Do you really think people are reading your website?
As a website designer, you might like to think that visitors are reading all of your content in a focused and organized fashion. When I am writing website content, I sure as heck hope my visitors will read every word I publish in a very particular order.
Think about your company’s website. Do you expect visitors to read your entire homepage, evaluate all of the links, and make an educated decision on where they would like to navigate? Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of your visitors are reading very little of your content. Instead, they are scanning. They are scanning until they find the first logical option.
To grasp this concept visually, take a look at the graphic below. Steve Krug, a website usability consultant and author of Don’t Make Me Think, gives us a look at how our visitors are really navigating your website:
The details of this graphic are not important. What is worth noting is the lack of thought people actually put into surfing a website (illustrated by minimal orange lines in the second example).
Think hard about how you scan web pages. Normally, you are in a hurry because the internet is primarily used to save time. Also, consider how good you are at finding what is important to you in the first few seconds. You look for bold headings, important buttons, and keywords related to your end goal. In other words, if you are looking to find the price of a necklace, you are not going to read every link on the web page and evaluate your choices. Instead, you will scan the graphics and links that stick out until you find something close to what you’re looking for.
The overarching lesson from this post is to not overestimate the time and energy people put into reading your website. When you are designing a page, remove information that is not absolutely necessary and focus on emphasizing a few important options that will help your customer and ultimately help you.
Great topic and something most designers and marketers have a tough time coming to consensus on. It’s a real balancing act between delivering a clear call to action and providing the right amount of information for visitors to consume.
Thanks for the comment Steinar. Speaking of an easy to navigate website, I just checked out yours and it is great. This is exactly what I’m talking about when I say focus on the important information and make it easy for the user to make decisions.
Thanks Sean. I just spent the last 48 hours simplifying things so your post was timely.
My personal blog is another story … WAY too busy and much like your screenshot to the left … http://www.steinarknutsen.com/. It’s only 8 weeks old and I have enough Analytics data to see what’s getting traction and what to weed out. Thanks again for the reminder!
I enjoyed reading Mr.Krug’s book but it was also written several years ago, when multi-columned design was in vogue. I am wondering what he will say about the current “downstream” design adopted by Twitter, Google Buzz, and so on. There is not much place to wander our eyes so we assume all content (the stream) will be read without distraction, but the reality might be?
Wow Isao great point. Steve does mostly talk about multi-columned websites and ecommerce stores. He sort of covers himself be saying all of these principles can be applied to other kinds of sites.
I would like to see the usability testing process for Twitter, Google, and Facebook. I bet it’s pretty intense and there are alot of arguments about what is important and what is not.
When I read a ’stream’ I personally skim the top few entries that are trending the highest. I wonder how others interpret it?