Jared Spool (ein bekannter Usability-Forscher, das Wort “Guru” verkneif’ ich mir lieber ) beschreibt in einem aktuellen Posting das Phänomen “Link Rich Home Pages”, also Homepages mit überdurchschnittlich vielen Links…

It’s good design/usability if it works for your users. The point of the article was how sites like the New York Times, McMaster-Carr, and Staples have found ways to make it work for their users by using more links, thereby breaking the myth that “simple and uncluttered” is always better.

Hope that helps.

I have always been taught to keep homepages simple and uncluttered. I was actually hired as a consultant for an Intranet site to “organize” a departmental page that had 612 links and create a proper departmental site, complete with taxonomy.

I have re-read this article a few times and cannot understand the conclusion of the article….is this good design/usability or is this bad?

There is a school of thought that Chinese users like busy pages and animations.

See:
http://www.sohu.com
http://www.163.com
http://www.now.com.hk

But testing has indicated the opposite. Users crave simplicity …

On the other hand, users have also commmented that an over simplified Home Page does not look information rich and perhaps cannot be trusted or respected.

*sigh*: This is one we are looking to research further in China

Thanks for the article.

The BLS site is a perfect example. The first design doesn’t come close to giving out enough information about what’s behind those links. Yes I’m sure users loved the new design because the first one was so bad with it’s navigation and structure. The next one is better, but by the third one, I’m pretty sure I am going to feel the same way I feel about most government sites. They are hard to navigate.

Instead of doing what you have said to do, which is to lead by scent, they just throw everything out there. It’s like touring the Jelly Belly jelly bean factory and getting hit with every scent of all their flavors at once, there’s no leading the user.

Surely these companies have the capacity to come up with more sensible categories the would lead their different audiences along paths that would give them a sense of accomplishment.

These designs all became better to the user because the first ones weren’t designed properly. Thanks.

First, I recently read an article by Gerry McGovern (Web Navigation is About Moving Forward) in which he says, “Good web navigation design is not about giving people lots and lots of choices.” The rich link principle may conflict with this view. As with many other beliefs, opinions, and research in our industry, it seems like there is always a competing side.

Secondly, I have personal experience with rich link designs because our intranet has been using them for years. We are currently considering changing our rich link designs to a “less rich link” approach. We recently changed our home page based on the postulate that we should lead the user to the content they need by reducing the number of choices they had to review and analyze which also reduced the probability of them making a error in selection. Obviously, we also incorporated all the principles of information scent in the design. So for our homepage we went from a rich link design to a “reduced link” design and our user satisfaction skyrocketed. The other reason we are moving in the other direction is that we have found that one of the limitations of the rich link approach is the ability to focus on major content and the user perception of just too much to decipher. The rich link design, or as we like to call it “the site map design,” makes it difficult to apply focus except for placing the most important content in the upper left corner. After that, most of the content and links can be considered equal in terms of relevance or importance. We wanted, through the design, to expose the most relevant content, not necessary expose all the content.

So, I will be following this concept closely to see how it plays out.

We recently redesigned our intranet, stressing the proposition that the home page is really the jumping off point to go deeper into the site. The new home page has about twice the number of links as the old home page, with minimal text. We’ve also grouped links into categories, some based on an employee’s role (nurses, physicians, non-clinical staff) and some based on the type of information you’re looking for (policies and procedures, forms, clinical resources, etc.)

I work with smaller clients on lower budget sites and, although the theory is still true, the issue of doing it well is key.

I just pray that your wisdom and this emerging trend don’t spark a rash of poorly presented, jumbly links across homepages from clients who still spend on design and software and ignore IA and user testing.

So I’ll rewrite the script for the record:
“User Experience Guru Jared Spool says: spending money on research and testing is good; letting webmonkeys throw your price list index onto your homepage is bad.”

But you already said that, right?

(For all the people who skim the comments first.)

Search engines are getting smart about some of the spamming techniques out there that include massive numbers of links on one page. These are called link farms if they link out to other sites and those sites link back to them. This is not what is in question here. That’s good!

Link-rich pages that support internal navigation are great ‘food’ for the search engine spiders. They WANT your content and thus attempt to follow links on your site to visit all the pages. If you have graphics, flash, subjective links, and other means of un-simple HTML text links then the search engines might not find all the pages on your site. If you have session ids, track ids (of some types), multiple parameters – they may not visit all the pages on your site. It would certainly make my job as a Search Engine Marketer easier if everyone listened to Jared and put clean links on their home pages.

Recommendation: ~100 links as the search spiders can get bored easily and stop following links. Remember to include key converting or branding words in the link text. And put up a sitemap anyway. Like Jared told me many, many years ago – if people use your sitemap or your search box it means they are pissed off they couldn’t find the information the easy way. Make sure you provide them with all quick links on the sitemap, especially if you can’t do it on the home page.

The authors love them as they get a spot on the home page, the bosses love them as they get to show everything they do, and the users can find stuff.

Can’t lose!

I need to experiment more with the clustering and ordering, but I think that RLP’s (Rich Link Pages) are here to stay.

Certainly if the penalty is not being applied a link-rich home page could also be a way to help get a site’s links indexed by search engines.

What are some UI solutions that are helping users quickly scan these pages?