Solid State UX

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?

Once they get a chance to type in a search term, or express interest in a topic by clicking on it in the main menu – they start to become more aware of what the site is trying to tell them.  The deeper into the site they navigate, the more this mindset becomes true.  This is the principle of “just in time” information.  A relevant feature box that is on a page where a user has self-navigated to is a more effective selling tool than a general one on the home page.

About.com is Massive but it's Home Page is Clean and Focused

The trend, I’d say, is for cleaner home pages, with clear starting points, that make impactful branding statements.  The trend is away from piling the home page high with sample product, teaser items, marketing promos, and news flashes.  Savvy site producers have realized this stuff rarely performs on the home page – rather only when it’s deployed in a more thoughtful and targeted manner throughout the site.   If you know a user is flying through the page and will spend very little time taking it in, then you are better off thinking of it as “billboard” rather than its traditional role as a “portal.”  The more you make your central message clean and simple to take in, the better the chance is that someone will notice…  in the same way that billboards are designed in such as way that their message can be digested while someone drives by at 60 miles an hour.

Another trend is that fewer and fewer users are entering via the home page at all.   When a majority of the traffic comes from users googling their way deep into a site, then every page on the site needs to function as a home page.  Thus you will notice a rise in page-level “general” elements such as expanded merchandising-oriented “footers.” (see the “inside nytimes” feature at nytimes.com for an example.)  Marketers should not lament the decline of the homepage as an effective space to ply their trade.  Instead, they have an opportunity to leverage actual user behaviors to deliver more targeted, more effective cross-selling strategies than ever before.