Is Your Website Click-Happy?
Bad website design comes in several forms.
There’s bad design. In it’s extreme form (now more rarely seen in the wild), this is garish fonts and graphics, scrolling banners, and a home page that is about 15 screens long. I’m gone from these sites in under 5 seconds.
There’s bad layout, where you can’t find what you want, get lost quickly, and can’t see how to get back. If the site looks nice, I can put up with this for 4 to 5 clicks, and then I’m gone.
These mistakes are easy to see and, with the right skills, easy to fix. But there is another type of bad design that is more difficult to recognize and much more difficult to fix.
The click-happy site.
Click-happy sites can be nicely designed and intelligently laid out, but you have to click A LOT to interact with the site. Being click-happy is most noticeable in sites you come back to over and over again, like webmail.
I have a Hotmail account I use for sites that force me to verify an email address (so they can send their unwanted newsletters to an account I rarely read). Hotmail is click-happy.
Open message <click>. Open reply <click>. Send reply <click>. Move to <click> a folder <click>.
We’ve learned to put up with click-happy sites, but better ways have emerged. Coding languages like AJAX allow webpages to change without refreshing the entire page, and allow a more fluid and intimate user experience.
I love this little experiment that pushes this idea to the limit (and it’s even 2+ years old): http://dontclick.it/
Hover-over actions, mouse-motions, click and drag–there are many ways available to designers and developers to invite visitor interaction with your site.
Certainly you can go overboard. A browsing experience should be intuitive, which means clicking will still be the norm for “normal” sites . But the right dose of pleasantly surprising moments from other forms of interaction can leave a powerful impression with visitors of a business that is savvy and eager to help.
Know any websites that put this type of interaction to good use?
