When looking back on traditional media, you might think a website should stand out against all others, do something unique and wow visitors with flashy graphics and animation to get their attention. Newspaper advertisements, TV and radio adverts all have to fight for attention. On a newspaper you see multiple adverts on a single page, and on TV and radio, people are generally quite zoned out and relaxed so need a bit of umph to wake them up, but this isn’t true for web design.

Visitors to your website made a conscious decision to give you their full attention, even if they have multiple tabs open, or even (in rare cases) dual monitors, they will focus on your site. Sites that stand out on the web are those that let people get on with their task, whether it’s finding the information, buying some products or making an enquiry without having any barriers to doing so.

These barriers could be:

• Waiting for introduction videos to load – even providing a ‘skip intro’ link isn’t the solution, as that is one cause of the following barrier.
• Having unnecessary clicks to get to the content they want – this doesn’t mean the homepage as to contain everything, as that would cause the following barrier.
• Information/navigation being out of it’s logical place – your site should guide people to the information they need, people are quite happy browsing through pages to get what they want, provided they are confident they are getting closer to getting it.
• Information overload – like the inverted pyramid writing style, start with your most important, broad points, then allow visitors to drill down into further pages if they want more information, no need to overload any single page in the hopes that something will catch the visitor’s eye.
• Missing information – there is nothing worse than “coming soon” or “under construction” pages, if you don’t have the information ready, don’t put the links up, or at least provide an alternative such as “We haven’t got this information up yet, but if you search on Google for ‘XYZ’ then you should find what you need”.
• Requiring people to complete forms to get information.
• Forms that contain more fields than required – we could write a whole post on this, but for now: all you need to get in touch with someone is an email or a phone number and maybe a name, you don’t need to know anything else as you can ask them that at a later date, people are put off by large forms.
• Slow loading times – we’ve discussed this previously.
• Ugly design – a bad design will be noticed, but that’s not to say you want noticeably good design because that will distract people away from the content, you really want unnoticably good design.

These barriers will each put people off a little bit, to the point at which they leave your site and go elsewhere. The fewer of these barriers you put up, the better the user experience, and the more likely when a friend asks “what website do you use for ABC?”, the visitor will reply that they use your company’s website “because it’s so much easier to use than anything else”.

Image Credit: Odd one out @ Flickr