Common sense and easy design tips can ensure that your website users have an enjoyable experience.

Something happened the other day reminded me right away of Steve Krug’s First Law of Usability – “Don’t Make Me Think!”. Whether you are designing a widget or a website, this is one law you don’t want to break.

I’ve been helping one of my clients and long-time friend convert her mailing list from from Yahoo groups to MailChimp. She’s been doing a great job and after our initial training session has really picked up on all of the new features available to her. And she loves that you can monitor your campaign status with their app.

I was a bit surprised then, when I got a text saying that she having issues importing another of her mail list into the application. When we had walked through it the first time, she had taken copious amounts of notes and it really was a pretty straight forward process. So I couldn’t imagine where the problem might be.

It all became so very evident when I logged into MailChimp.

Light Bulb!
Since our initial training session, the MailChimp application had undergone some design changes. One of those changes, involved renaming the menu item “Lists” to “Audiences”. And within the Audiences option, the ability to view your existing lists and add new lists was hidden.

Now this might seem like simple situation. But actually it violates the “Don’t Make Me Think” law. Studies have proven that as users, we rarely actually READ sites. What we really do is SCAN them. And I’m going to simplify this but the fact is, if we don’t find what we are looking for quickly, like in splits seconds, we’ll most likely do one of two things: go to another site (because let’s face – We CAN) or we start feeling that niggle of frustration (you know the one, it starts as niggle and the longer it lasts the more it spreads)

You don’t want you users to have to think about anything, the longer it takes them to get to what they are looking for the more chance there is that they will find another way, or website, to get it.

So how can you design your in a way that minimizes the thought process or “mental chatter”? 

Here’s a few quick tips to remember:

Navigation: Most people expect to find their menu options at the top of the site or along the left side. Don’t put them anywhere else without a really good reason. 
Menu Options: Use common  and consistent naming conventions. Everyday language or common reference word work best. Not need to get fancy, that will just cause your user to think “well, why did they call that?”. Again, don’t make them think. 
Links: Most people expect text links to be blue. In the past they were also underlined but the new trend emerging is that doesn’t require that. For images, people expect clickable images to turn their cursor into a pointer. But that requires them to hover over it. 
Use clickable images in a way that suggests strongly that clicking on it will take them to more information. (i.e. Clicking on a product image in Amazon takes you to the product page for that product.) If an image doesn’t add anything to the content of the page, consider not including it. One less thing for users to think about.
Content: There are many ways to cut the mental chatter that goes on within your pages and content areas.

1.  Declutter your pages. The more noise on your page, the harder it is for a user to get to the content they are looking for. Organize your site and your pages in a clean, clear fashion to prevent user’s from just giving up and going elsewhere. Your site should not look its been ransacked.
2. Use heading efficiently. Organizing your content in a hierarchy and then using headings to call out those sections helps users navigate your content – kind like a map for your mind.
3. Break your pages into pre-defined sections. Headers, sidebar and footers are a few common sections, but you can also segment the content area of your page using horizontal lines, boxed elements, or color blocks.
4. Keep paragraphs short and use bullet points. This allows users to easily scan your content and identify information they are looking for quickly.

Be Consistent: Whatever you do in any of the segments above, be consistent about it. Keep links one color, don’t use a different font for every heading. keep content fonts the same. 

Remember that your site is only as good as the quality of the content the experience of the user. If either of those are not up to par, it’s time to take another look at how you are presenting your business on the web.

What design elements have you run into that cause unnecessary “mental chatter”? How would fix them? Let us know in the comments below. We’d love to hear about it.

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