Website Design Blog

Swimming upstream gets boring

We don't all have the determination of David Walliams, and most of use certainly would not take on the challenge of swimming the length of the Thames, a feat Walliams has just achieved. But not even David himself would want to swim the opposite direction back up the Thames and against the current.

The same concept can be applied when designing a website. The whole task of getting to where they want to be is a lot easier for the visitor if they can just go with the flow.

A river takes the path of least resistance and that is what your customers expect when they visit your website, they don't what to be fighting their own intuition and logic in an attempt to find what they are looking for.

Put your customers on a raft and let them float

The flow of your website needs to be above all, intuitive, it needs to make it easy for customers to navigate without thinking, and the flow of the site should take them on a pleasant journey without much effort to their final port of call.

If your website navigation is counterintuitive your potential customers will get sick of swimming upstream and will feel it is not worth the effort and leave. We've all done that haven't we?

Google analytics allows you to analyse what your potential customers are doing once they arrive at your website, so test different configurations to find the most intuitive structure.

Keep it simple

Good navigation is simple navigation, which is what we need to be aiming for.

Good examples of this are Google and Twitter. Think how easy it is to find what you are looking for on these two websites. The sign up process on Twitter is stupidly easy and Google became so popular partly because the search interface was so simple people didn’t have to think.

It's no surprise then that these are two very successful websites, so if they are keeping it simple, then we surely should?