When Less Isn’t Less

Posted: February 1st, 2006 | Author: Michael R. Murphy | Filed under: Design, Food for Thought, Usability | No Comments »

A while ago I read an article in Wired about a traffic engineer who removed all the traffic signs from a village in Holland. No street signs,no lane markers,no crosswalks,not even markers to indicate where the road stops and sidewalks begin. What residents found is that it reduced accidents because without any explicit direction,people were more focused on the task at hand,mainly driving. It interested me at the time but it also seemed pretty idealistic to trust people to pay attention. I filed this nugget away in my brain and promptly forgot about it until Jason Fried posted about it over at 37signals.com.

What does any of this have to do with web design? I think the point Jason made and I’d like to reiterate is that less is sometimes more. Have you heard about the million dollar homepage? It was thought up by an English lad as a way to pay for school. Basically he divided up his homepage into a million pixels and sells them to advertisers for a $1. While it’s got him rolling in cash,looking at it is enough to trigger a seizure. It’s a great gimmick for sure but there’s way too much going on.

Users can get overwhelmed by information so before you put pad to pen,think about the purpose of your design. What do you want from the user? Look at Blogger’s home page. I think they’ve narrowed it down to two main reasons why someone would visit their site: 1. An existing user wants to use their account. Good,the login area is featured prominently at the top of the page. 2. A potential new user wants information and/or to sign up. Again,the necessary information is displayed right smack in the middle of the page. That’s pretty much it. Simple and elegant. Even the dimmest bulb could figure out how to login or where to click to create a blog.

Cameron Moll had a great article on breaking a design down to only the necessary elements. Unfortunately,I couldn’t find it on his site when I went to write this but if you troll his archives you just might get lucky. Derek Powazek has also written a great piece at A List Apart about home page goals and how to design to meet them. The moral of the story is that complexity or features don’t necessarily make something better. There’s a reason KISS rocks.

Editor’s Note: You can also find this published on fad.tastic’s home page.

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