For Usability Sometimes Less Is More
February 2, 2007 – 1:00 pmWhen you consider the most successful internet company of all time (Google) you have to marvel at just how simple they’ve always kept their home page. There has to be a lesson in that. For a page that has been seen trillions of times by billions of people has to appeal to the widest possible segment of the population. And how did Google do this? By keeping things simple.
When you get to Google’s home page you have no problem figuring out what the website is about. You pretty much can figure out that you should “search” for something. The website has a specific purpose. You go there to look for information and the website implies that. Strength and unity of purpose like that is rare to find in many websites.
If we can learn one thing above all else from Google, it’s to keep things simple and to make things work as well as you can for visitors. That’s enough to keep you in most people’s good graces.
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2 Responses to “For Usability Sometimes Less Is More”
I would go further and say that for usability, less is *always* more. Developers seem to think that what users want is more features but, in reality, users just want applications/gadgets/websites to do one or two things really well. And they want to be able to figure them out right away.
By Michael Heraghty on Feb 2, 2007
You shouldn’t think simple because their a seach engine they can be simple with a input box thats it they don’t need jack, people thinking to go this way is a NO can you have a blog looking like this no you look at their other pages don’t just look at the homepage, this subject can annoy me sometimes I’ve seen people copying google so many times and it looks crap when people do, do more research on tall their pages the homepage is nothing “Don’t judge a book by its cover” its like having a page dedicated to a short intro its crap and useless do not think of using this idea unless your starting a search engine.
By Mike on Feb 5, 2007