What is this site for?
Posted February 4th, 2009 by David HamillWhen you’ve spent lots of time planning a website, it’s easy to forget that most of the people who arrive at it for the first time, will never have heard of it. You need to make the proposition obvious on the homepage.
Rather than pointing out sites that get it wrong, I’m going to provide some good examples of clear propositions on homepages. My first example is from BBC iPlayer.
BBC iPlayer
If you’ve seen the iPlayer ads on UK TV, you’ll know that the advertising tagline is “Making the unmissable, unmissable”. This won’t tell new users much about the website if they put this tagline on the homepage. So the BBC uses a different tagline on the website itself. “Catch up on the last 7 days of BBC TV & Radio”. Immediately it’s possible for me to understand what I can do with the website.
Despite lots of TV advertising, some people won’t know what they can do with this website so the tagline has a huge benefit.
A good tagline is short enough to be read quickly whilst being specific enough to explain the purpose of the site. “Watch TV on the internet” would not be very helpful on this site for example.
Last.fm
Last.fm is another website that explains itself upfront. “Based on what you listen to, Last.fm recommends you new music”
Last.fm goes a step further than iPlayer by giving an example. People who listen to Madness also like The Specials, Bad Manners and The Selecter.
It also invites me to begin using Last.fm, by telling me to “type an artist”.
Hubdub
Hubdub is a website where you bet on the outcome of the news with pretend money. The image below is from the homepage. The tagline “Predict the News” is short and descriptive.
The site goes on to feature an event for the new user to bet upon. So like Last.fm, it tells me how to begin. Hubdub could do more elsewhere on the page to sell the concept and the page could do with a clear single sentence explanation. But otherwise the basic proposition is quite clear.
Won’t my users understand my site by playing with it?
It’s best not to presume that visitors to your website will eventually work out what the site is for, simply by playing around with it. It’s more likely that they will leave because they don’t really see the need to stay. If your site’s visitors can’t instantly understand your offering, why would they hang around to work it out?
Now have a look at your own website
It’s no accident that all of these examples are all relatively new concepts. Your own website might be more traditional, but the proposition still needs to be quickly obvious.
Why not print off a colour version of your homepage and show it to a few people who’ve never seen it. Then ask them to tell you what the site’s purpose is. If they have no idea or get it completely wrong, consider making a few changes to your homepage.
4 Responses to “What is this site for?”
February 4th, 2009 at 10:15 am
It would seem that far too few people are experimental in nature and consequently the first reaction when coming across a new website that they don’t ‘get’ is to leave it straightaway and not to click around thus finding out what it’s all about.
This is pretty much common sense, as it happens in shops/restaurants and probably elsewhere too.
Take for instance, the restaurant Nando’s; this place has waiting staff but bucks trend by expecting you to order at the bar and grab your own plates/cutlery/drinks. This works out well because they explain it to you when you first come in. However, last week I was there and the waiting staff didn’t explain it to us – no problem for us as I’ve been there before, but the couple next to us sat there looking perplexed for ten minutes and eventually left because they had no idea what to do. They clearly didn’t ask for fear of looking stupid.
The morale to the story: a little explanation goes a long way.
February 5th, 2009 at 7:20 am
Interesting stuff. The point I’d like to make here is that the websites you mention are very specific in their intention. Take iPlayer – it is there for catching up on broadcast TV using your computer. Very clear objective, from a user’s perspective. However, many sites may offer multiple services, or even exist for purely informational purposes. My company’s site is one – http://www.reynardthomson.com – no tag-line (but maybe this would help – food for thought?) but a more complex proposition which isn’t really intended for the casual browser. If you’re coming to my company’s site, you’re visiting because you probably have an interest in some of the services, or perhaps you’ve just chanced across it via an AdWords link or somesuch.
So, tag-line’s aside, it’s our duty as developers to make sites intuitively easy to navigate, exploiting good design, avoiding padding and technological lock-in* and trying to get the message across in the best way possible…
* one trick I like is to see how easy it is to navigate my site using a text-only browser – Lynx springs to mind. If you’ve avoided ‘lock-in’ AJAX and flash and so on, you ought to be ok, but it’s surprising how many sites just won’t work. And if they won’t work for Lynx, they likely won’t work for Jaws or other assistive web readers, and may even (heaven forbid) get the Googlebot in a fangle…
February 5th, 2009 at 7:58 pm
Hi John, consider the user who has clicked one of your Adwords links. They may have run a search on a particular service and landed at your homepage. They will arrive with questions that need to be answered pretty quickly. The first is likely to be “OK, what do these guys do?”. That’s your proposition.
The fact that you’ve listed your services from your homepage explains your proposition.
You could apply a little more visual focus to this list and make them links to more information.
I would also recommend saying “you” more than “we”. Focus on the benefit you can give to the reader. That’s what they’re interested in.
February 11th, 2009 at 3:38 am
[...] Usability has some good advice for all you webdev’s out there: tell your visitors what your website does. This should really be a no-brainer. However, I do think its worth noting that telling someone != [...]
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