Has your website gained a few unnecessary pounds in the past few years? Trying to please every person or department in your organization with one website can often lead to a site that looks a bit overweight. Cramming advertisements, promotions and unnecessary information in one small space can leave users overwhelmed. When zapping the fat off your website, think about why the customer is coming to your website in the first place.
What do you want them to accomplish? What is the number one goal for your website? How can you make it easier for your users to accomplish?
Website Content Overload
Don’t give your user everything all at once. There should be a rhyme or reason to your website structure. It exists for a reason–to help your users find what they are looking for easily. Do make the most important action on your website at the forefront of your site.
Humans aren’t designed to multi-task. When our brains try to take in too much information at once, less information sticks. Less is more for a reason.
Information Architecture
Planning out your site’s information architecture before diving into a re-design can vastly improve user experiences. The flow from the start of the funnel to the end should be very clearly structured. Focus on the elements that help accomplish the #1 goal on your website. Nothing else.
An IA (information architecture) specialist can help take multiple opinions and feedback from a large team and organize it according to your business goals. If an element doesn’t have a strong purpose to live on a particular page, then it’s left out. The flow of a website can be restructured to allow the customer to take in a smaller amount of content at a time. This process doesn’t require an entire redesign.
It may be a matter of removing a few elements from a page when it’s purpose is undefined. Sounds easy right?
You can’t please everyone. A great way to persuade tough folks on your team is to provide them with the hard facts. Heat & click maps can be used to see what elements your users are clicking on. If the elements really aren’t important to the end goal, they likely won’t have many clicks. It can be tough task to convince your adamant CEO or advertisers that particular elements may need to pack up and go.
Mobile Mindset for Content Strategy
Mobile has been and will continue to be a big deal. Why do businesses feel the need to fill up space when it’s available to them? I strongly believe that many people turn to their phones or tablets to accomplish a task because there are less distractions. Of course there are many other factors, but for the most part mobile is all about simplification.
Small screens force designers to zap the fat. It’s the best reason there is to cutout unnecessary elements.
Shouldn’t web experiences be simple and easy no matter how much screen space there is?
