Solution: Create a site that can convert whatever activity you are hoping your visitor/customer will accomplish without needing to read (much), while ensuring depth of information is available to those that want it.
- Color is key in design. The bulk of your content and site (60%ish) should be a base color that is pretty neutral. Think black or blue here. 30% should be your accent color which is used to divide sections of the page and highlight or frame logical places that contain attention. And 10% should be the action color, reserved for wherever you want the user to click for “next”. Over-use of the action color or even the accent color is very distracting to web apps and hurts conversion.
- Accept greater back-end complexity to avoid error messages and simplify the front-end. For example, when taking a dollar amount in a filed, accept “$”, “,”, “.” and interpret them appropriately rather than presenting the user with an error message when they put a dollar sign ($) in front of the amount. Even though you put a $ visual in front of the text input box to let them know they did not NEED to enter a dollar sign, if they enter it, accept it and move on. Due to the scale affect mentioned in Jared’s article, it is worth your time to develop robust input parsing rather than returning the dsu (dumb-sh*t user) error message.
- Develop and adhere to standards as much as possible. Use a standard page title size, location, tone, and tense. Have the standard action button, a standard action color highlighting what you want visitors to accomplish, put the button in a standard location (bottom right?) above the fold. Use standards to show required fields throughout your site, either footnoting or bolding required fields or optional fields depending on what will keep your interface simplest. Adhere to standard web page layouts which users have become accustomed to such as logo in upper left linking to corporate home page, utility navigation in upper right next to search input text box, footer nav with site terms, site map, and corporate non-consumer uses, top tab and/or left nav structure with breadcrumbing, etc.
- Create a header, footer and navigation which blends in as a single ignorable unit so as not to distract from whatever you are trying ot focus the visitor on. Of course, navigation clarity is paramount, but you can design it in such a way that once a user has glanced at it and figured it out, it becomes like wallpaper on your site and only gets a visitor’s attention when the visitor actively applies their attention to it.
- Create a way for users to get more information about fields if desired while maintaining the simplest application possible. A new web standard developing along these lines might be dashed underlines (half-hyperlinked?) for keywords with brief descriptions in rollover text and more extensive descriptions available in old school pop-up windows or web 2.0 foldouts.
- Allow configurability, but do it in a way that does not overcomplicate for the new and casual users of the site. A good example here is the google search preferences settings. There is quite a bit of back end complexity, configurability, and power available, but only a small hypertext link on the main page, not a control for every field in the output. Balance this carefully, showing the coplexity only to those that want to find it and can handle it.