Underlying all of the chatter about flat design, minimalism, and user experience design, there’s a simple principle: complexity does not lead to positive user experiences. Unfortunately, many businesses aren’t paying attention to the message. In many ways, that’s understandable. Modern content management systems make it almost trivially easy to load a site up with features. Want your Twitter feed published on your home page? Easily done. Want to bombard users with calls-to-action and various product combinations that might possibly elicit a conversion? Again, there’s very little work involved in doing so.
Websites exist for a purpose. For most business websites that purpose is to either generate leads or make sales. But there are plenty of tempting subsidiary functions that a site might be used for. Attempting to throw everything at the wall to see what sticks is a “design” paradigm that was once very popular, as you’ll know if you recall what corporate sites used to look like.
In fact, it isn’t a design approach at all. It’s a lack of design, a lack of thoughtfulness. There’s an old cliché among writers that the perfect piece of prose is one from which nothing more can be removed — a lesson that business site owners should take to heart and not just for aesthetic reasons.
It’s harder to create a simple and elegant site than a complex and cluttered one. It involves making choices at the design stage that result in a carefully curated set of effective on-site elements. That’s difficult, but it’s the job of designers and site owners to make those choices upfront, rather than ignoring their responsibility and putting the cognitive burden on visitors.
It might seem counter-intuitive, but the fewer options you present to visitors, the more likely they are to make a choice. Bombarding visitors with choices reduces conversions. I don’t know about you, but on many occasions I’ve stood in front of the dozens of different brands of cereal on the shelves of a supermarket in a state of unpleasant indecision because there are just too many options. That’s a state we don’t want to elicit in site visitors.
As I said, websites have a job to do. That job is moving people along a clearly defined path towards a goal. Without having a clear understanding of that path and the goal it’s impossible to focus design efforts in the right direction, and the result is complex, messy, and low-converting websites.
Simplicity is harder to achieve than complexity (or more accurately, than chaos), but it’s also the best way to ensure that a site does its job and serves a business’ needs efficiently.
