Google's Homepage: The Web's Most Valuable Real Estate is Famously Uncluttered

The temptation is to think of the homepage as “waterfront real-estate” because it gets a relatively large amount of traffic compared to any other single page on a website.  Traditionally, this has meant that competing interests within a company battle for placement on this “strategic” page, which often leads to a cluttered first impression of the company’s website for the user.  And worse, a busy homepage can undermine its primary purpose – which, according to the wise Steve Krug, is to answer three questions:

-What can I find here?
-What can I do here?
-Why should I be here – and not somewhere else?

Our experience has proven that users move very quickly through home pages, especially those for broadly scoped websites that carry a lot of diverse products and content.  The vast majority of clicks tend to be around the main navigation menu and search box area.   Home page feature boxes tend to get very little traction.  Qualitative data from the usability lab supports this data.    Users assume that a home page is very general and is unlikely to provide useful information for a simple reason – they feel they haven’t told you what they are looking for yet.  So how could you possibly have anything of interest to say to them at this point in the game?

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