Home pages have historically been a hotbed of contentious debate. Because of this, they are what Steve Krug called “The First Casualty of War.”
Why are they so controversial?
Because everyone wants a piece of the action. Because organizations typically work in silos, different departments feel slighted if their discipline isn’t “adequately” represented on the home page. One would think by all the name-calling and weepy eyes that the home page is kind of a big deal.
And they’re right. The home page is – kind of – a big deal. But not for the reasons people tend to get worked up about. After all, typically, only 40% of traffic to a website comes through the home page.
But as a consequence of their inability to set boundaries and priorities, they compromise the very purpose of the page. Every piece of real estate is up for grabs. The result of all the haggling may actually, as Krug suggests, kill the home page. But unlike a typical dead thing, it doesn’t go away. Like a zombie, it is reanimated into an unrecognizable abomination of its formal self.
You have 1/20th of a Second. Go.
The average time a new visitor (who comes to a site through the home page) spends somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-35 seconds on the page. User research tells us that people form lasting impressions of the quality of a website within 50 milliseconds.
That’s 1/20th of a second. It isn’t nearly enough time to process, well, pretty much anything except, apparently, a lasting impression.
There is one thing that can be processed in that amount of time: The presence or absence of clutter – the very thing that all the haggling over home page real estate tends to produce.
Like zombies, they also slowly suck the brains out of the user – making the home page manifestly harder to comprehend.
The purpose of a home page
To prevent this tendency, organizations and everyone who has a say in how the website is designed must realize what a home page is intended to do. A home page for a typical B2B or B2C site needs to do two things very well:
- Convey the big picture
- Speed people along their way.
Example 1: Hulu does an excellent job providing access to relevant video entertainment while minimizing noise.
This can be challenging for larger organizations that must communicate distinct messages to and accommodate the discrete tasks of many audiences – especially if they don’t have internal buyoff on priorities, or if they do not understand the purpose of the home page in the first place.
Example 2: Although improved from it’s previous version (on right), BravoTV still suffers from a significant lack of focus created by a failure to establish a clear hierarchy.
These organizations ought not rely on the home page to have a message and support each and every task for each and every one of their audiences. That produces clutter, which is enough to form a lasting negative impression within 1/20th of a second.
(As an aside — contrary to popular belief, clutter isn’t the result of simply having “a lot of stuff.” Instead, clutter is the consequence of failing to establish a clear priority and hierarchy. It is created, not by a multitude of objects or content, but by confusion.)
To serve all the audiences – even the important ones for whom the website was not primarily built – companies must ensure enough time and skill is applied to a comprehensive, consistent, and intuitive navigation – most of all from the perspective of all of the intended primary audiences.
Without a commitment to a process that recognizes that, they’re just tilting at the windmills – or worse – fighting a battle against a horde of undead without as much as a zombie survival guide.
Related Links:
Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability
Don’t Make Me Think
How to Kill a Zombie
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