The more I know, the less I need: Thoughts on web design

Reading time: About 2 minutes

You may have noticed that I’ve been going through design changes like crazy over the past month or so. That’s because I’m tracking almost everything my readers do into web analytics. With the right web analytics tools, you can gain real-time empirical data on your website visitors’ habits in massive quantities.

What I’m learning may shock some of you, and it may confirm ideas for others. It’s not far from what I’ve blogged about in the past: Supplemental navigation is, in most cases, visual junk.

Breakdown of link clicks by area

Interpreting the chart data

As you can see, supplemental navigation—including related posts, historical post navigation, popular posts, most commented posts, sidebars, etc—has accounted for about only 10% of the navigation on my site during several design variations. Of that 10%, historical navigation and related posts alone accounted for about 99%. The rest? Fluff. Garbage.

On the other hand, navigation inside the content area accounted for approximately 70% of clicked links on my site. Header navigation, including menu, logo, search, accounted for 30%.

Design implications of data

In short: less is more.

If you visit almost any blog today, you’ll be bombarded with 5,000 sidebar widgets, gadgets, and gizmos that are there to do what? Lower the bounce rate by increasing page views? Is that an actionable metric? No.

Blogs should be especially ashamed of these design practices, because the user’s goal is clear in 99% of the time: Read an article.

And the conversions are clear: subscribe, comment, share.

Those conversions are getting lost in too much choice and information overload. Do you want your users to subscribe, or do you want them to get lost in a sea of sidebar gadgets?

If the Paradox of Choice has taught us anything, it’s that how many choices you provide to users is a serious issue you should confront with every design decision.

Actionable design recommendations

  1. Start tracking exactly how your users are navigating your site. If you don’t know how, here’s a good place to start.
  2. Apps like Readability and WriteRoom exist for a reason: Distractions suck. Eliminate low performing navigation options to increase the performance of effective navigation and user goal completion rates.
  3. Integrate important navigation into your content. Don’t leave it off to the side where it’s unnatural for people to look.
  4. Focus on what you want your design to achieve. Don’t focus on inflating your stats and ego with page views or lower bounce rates.

Conclusion

Using information to make design decisions is something that should be practiced more in the web design community. In this case, a little data has provided a significant argument against a common blog design practice. What else could we be doing wrong or could we improve?

I think we’ll also find what works better for our users, also works better for our conversion rates. Please share your thoughts or data on the subject.

18 comments skip to comment form

  1. Saud Khan said— 4 hours later

    Seems like you have discovered “Less is More” all over again :)

    I totally agree with your recommendations. However, I feel different types of sites will deliver different results for supplemental navigation.

    Thanks for another excellent article.

    #1

  2. Kalim Fleet said— 4 hours later

    You are right on point with this article. The key is to center your design around the user’s goals – this is often very different from the designer’s goal. This will be different depending on the industry but in terms of blogs the user goal is, as you say, to “Read an article.”

    #2

  3. Luke Stevens said— 14 hours later

    Yes! I’ve been doing this for a while in various contexts with old school fake page views, but good on you for making the design changes and measuring the results. I’m actually working on a book for web designers about this very kind of thing (see my URL), and it’s great to see these sorts of posts about using data in design.

    ‘Using information to make design decisions is something that should be practiced more in the web design community.”

    Amen to that :)

    #3

  4. blythe said— 2 days later

    “Less is more” … one of my favorite statements, even when you can’t convince others that it is true! One great way also using analytics is doing a series of A/B testing. It is great way to see when design IS and when design is NOT effective and also how positioning and other elements can direct people to click and navigate to where you want them. Here is an interesting blog on it if you are interested:

    http://www.microarts.com/culture/branding-insights/2009/12/introduction-to-ab-testing.php/?s=bl

    Thanks again for the great insight, keep chanting “less is more” and maybe one day people will catch on :)

    #4

  5. Howard Yermish said— 2 days later

    I think that Kalim starts down the right path here. The audience isn’t one of the following: the owner of the website, or the art director, or the PR company, or the content writer, or Google. But all of these people will make the decisions because they believe that they can be objective. Being objective is very hard, especially if your profit depends on it.

