December - De-clutter the homepage! A project for a leading online retailer this month has highlighted that, like many other sites we research, an overly busy homepage overwhelms or frustrates users. This propels them off the homepage at top speed, in search of sanctuary in the task they came to perform or simply in an effort to escape the ‘noise’ they experience on first entering the site. Noise takes many forms, such as Flash banners rotating too quickly, special offers from one department competing with half price deals from another, and these competing with Christmas advertising. None of these are sins against the homepage in themselves, but the amount of them produces a cacophonous confusion, driving the user away. Solution: draw the user into your site and homepage with an uncluttered ‘quieter’ homepage. This will have the effect of encouraging the user to stick around and allows them to actually see what’s on the page before they continue on their site journey.
November - Consistency of navigation It may sound obvious, but consistency of navigation is incredibly important, so that users can quickly learn their way around a website without getting lost. If they can, they’re more likely to stick around until they find what they’re after, or visit more of the site than they would otherwise. Examples of sites where the navigation consistency is good versus poor are www.johnlewis.com, on which navigation is easy through the primary and secondary top navigation versus www.amazon.co.uk which is overall pretty messy and moreover adopts a questionable left hand navigation strategy whereby it changes and (this is the problem) unless you happen to notice a small arrow, which is the key to once again finding the main categories, you may well quickly find yourself pretty lost. |
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