Home pages are vulnerable to content mistakes: here’s how design can help
Complex home page issues can often be addressed with quick user testing
Sometimes you can get so engrossed in the other parts of a website that you forget about the user’s first step: the home page.
Surprisingly, a home page can often turn into a dense and hard-to-understand page because it’s valuable real estate. It’s not the fault of one person in particular: in fact, home pages often become like this because no one is in charge of home page content.
So it helps if you’re monitoring your home page with user feedback, and doing that can be easier than you realize. But to do that, you have to realize how home pages balloon in size.
Keeping track of content
“Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.” — Antoine de St. Exupéry
In Content Strategy for the Web, Kristina Halvorson talks about one of the first responses, when she asks who’s in charge of content, is often “No one.” When there’s no one in charge of content, there’s no one to say “No” to new content pieces (or at least de-prioritize them).
This can lead to several problems, but nowhere is it more evident than on the home page. Organizational politics often gets involved, with several projects fighting to be at the top of the page (instead of what matters).
For example, users might mainly come to a site to order a replacement ID, which is straightforward (but a little boring). However, people working on New Feature X want to bring more attention to it, so they want to have their section at the top. Then, the people on New Feature Y do the same. After a while, you find out that to order a replacement ID, you have to scroll down the page 3 times, where it’s hidden in small text.
What makes this doubly complicated for designers, though, is that organizations aren’t structured in a way to address this. You’re often a designer on a specific product, which may not be on the home page, which means you might not have the resources assigned for you to do regular user testing entirely on the homepage.
However, what you can do is push back with quick and dirty user testing. That comes in two forms: five-second tests and home page tours.
Quick and dirty user testing: Home page tours and 5-second tests
If you want to gather user feedback around homepages with a limited budget, there are two methods that you can use: Home page tours and five-second tests.
Five-second tests are primarily self-explanatory: you find users and ask them to look at your website for five seconds. Then, you ask them several questions to get a sense of what they recall or what are the critical points of the website, including:
What is the purpose of the page?
What are the main elements you can recall?
Who do you think the intended audience is?
Did the design/brand appear trustworthy?
What was your impression of the design?
This is effective because users often leave web pages within 10–20 seconds unless they understand (and want) your value proposition. As a result, it’s necessary to quickly communicate what your website is about and see if users get your website as a first impression.
However, just because the initial value of the page seems clear doesn’t mean that the user understands all elements on the page. This is where the Home Page Tour comes into play.
Homepage tours are an idea from Steve Krug’s book Rocket Surgery Made Easy, all about DIY user testing. He suggests that you spend around 3 minutes in any user test to conduct a tour of your home page. This allows you to get a sense of how easy it is for users to understand your home page and provides insight into how familiar your participants are with your product.
Users might understand the overall purpose of your company, for example, but not understand why there are different menus on the top and sidebar navigation. Or they might not see how to access a particular product. In conjunction with existing user tests, Touring the home page allows you to understand what design elements might be problematic for your users.
Both of these methods allow you to gather user feedback and monitor if changes to the homepage are negative.
But let’s say that you get the terrible news that the main page is incomprehensible to the average user. What do you do, then?
Create a compact design recommendation for problem-solvers
One advantage that user testing methods have is that they provide a summary of the issue and can be paired with design recommendations on fixing the issues. Rather than saying something vague like “Our homepage is terrible,” we’re likely to have some idea of how to fix it.
This is what we should then prepare and then pass along to anyone who might help. Unfortunately, getting this feedback to the right person may take a while: it may not always be clear to who you should pass this information along or who can address this problem.
But having a straightforward problem to address (especially with user feedback), along with recommendations on how to improve it, will have a good chance of getting the problem fixed. We may sometimes forget about it, but having a bad home page (and user impression) is a reasonably high priority.
So if you suspect that your home page is going to run into issues, don’t be afraid to do a quick and dirty user test: gathering feedback from users about their first impression doesn’t have to take a long time, but it can make sure that your users don’t stumble on the first step.
Kai Wong is a Senior UX Designer, Design Writer, and author of the Data and Design newsletter. His new book, Data-informed UX Design, explains small changes you can make regarding data to improve your UX Design process.