7 Principles for Banishing the Unimportant
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My presentation Everything Is Not Important, as presented at SXSW, Saturday, March 9th, 2013 in Austin, TX
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7 Principles for Banishing the Unimportant
- 1. Everything Is NOT Important
- 2. Hi. I’m Robert Stribley. I’m an Information Architect at Razorfish, NYC. @stribs
- 3. Everything Is NOT Important What do you mean? #important
- 7. No, seriously. Kill them.
- 8. 7 Principles for Banishing the Unimportant
- 10. 3 Clicks? A myth If there is a scientific basis to the Three-Click Rule, we couldn't find it in our data. - User Interface Engineering, April 2003 Designing for scent is more successful than designing for navigation. – Jared Spool, UIE
- 13. Tease users. Then draw them to the details.
- 16. 3 Information Clustering Lustmord Table by Jenny Holzer, 1994
- 17. When information is clustered appropriately on a screen, users can scan and quickly come to terms with the intent of the content.
- 18. 1. Group features and content by type
- 19. 1. Group features and content by type 2. Position them according to an intuitive hierarchy
- 20. 1. Group features and content by type 2. Position them according to an intuitive hierarchy 3. Drop or demote the less important content
- 22. 4 Remove Paths Not Taken
- 23. Reduce the field of view Once users commit to a path, remove irrelevant navigation
- 25. 5 The Tyranny of Consistency
- 26. Consistency is an important but sometimes over-rated tool It’s key in maintaining a coherent experience But develop an eye to know when to break from it
- 27. Design pages so they're scalable Suppress modules or sections of the page until they're needed Don’t labor to create content just to ensure every page is "consistently" populated
- 29. 6 Your Homepage Ain’t Important Either
- 30. People may come to your homepage But more and more likely not They’re more likely coming from Google or social media Many sites report only 20% of visitors landing on their homepages Some as few as 10 or 5%
- 31. More Important? • SEO* • Taxonomy • Meta data • Tagging *search engine optimization
- 34. Consider the amount of attention an audience needs on a particular screen* *It may be zero
- 35. Recapping: •Scent of Information •Progressive Disclosure •Information Clustering •Remove Paths Not Taken •The Tyranny of Consistency •Your Homepage Ain’t Important* •Know Your Audience *OK, it’s not *as* important as once thought
- 36. Now. Your site is perfect, right? No. Rinse and repeat.
- 37. Thank you! @stribs slideshare.net/stribs
Editor's Notes
- You’ve seen web sites with this malady: Everything is treated as if it’s important.
- Uniqlo’s homepage isn’t the worst you could encounter, but I’ll show you in a moment how my colleagues at Razorfish have simplified the home page experience for the U.S. site, which they plan to roll out internationally.
- Writer’s understand this need to focus on what’s truly importantIn his1916 essay “On the Art of Writing,” Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch wrote, “Murder your darlings“
- William Faulkner - "In writing, you must kill all your darlings.“Especially helpful when designing for responsive, “mobile first”
- If you were to take only one thing away with you today, it would be that the 3-click rule is bunk.Can actually make for a very cluttered site if you try to flatten content so it’s all available within three clicksUsers will happily click away 5, 6, 7, 8 times without noticing, if there are clear paths to what they’re looking for, concise navigation, intuitive labels, etc.Background:Studies in “information foraging” in the early 90s at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated)Better: a dynamic tension between reducing the number of clicks and providing strong scent to content
- Reduce clutter, cognitive overload, so there’s less to process at once - Across multiple pages – or within a page or overlay
- Isn’t to say that you couldn’t have a lot of content on the page – e.g. Pinterest. But content is grouped logically, can be scanned easily.
- The New Republic’s redesign 1 year after getting purchased by Facebook co-founder Chris HughesYou can immediately process/grasp what’s going on here
- Seems simple, but a lot of sites could benefit from adhering to this principle
- eBay does the same:sellseverything from Beanie Babies to earth moving equipmentRazorfish design for EMC: storage hardware versus security software & services
- This is a “Know it when you see it” kind of problem – sometimes tough to put a finger on
- But be sure when you break with consistency, you do have a principle in mind for doing so
- Found this site by searching on Worst Home Page in the World. Clearly, it’s trying to be all things to all people. Instead, it looks like a dog’s breakfast.
- Jakob Nielsen wrote in 2002 that home pages are “the most valuable real estate in the world.”Sourcing: http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/08/coming-in-the-side-door-the-value-of-homepages-is-shifting-from-traffic-driver-to-brand/88% of traffic coming to The Atlantic not hitting home pageMore than 50% of visitors to the NYT not arriving at the home pageHave you ever bought a book on Amazon.com because you saw it on the homepage?
- Note how the site offers plenty of scent
- Yes, your site typically has multiple audiences.But not all of them need to be addressed at once. Giving proper thought to who defines a site's audience helps clean out the chaff. Example: Placing find an event functionality in an area where a using is creating an event. Not necessary for that audience.
- So those are our principles – right to NEXT SCREEN
- This isn’t a complete listing of principles, which can help you cure the disease of inflated importance, but I hope they’ll make for a good start. Remember: Don’t be afraid to kill your darlings!E.g. Importance of iterative design. Keep in mind, it’s more important that your content be good, than voluminous
- Thank you