Welcome Messages Must Die

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synoppsys: Welcome messages on home pages waste our visitors’ valuable time.

I attended Jared Spool’s UIE conference in Boston a couple months ago. It was a fantastic learning experience. During Gerry McGovern’s presentation on killer web content, he told us to stop saying “welcome” on our home pages. Our visitors know where they are, and we’re wasting their valuable time and our precious chance to grab their attention with a big “Welcome!” banner. I was horrified to think that we’ve got those introductory welcome paragraphs on nearly every one of our web sites. How could I have missed something so obvious?

When you feel the need to welcome your visitors to your site just like you would if they were to arrive at your physical front door, it probably means your site is still in “brochureware” mode: your site is designed from the perspective of your organization. I have no statistics to support this, but I would guess higher education web sites are generally way behind e-commerce sites in their evolution from organization-centric to user-centric design. Think about how often you see mission statements on the home pages of non-profit organizations.

Gerry’s message is clear to me: don’t waste valuable real estate on warm and fuzzy welcome messages. Jakob Nielsen calls these introductions, “blah-blah text.” One participant in a web site redesign summed it up well: she said she had been trained over the years to NOT read the wordy stuff on the home page.

Left Nav vs. Right Nav

synoppsys: Give right navigation a chance.

In response to our need for a new web site design, our lead developer recently developed a very nice style guide: an html page demonstrating elements of his stylesheet. My initial reaction was, this looks great. My next knee-jerk reaction was, we need to move that right navigation to the left, as if it were some unspoken law of the web. Because so many web sites use left navigation, including all of the sites in our portfolio, I’ve never questioned the pattern. I’ve assumed there must be solid usability research supporting left navigation, although it would not seem to be in alignment with my recent reading on eye-tracking.

“Google’s golden triangle” and Nielsen’s “F” pattern were discovered in research on how users visually scan web pages: the studies conclude that our eyes’ go first to the left hand side of the page and move right and then downward. That would make total sense for English-speakers: we read left to right, top to bottom.

I did some googling on the topic of navigation and came across an informative article summarizing the literature on the topic and the results of a research study comparing left vs. right navigation. The researchers concluded that the location of navigation resulted in no significant difference in task completion times. Most importantly, in my opinion, is their finding that “users appeared to be indifferent about the location of the navigation menu subjectively”.

Anecdotally, when we presented the right navigation design to a user group, no one raised the issue of navigation location. When we probed about the right nav, one attendee stated that she did notice that navigation wasn’t in its usual location, but she had no problem with it. Another attendee said that it would make sense to put content on the left, navigation on the right, because of the way we read.

It would seem to me that left navigation is a convention. Usability experts would tell you that’s exactly why we should continue to place navigation on the left: because that’s where users expect it. I’m not so sure. In fact, I think there are more compelling arguments now to support right navigation: namely, why wouldn’t you want to put your most important content where your visitors’ eyes first stop?

Redesign: The New 4 Letter Word

synoppsys: An “iteration” may be a more appropriate description of web site projects than a “redesign.”

Like any bad habit, removing a word from one’s vocabulary is challenging, especially a word that has been so close to one’s heart. For the past year, I have probably repeated this sentence 1,000 times: “this web site needs a redesign.” Our project queue is full of web site “redesigns.” When I started to hear customers use the word in our conversations, I became concerned. This word promises much more than we can deliver.

Think a moment about what “redesign” implies. Let’s be the customer for a second. Is this what they are hearing? “Our web team is going to redesign your web site, because it really sucks. We can’t salvage anything. So by the end of the quarter, your current ugly site will be totally trashed and replaced with a site that is a hundred times better, with lots of flashy widgets, content you’ll never have to maintain, and millions of visitors.”

Now let’s try out the word “iteration.”

“Our web team thinks that your web site is pretty good, but there are a few things that we think can be improved in a short amount of time. Let’s pick the top couple of items that will benefit the most members of your audience, and then we’ll revisit your site in the future.”

Doesn’t an iteration sound a lot more manageable and realistic than a redesign?

I’ve been reading a lot about Agile Software Development recently. At its core is the concept of repeatedly slicing projects (sashimi) into “increments of functionality” (see Schwaber and Beedle’s Agile Software Development with Scrum (2002)).

I’ll write more about Agile in future posts but for now, I’m busy. Our project queue is full of web site iterations.

Helvetica and Vanilla Ice Cream

synoppsys: Try going a day without Helvetica.

I watched a great documentary tonight called “Helvetica.” If you are like me, you have your own favorite type face–the first font you choose when typing a document. Trebuchet is mine. It’s my default font in Word. I bet your favorite is NOT Helvetica. Or at least you wouldn’t admit it. I have always felt that Helvetica is the vanilla ice cream of type faces. Who knew it had such a fascinating history: with camps of graphic designers on both sides of the Helvetica “movement.” What was most eye-opening from watching this movie was how ubiquitous Helvetica really is: it is everywhere, and I haven’t even noticed. I challenge you to look carefully at brands and signs and stores and web sites for a week and count how many times you see that “vanilla” font. Not so vanilla after all!