Understand a user’s happy path to create a great overview page
How to keep your users from getting overloaded by too much information
Overview pages often trouble multiple team members, such as UX designers, business analysts, data scientists, and data visualizers. Unfortunately, the reason for this is an all too common issue with many organizations: there’s often too much potential information they could fit on the page.
However, one key thing you can do as a UX Designer to fight this information overload is to start with the minimum amount of information a user needs to accomplish their task. We can do this by thinking about a user’s happy path.
To understand why we first need to understand the differences between an overview page and a homepage.
Overview pages are often one-stop shops for internal users
One of the critical differences between an overview and a home page is that internal or logged-in users almost always access them. Overview pages often show company or sensitive data that you might not want publicly broadcast, so users often need to be authenticated.
To show this, let’s look at three of the most common overview pages:
Dashboards for giving a quick overview of various metrics (like Google Analytics)
Status pages for specific orders, products, and more (such as Fedex’s tracking page)
Pages for monitoring things in real-time (such as server status or stock markets)
Each of these overviews highlights information relevant to the user but are things that you might not want everyone to know (imagine if your entire neighborhood knew when packages were being left on your doorstep!).
In addition, looking at these overview pages also highlights another difference: users might leave after landing here. After all, if everything looks good, they might not need to take any additional action.
However, this raises one crucial question: What sort of information do you put on an overview page? A wide range of relevant information could fit here, from metrics and status to internal company news and documents. What makes sense to include if this has to serve as a one-stop shop for many users?
The answer comes from how users seek visual information.
Overview pages are prime examples of information-seeking
Ben Shneiderman is a Human-Computer Interaction and Information Visualization Researcher who pioneered a mantra about how humans seek visual information: Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand.
Users will glance over a page to get a basic story or sense of the information, paying attention to visual elements or large headers. Then, when they find something relevant to their interests, they zoom in on something and filter out everything else. Should they need further explanation, details should then be provided on demand.
Following this mantra lets us see what our overview page should focus on: it should provide an overview of all relevant content, with actionable ways to zoom and filter if needed. While having details on demand may be necessary, you likely do not have space to include them directly on this page.
So how do you do that? You start by considering the happy path.
What is the minimum required information for the happy path?
Planning for the happy path is one of the best ways to start designing an overview page. Just imagine your user clicks once to access this page, then they leave: what information do they see here that tells them everything’s good?
To figure this out, you need to create a detailed user persona. For example, imagine your user is a network administrator doing a routine check of all their servers. Here are some things they might need to know that everything’s fine:
What is the current status of all of the servers?
Did the servers go down at any point since they last checked?
Are any of the servers running slowly?
Are there any warning signs of abnormal activity (like network security issues)?
Etc.
Understanding the happy path allows you to understand the minimum amount of space you will need to take up for your overview and how much space you have to work with.
From there, it’s a matter of understanding the other possible scenarios you need to account for with your overview.
Great overview pages provide just enough information
As designers, we’re often used to designing pages that accommodate relatively sparse amounts of information, with more than enough whitespace to make it readable.
As a result, overview pages can often be a little overwhelming with the amount of possible information that can go into them. However, start with the basics of how humans seek information, and you may be on the right track to providing just enough information for your users.
So if you find yourself designing an overview page, don’t stress over all the potential information that you (and your team) might want to fit onto the page. Instead, take a step back, and consider the minimum amount of information your users need.
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.