Too much information on a site can work the same way, bogging visitors down and losing sales. A good website offers a balance between a compelling simplicity with an option for more information and a lean streamlined platform that flows easily to a shopping cart or communication portal.
We’ve all been there, on a site that we are genuinely curious about, looking for a piece of information buried in a sea of superfluous information and features.
Avoid TL;DR
We’ve all been there, on a site that we are genuinely curious about, looking for a piece of information buried in a sea of superfluous information and features. Too much information on a site can bog visitors down and lose visitor interest, or worse: sales. A good website offers a balance between a compelling simplicity with an option for more information and a lean streamlined platform that flows easily to a shopping cart or communication portal. It can be hard to design all of the content on one’s own site or application. As creators, we are intimately involved in our throughs and processes and sometimes cannot tell which pieces of information are more important than others to broadcast. Whether it's features in your new application or architecture and content on your website, self-editing is an art. Projecting how others feel about our work can be extremely challenging. Having an objective collaborator can be a game-changer and can mean the difference between content or feature bloat, and focusing objectives and user attention toward specific results. The capabilities of the digital landscape can be incredible. And those capabilities are growing all the time. So incredible, that exercising design restraint is a discipline. With so many bells and whistles at our fingertips, and without the cost of print, it is easy to over-do it, making our sites so stimulating or, frankly, boring, that they are harder to navigate, sabotaging our own digital goals. Where to start? Ask yourself a few simple but weighty questions:
If you only have 30 seconds to make an impression, what would your site say? If it could say only one thing, what's most important?
What's the single most important objective of your website or application? If you could ask users to take one action, what would it be?
How lean can you make your website?
In other words, what is the bare minimum that you need to convey the essence of your business and direct a curious visitor to your goal? Let’s start there and build out from that point, but only if necessary.
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