, more brainpower required to comprehend it all… figure out the navigation, figure out what the deal is.

If 98% of your users want only one thing from your site… then that’s what you should show on your home page, in a “quick bite” form, and hardly much else.

Coming back to Barry Schwartz’ study of the “Paradox of choice”: If you have too many choices, you end up paralyzed, and you choose none.

On the web, the simple truth has long been known, especially in the field of internet advertising. The more links you place, the less these links get clicked. Having less links means more clicks!

So… putting this all into practice… take our old home page, feature rich, oozing of capability, with a lot of things going on, and compare it with the new version.

The new look is barren (again!), but with hardly a word too many. You be the judge… which one gives you a better “vibe” and provides you with a more pleasant experience?

Long navigational menus - a thing of the past?

For the longest time, internet advertising experts told us that we need to reduce the number of clicks in between pages of interest - so we all started to make huge menus so that you could get to almost any sub-page in less than two clicks.

Maybe we need to look at this old wisdom in a new light - give your users less and they’ll have a better experience.

Think for your users instead of asking them to make choices - how many sites have you seen where you can choose your own color set, your theme, and what not….and how often have you actually made use of these options? Never? That’s right.

What YOU can do

So, if you have your own site, or are in charge of a site, here’s some simple rules that we recommend based on our experience.

Figure out what your site REALLY is about, and describe it in one or maximal two sentences, forming a synopsis.

This synopsis should be clearly visible on the home page, maybe as a slogan next to your logo.

The less words the better - make every word count, and see it from your visitors’ experience. Be brutal and cut out what YOU want them to see, and emphasize links that THEY want to see.

You should consider displaying this synopsis or slogan on all pages, not only the front page. On content-rich web sites, especially those getting their traffic from search engines, you may find that more visitors enter the site through a small set of popular subpages rather than the home page.

Fewer choices, happier users!

When it comes to operate software, technical equipment, or web applications, users that are offered less choices are happier.

In turn, these happier users will interact with your site more because they have to read less, comprehend less, think less, look around less - in other words: they have to do less work!

In a way, you’re pre-filtering your users’ experience, so they can divide up their available time in favor of actually interacting with your site, as opposed to spending a large fraction of their time on the “comprehend before use” part.

KISS revisited - Ask yourself some tough questions…

So, what is the KISS principle again? It’s an acronym for “Keep it simple, stupid!”, and while the rule may appear trivial, the execution of it in context of creating a great front page (or “home page”) for your site or application is not.

Often, it will take a lot of work to phrase the synopsis well. It helps to look at it from several different angles. Here’s a list of questions to ask yourself that we found useful in this process:

* From your point of view, what does your site do?
* From the point of view of a disinterested, cynical, casual observer, what would THEY think your site does?

* What would you like your visitors to do on your site?
* Analyzing your logs and feedback, what do your visitors ACTUALLY do?

* What content would you like to “push” to your visitors?
* Analyzing your logs, which content are they actually interested in?

* What is UNIQUE about your website, from your point of view?
* What would casual observers think to be UNIQUE about your website?
* What are the strengths of your website, from your visitors’ point of view?

Summary

This diary of the evolution of a home page is very much an exercise in analyzing and discovering visitors’ mindsets, needs, motivation and behavior.

As developers, we’re also web site visitors on other sites and all these principles should equally apply to us, and I think they do! I for one always feel almost hassled even having to look a new site, because typically what you get is information overload. My brain is just too small to take it all in!

I kid you not, my brain has a limited daily information bandwidth and most sites I visit (or have to visit) use it all up before I had lunch. Surely most of us must feel the same in our increasingly information overloaded times?

Let’s make the web a better place. Let’s make simpler web sites, and let’s be more economical with the available time, attention span and brain bandwidth of our web site visitors.

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