Usability Tip of the Day - Get rid of half the text on a page, and then half of what is left!
Steve Krug suggested in his book, Don't Make Me Think, that one of the most distracting hindrances to users is too much content. His suggestion mentioned in the title of today's blog is intended to make a point to "BE RUTHLESS ABOUT THIS".
In many web applications, I see many chunks of text that I most likely will never read. In addition, the mere existence of many chunks of content implies that it might be important to me, and over complicates my user experience. Good candidates for removal are the following:
- Happy Talk - These are the chunks that usually say "hello and welcome to the blah site..." In fact, a good indicator to determine if text is happy talk is to see if you hear a "blah blah blah" in your head when you read it. Text that tells you what you will find at the site is also considered happy talk. You should convey this with intuitive navigation instead. Imagine if each television show had a 10-minute introduction telling you what you were about to see. You'd be saying, "Just show me the program please!"
- Instructions - One thing developers do not understand is that users do not read instructions; at least they do not read them until they have "muddled through" the site with no luck using it. You should eliminate the need for instructions by making everything self-explanatory. When instructions are absolutely necessary, they should consist of as few words as possible. Remember that users are accustomed to the instant gratification the World Wide Web provieds, and will not linger long to read the instructions before clicking on things again.
Remember, according to Krug, removing all the needless words from your site enables you to:
- Reduce the level of noise in a page
- Make useful content more prominent
- Make pages shorter, allowing users to see more of each page at a glance
Krug does not of course, recommend removing article content and such, just the "noise" so many of us overlook when trying to make user friendly sites. We assume the user's experience is improved with things they actually never bother to view.
That's the tip for today! Those of you in the Atlanta Area, come hear me speak more on usability at the June meeting of the Atlanta .NET User group (http://www.atlantadotnet.org/) .