No One Wants To Be On Your Homepage
By Jeff Hilimire on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007Yesterday our Director of User Experience, Donovan Panone, spoke at a lunch & learn about how Web 2.0 is changing the landscape of user experience. He specifically focused on the psychological reasons that people want Web 2.0 capabilities (sharing, collaborating, etc.) rather than focusing on the technologies that enable this type of interaction. It was a great event and I expect he’ll be cranking out a white paper on it soon that we’ll be happy to share (sans his cheesy jokes I suppose hope).
One of the things he noted that I found particularly interesting was that companies should stop thinking about their interactive efforts as “one-offs”. No more website redesign or email campaign RFPs. Instead, companies need to first address what they are trying to accomplish and then task agencies to come back with an integrated plan to hit those goals. Sometimes a redesign of a corporate website is going to be the answer, but likely that’s not where your users want to be anyway.
I posted a few months ago about the death of the corporate website. In the post I was trying to make the point that search is really the way most people begin their web browsing and because of this, we know exactly what a user is looking to find. If someone searches for a product that your company sells, you certainly don’t want to have the user click directly to the homepage of your site and then have to navigate to that product. You want them to go directly to the page for that product. The very essence of a homepage is to help the user get to where they want to go - no one WANTS to be on your homepage.
Maybe I should emphasize that again, NO ONE WANTS TO BE ON YOUR HOMEPAGE. Why would they? Search has started to replace the homepage and this will only continue to be the case. The homepage is like Yahoo’s early efforts of directory-based search. Great for it’s time, but time has changed (if you don’t believe me, check the increasing usage of RSS as a reminder).
A decent article by Nilofer Merchant in this month’s Advertising Age makes essentially the same point and emphasizes that we should be looking to have our users help us create the experience - co-creation she calls it. That may be a little ambitious but the point is still clear - we need to really understand the user experience today and what that means.
Maybe our old/current conventions of user experience, information architecture, etc., need to be re-purposed to take these things into account because you can create the most usable, best laid out homepage but if people never see it, what’s the point?
Why does UX and IA only have to do with the home page? And why the importance on the home page in general? It’s just one page of a site and a redesign should include UX and IA for every page of the site.
Or maybe that’s your point.
Hi Jeff.
TS - Actually I wasn’t making much of a point about UX/IA, but more that homepages aren’t really as important of an entry point to your company as it used to be. However, I agree with your point and would say UX/IA is probably more important on other pages than the homepage.
Brian Westbrook - Glad to see you read our blog. Tell me, how is McNabb going to do this year? I plan on drafting both of you in my league this year so let’s have a good training camp alright?
A homepage is still important.
Yes, lots of your visitors, especially the ones coming from search engines, go directly to the specific page in question. But I doubt that that’s how the majority end up at your site. Some find it via business cards, word of mouth, or referrals from other sites. For those, the purpose of a good homepage is to give a good overview and yes, move people right along to the specific pages that apply to them.
BUT, a good homepage can capture users without shuttling them on. You just need to structure it in a way to capture, not like another piece of boring corporate literature full of useless marketing speak.
And hopefully the Eagles will win on Sunday (from NE Philly)