Websites are like cars
Visiting a website is just like driving a car.
Or at least it should be. I’ll try not to labour the analogy.
The other evening I was watching the TV programme about cars, Top Gear. The presenters were looking at how long it took to standardise on three pedals in the same order, gear stick, ignition, etc. No one imposed this standard: Cadillac invented the layout and Austin copied it in the 7, a prodigiously popular car that was copied across the world. Ever since, when you get in a new car, you know how to speed up and slow down, irrespective of make and model.
The experience is of course completely different if you’re on the track in a Ferrari, off road in a Land Rover or commuting in a Nissan Micra. And you always need a moment to get your bearings: adjust the mirrors, find the windscreen wipers, gauge the clutch. This — as you probably figured out — is exactly the same for websites.
You should be able to go to any website and know what to do instantly. The experience will be very different on facebook to John Lewis to Dresdner Kleinwort, but the principles remain the same: people need to be able to perform a task in a way that’s obvious. If they have a great experience achieving the task, so much the better; but don’t put obstacles in their way.
What sort of obstacles do I mean? They’re obvious really…
- Grouping links that don’t belong together, like Print this page and Find out more.
- Labeling similar functionality differently across the site: e.g. Go / Submit / Enter buttons on forms.
- Giving your site a name and brand that’s different to your domain name.
- Challenging a visitor to say who they are in order to get more information, when the distinction is unclear: e.g. Investors / Public.
- Delaying people with irrelevant promotions (example).
- Making things that aren’t links look like links, and vice versa.
- Making people guess how to get to content, either through poor naming of your navigation or through navigation interfaces that show only some of the options.
- Putting core functionality in different places on your web pages.
- Having stuff no one uses: empty forums and wikis, folksonomies that aren’t updated, related links that no one follows.
- Mimicking browser functionality: to increase font sizes, link back in history, bookmark a page.
All right, so these aren’t web standards, but why would you want to do these things differently to every popular website out there? Do you believe that your users are really so different from those of any other website? What’s wrong with following a conventional layout and stamping your own look and feel on it?
To return to our analogy, if I pick up a hire car and the accelerator is on the left, I’m going to hand the keys straight back at the desk; even if it means trading a Bugatti for a Perouda.
Visitors are only ever going to experience your websites if they actually use them.