Visual clutter happens most on high-content sites that lack organization in their design. It’s often overlooked or ignored and the result is a poor user experience, missed stories or information and a very short time on the web site. A visual segmentation test shows you exactly what’s wrong with the organization of your site and offers the opportunity to reorganize and create a design that keeps your users on your site longer and keeps them coming back. In this post, Mario describes the organization process and offers advice for avoiding clutter on your homepage. Here’s a sampling from the post:
A cursory look at most news sites and it becomes very obvious, regardless of how good the content, things are hard to find. Often, users don’t even know where to start. It’s as if everything has been dumped onto a page, crammed “above the scroll,” and left to the users to get their machetes out and make their way through the visual clutter. Users don’t want to have to work that hard. They’re too busy.
The tendency is to organize by subject matter or topic. And that works for building an information architecture or site map, but visually it’s better to organize by function. Nielsen’s advice works here—what are the main reasons users come to your site? For a news site the answers are normally to get news, to look for a job, to read columns, to share, to look at photos, to find out what’s going on for the weekend, etc. These are motivations more than categories and should be the basis for how the site should be organized visually.
For the rest of the article go here:
http://garciainteractive.com/blog/view/33/
TheMarioBlog posting #204