LESS Choices

Yeah, yeah. Fewer choices. I know.​ Maybe I need to work on this play on words a bit.

​Anyway, I was digging around what felt like the ENTIRE internet for something tonight and ran across this article from 2010: A Better Choosing Experience.

Consumers have grown accustomed to having a lot of choice, and many people still express a strong desire for having more options. But that doesn’t make it a good idea. There are neurological limits on humans’ ability to process information, and the task of having to choose is often experienced as suffering, not pleasure.

Yep. Still true. Thanks to the near-infinite Web, I never did find what I was looking for tonight*. But this article made for a nice silver lining.​

*Anyone have a screenshot of the faceted search from the old bestcellars.com? Anyone? Bueller?​

Just delete it, already.

This post at The Scotsman does such an amazing job of capturing our digital hoarder mentality.​

We need to ask questions about our inability to discard. What is so wrong with deleting and forgetting? We are turning into a nation of digital pack rats, who are unable to work out what is worth keeping and what is disposable, frightened of taking responsibility for identifying what is significant and what is not.

http://www.scotsman.com/the-scotsman/opinion/comment/tiffany-jenkins-the-digital-age-is-making-hoarders-of-us-all-1-2806684

xkcd - More Strategy

Less content isn't always good. (See? I'm reasonable.) The key, of course, is getting rid of ALL of the crap that doesn't serve you or your customers, but not a pixel more. Strategically determine what is useful, and make that easy to get to. 

It sounds so simple, doesn't it? Yet enough people are getting it wrong that xkcd is calling them on it.

​Original at http://xkcd.com/1174/.

The people using your mobile site need all of the same things the people using your full site need. (Or, perhaps more accurately, the people using your full site don't need or want all of that extra crap that you're throwing in their face.) People checking out a restaurant want hours, directions, menu, and reviews, probably in that order, regardless of whether they're on a phone or tablet or sitting at their desk looking at dual 25" monitors. 

Looking for more? Luke Wroblewski's book, Mobile First, from A Book Apart, is a great starting point.​

LESS Carousels

I mean fewer carousels, of course. But you know, it's not "Fewer Content. More Strategy."

Anyway, Peep Laja (@peeplaja) recently wrote an interesting article outlining all the reasons you're not going to see good ROI on those rotating spotlights you see all over the place these days. 

In all the testing I have done, home page carousels are completely ineffective.For one, anything beyond the initial view has a huge decrease in visitor interaction. And two, the chances that the information being displayed in the carousel matches what the visitor is looking for is slim. So in that case the carousel becomes a very large banner that gets ignored. In test after test the first thing the visitor does when coming to a page with a large carousel is scroll right past it and start looking for triggers that will move them forward with their task. (quote from Craig Kistler)

http://conversionxl.com/dont-use-automatic-image-sliders-or-carousels-ignore-the-fad/

Note that he covers both "Less Content" (getting rid of the carousels) AND "More Strategy" (focusing your message). And if he doesn't quite convince you, consider that he doesn't even mention the effort involved in creating them, the hours spent around a conference table arguing about who gets a piece of this treasured real estate, or the issues they cause for users with disabilities. 

Nice job, Peep.