    And blogging platforms make it way too easy to add all kinds of visual noise to sidebars, even adding extra sidebars to add yet more noise. And in turn people start to believe that having your blog tricked out with all of the latest plug-ins and visual candy means that you are “an expert.” It really means that you are capable of creating distractions around the stories.

    #5

  6. Calum Ryan said— 2 days later

    There’re some very valid points here particularly about how traditional navigation within the header can be least popular. I’d also say that developing a content rich footer is an important element within all pages. Having read an article then it is the footer where further related content should be suggested along with a select range of other components such as feedback options and author rights.

    Taking onboard this article’s recommendations; I’d be very greatful if you and your readers could take a brief moment to review and feedback their views on my site.

    #6

  7. Tristan said— 2 days later

    Dude this post is great. My first read on this blog but not my last!
    The theory is good, is well supported and clearly lightens my current ideas on blog design.
    Cool stuff!

    #7

  8. Amrinder said— 2 days later

    Impressed!

    Content is the king, and content should precede design, advertisement, widgets etc. which seems absent in most of blogs these days. People get allured by fancy sidebar widgets and fluff important areas with junk.

    Some really good content here. Keep posting.

    #8

  9. Janko said— 1 month later

    Couldn’t agree more with you. It’s never too much to talk about “less is more”. I recently redesigned my blog and I am still testing it and finding new ways to improve it.

    #9

  10. Brian Cray said— 1 month later

    Janko: I saw your redesign and I love it. When I observe user behavior closely as it pertains to blogs, I find very consistently that content is #1, and everything else is possible clutter. Blog designs should especially be minimalistic in design with readability being the primary strategy.

    If you want to see exactly what your users are clicking on, I’d recommend implementing this code: http://briancray.com/2009/12/29/understanding-user-behavior-google-analytics-event-tracking-jquery/

    #10

  11. Jin said— 1 month later

    Brian, as someone who recently went from minimalist to ultra minimalist for my site redesign, I can relate and agree. However, I’d argue “enough is more.” If we aim for “less” as a goal, we may miss some key elements for the sake of design. So I say identify the absolute necessary elements when designing.

    #11

  12. De Cuellar said— 1 month later

    Hi Brian,

    Can you do a blog post how you can track users behaviours when it comes to clicking ads? Any API wizardary for adsense? Popular affiliate programs?

    Thanks in advance.

    #12

  13. Stacy said— 1 month later

    Brian,

    Thank you for sharing your insights and results with us. I have gotten into this discussion a number of times about all of the visual clutter that appears in blog sidebars and how in a lot of cases, that clutter takes away from the message/purpose at hand. Next time this comes up, I will be sure and direct them to this very post as more proof of the “less truly is more” axiom.

    #13

  14. Jared said— 2 months later

    I like it! I’ve been considering a redesign of my sites and I think i’m definitely going to go more minimalist on them both. You made some great points here. Keep up the great content!

    #14

  15. Pete said— 3 months later

    Awesome insight.

    #15

  16. Chris Jamero said— 3 months later

    Thank you for this helpful article Brian. I’m just about to start my Illustration & Design blog at Blogger to showcase my personal projects.

    This will be my first stepping stone.

    Thank you very much!

    #16

  17. Web Design Maidstone said— 3 months later

    I agree with the less is more philosophy. We recently overhauled our site to get rid of all the unnecessary “junk” which was just distracting the user from what we really wanted them to notice.

    #17

  18. Moi said— 4 months later

    Hey Brian,

    I read this post and I totally agree with you. I know you posted it a while ago but I was reading it using the new Reader in Safari 5, which just came out. I guess that could be the answer to our [web designer's] dilemma: To fill our website with advertisement and annoying to the reader junk, or not to fill our website with advertisement and…

    #18

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