Chapter 5 - How Do You Get All Those Big Tomatoes in That Little Bitty Jar? The Minefield of Homepage Design
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Page Design
A number of years ago, I was charged with the redesign of the Intranet Home Page for a large corporation. My boss had already done much of the heavy lifting by holding focus group discussions and sending out e-mail surveys to find out what people wanted to see on the Intranet Home Page.
We took the results of the survey, plus the system we had inherited, added the ideas of our corporate champion together with our own ideas, and came up with a plan. Acceptance of the new site was good, and by the end of one year, Intranet usage had jumped four-fold.
But the real story happened off the page. Not a day went by without someone or other calling up and pretty well demanding a spot on the corporate home page. How do you say no to someone with a rank two levels above your boss?
Remember those focus groups? Their real value was this: "Well sir, we went through pretty exhaustive efforts to find out what would suit the needs of most people, and the field reports on corn prices didn't make the cut."
But of course, we also tried hard to make as much information as possible no more than three clicks away.
There were times, however, when we lost the real estate battle. One extremely persistent and politically savvy project leader got her Y2K icon on the page, and someone in our direct chain of command felt strongly enough about the company mission statement that a link to it went directly from the home page.
How do you say no to someone with a rank two levels above your boss? Like this: "Yes, sir."
- What SHOULD go on the Home page?
- Site Identity (Logo and Tagline)
- Indications of the site hierarchy from user's perspective
- Search
- Pointers to high interest content
- Pointers to featured sections of the site
- Content of interest
- Logins or other often-requested shortcuts
- What DOES go on the Home page instead?
- Site Identity (Logo, usually without tag line)
- Site hierarchy derived from the company organization
- Mission Statement
- Picture of the business owner or the office building
Discussion: View Home Pages for completeness, clarity.
Useful:
- Steven Krug: Don't Make Me Think Chapter 7
- Jakob Nielson on Home Page Design
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