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
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
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
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