The case for interface simplicity

I hate the design of my alarm clock. The top surface is cluttered with a bewildering array of buttons and sliders—some buttons are randomly located on the side, and for some reason there’s a built-in CD player with even more buttons and controls. For me, the ideal alarm clock would: display the time without blinding me at night; allow me to set the alarm in the dark with ease; and let me turn off the alarm while I’m still only half-conscious. In the end all the ‘extra features’ get in the way of the primary purpose.

The same thing can be said about websites—when you overload users with too much information and too many choices, you end up reducing the utility at the expense of catering to a minority user group; or worse, at the cost of satisfying internal corporate politics. The reality is the more choices a user has, the more uncertain and less satisfied the user will be with their choice. In the book, “The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less”, Barry Schwartz describes how even when the choice is trivial and reversible and the only cost is time, people are still more likely to stick with their first decision, even if it doesn’t fulfill all of their needs. Additional research indicated that people without choices were actually happier with a sub-optimal solution as opposed to those with many choices who ended up with a better solution.

Directing a user to information relevant to them is of high importance, and is the basis of information architecture, without which a website can’t succeed. But it’s also important to consider the psychology of decision-making, from which it’s clear that too many choices leads not only to dissatisfaction, but may even misguide users to areas that are not of interest.

One of the most overlooked areas of web navigation is having too many paths to the same information. Multiple paths add another level of choices, forcing the user to choose a navigation structure before choosing where they want to go. Clients rarely say, “there’s too many ways for the user to get to our information.” It would take great user testing before a user would say, “I saw three possible ways to the same information; I tried one and it wasn’t actually what I wanted, but I assumed the other choices were the same thing so I didn’t try them either.”

Usage statistics can also be misleading. The statistics may show that many users are reaching a page via a feature box, but if the site hasn’t been tested without the feature, there’s no way to know if all the users might still find the page through other navigation.

When a user gets to a page with one kind of navigation, that’s the navigation they’ll most likely try first when going to a new page. Does it have what they’ll be looking for? Feature boxes are, by design, limited to only a few prominent options; breadcrumb trails can only show you pages higher in the hierarchy. While a related information feature with highly-contextual links is very useful, it’s not possible to predict everything a user will want to view, so alternate, accessible navigation will still be needed.

I’ll end with an example. Breadcrumbs trails are now nearly ubiquitous, and often extremely useful. On a site like homedepot.com, the side navigation is constantly changing, so the breadcrumb trail serves as a record of how you got where you are. However, on many sites, breadcrumbs are added without actually evaluating their usefulness for that site. Sites with expanding hierarchical navigation are common, and often show the same information as the breadcrumb trail (sonystyle.ca is an example). Is the benefit of the simplified linear presentation worth the cost of adding another choice and more visual clutter? It needs to at least be considered.

Ultimately, every website needs a good compromise between maintaining interest with information upfront, and keeping the choices few enough that users come away feeling satisfied.