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Simplicity is not always that simple.

By Dave Wallace, 28th February 2007

At HeathWallace we pride ourselves in our business focused philosophy. To us success is measured in the "effectiveness" of our client's online solutions. To our clients, success is measured generally in return on investment i.e. conversion rates, numbers of applications, registrations, time online, etc.

Through our work, one of the most consistent trends that we have observed is that the simpler you can make a web site the more effective it will be. Users tend to avoid complexity, especially if something "looks" complex. By simple we do not mean dumbed down. To us simplicity is ensuring that:

• Every page has a purpose and that purpose is clearly communicated
• Headings are clear and that content is concise and to the point
• Questions are asked in a logical way and that interactivity is used appropriately
• The brand identity is conveyed successfully without dominating the overall experience
• Every click on every page has been optimised to the user journeys across a site

In reality this is nothing more than common sense and should be straightforward to do. However, there are enemies of common sense and simplicity lurking in many organisations. The web instead of being the sales and servicing powerhouse that it could be becomes a watered down experience that attracts only the most eager. Here are some things to watch out for:

1) The wrong department doing the wrong things at the wrong time. Ownership of the web site within an organisation is not always blindingly obvious and this lack of clarity means that there is often a struggle for control, rather than agreements between Marketing, the Business and Technology on which part of the organisation should be doing what. The best projects we have worked on have been those where each department knows what it should be doing and sticks to its core competences. There is usually a visionary person pulling all the separate strands together.

2) The Chairman's wife. The web brings out the amateur enthusiast in us all, and people's subjective views can have a big impact on the effectiveness of what is finally delivered. The most successful project we have ever worked on was for a client where we insisted on having usability as part of the process from start to finish. They agreed not to provide subjective opinion, instead the customer was involved at pretty much every step of the re-design process, and it was only their feedback and the empirical evidence of eye-tracking and gaze analysis that was taken into account. The result was a truly user centric design process. In 6 weeks, the client managed to sell more products than they had for the whole of the previous year.

3) A website is for life not just for Christmas. Getting a web site live takes an immense amount of time and energy. Once launched, people's enthusiasm seems to wane. However, websites need to evolve almost immediately and respond to management information be that user feedback or web metrics. In general organisations are not set up with the teams and technology platforms to tweak and enhance their sites in a process of continuous improvement.

4) White space is boring. Users love web sites that are simple, straightforward and clear. However, within large organisations, it can be incredibly difficult to persuade all stakeholders that less is more. This is particularly true if you are looking at a web site over a long period of time. Eventually someone somewhere will get bored and talk about adding this or that. Normally the "this or that" is added without going through a user centric design process.

5) Technology for technologies sake. As we peer into the year 2007, there are few absolute truths. For example, broadband penetration in the developed world is increasing rapidly and the fact that users want more interactivity as part of their overall browsing experience. This is likely to result in organisations starting to use technology and rich media because they can rather than going through a methodical process of trying to understand how to use functionality and richer content to enhance the user experience. Through the work that we have done, we have demonstrated that increasingly users will relate to product based content through calculators and scenario planners, and indeed they will respond very well to video based content.

The online world is getting more and more competitive. By working with our clients to fix some of the issues raised above we have seen dramatic results. The world is steadily moving more and more online, so when planning a web site think about how you can keep things simple.