Less is More: Simplify Your Message

Your company is complex, dynamic, and multi-dimensional, but how do you successfully showcase that depth on a computer screen? Many companies have trouble clearly communicating their offerings without creating a cluttered and confusing list of information. This month’s article examines the solution to organizing your online information to create a more effective website and a more compelling user experience. Intuitive user experiences are the key to prompting the desired response from your users.

At Boston Interactive we find that many companies, whether product or service oriented, tend to include long lists of their services on their homepages in order to insure that they have “something for everyone”. For some, this manifests itself as a list of fifteen or more offerings – a list that can confuse more than communicate. Exhaustive listings are usually detrimental to the user experience and inefficient communication vehicles. Your website and Google are two different things and your company should recognize the difference.

For companies with clearly defined and manageable product mixes this approach isn’t as problematic. Most companies, however, are in a more fluid environment that makes the act of listing their offerings complex and chaotic. In addition to creating visual clutter, a lengthy detailed listing causes users to assume that the long list is all-inclusive rather than illustrative of your strengths. Should the entire list actually be read, any mismatch between your prospects expectations and your listing may result in their conclusion that your company has nothing to offer them. A more abstract listing allows for more effective positioning and effective communication with further detail just a click away. You should link to details where needed and don’t impose unnecessary information on your prospective clients.

A good guide to measuring the effectiveness of your list is the commonly-used “rule of seven”. Cognitive psychologist George Miller justified the importance of limiting information to seven units. He explained that the human memory has a limited capacity and tends to remember information when it is grouped in sevens. In his studies, he found that regardless of whether the information was digits, letters, words, or other units there was a distinct boundary to the number of information bits that could be effectively understood and memorized.

In order to organize the elements of your offering successfully, start with an understanding of your customer’s wants and needs. By knowing exactly what your prospects are searching for, you can categorize your services in a way that draws the user into your site rather than creating an overload of information that could confuse and ultimately deter visitors from forming a relationship with your company. Matching site navigation to audience expectations breaks down the communication barrier between your company and your prospects.

Edward Tufte, renowned author and expert on visual and information architecture wrote that “the standards of quality are derived from visual principles that tell us how to put the right mark in the right place.” He implies that the quality of your presentation is directly affected by the way that information in placed and structured on a plane. In our case, the information at hand is the range of company attributes. Simplifying the presentation of your company’s offerings is relatively small task that has a large impact on the user experience. Minimizing information overload can pay dividends downstream and support an evolving offering mix while better engaging your prospective clients.