Avoid Clutter

When designing user experiences try to avoid confusion, clutter as much as you can, by keeping the website / webapp as simple as possible.

Users can logically deduct certain steps, processes when interacting with the web application.

For example when I design administration interfaces I always skip the log out message, because the scenario is the following:

• The administrator clicks on the log out button
• The application logs him out, and returns to the home page

At this point the administrator knows that the log out was successful, there’s no need to implement an extra message saying: You are logged out.

On the other hand, if the log out failed, then the application won’t redirect the user to the home page, instead keeps him on the administration page.

Choices…

I see more and more the choices I have to make when I buy a product.

The typical scenario of buying a product could be:

• Identifying a product category which satisfies a typical need.
• Identifying the actual product.
• Considering the alternatives based on different factors such as price, quality, etc.
• Buying the selected product or one of it’s alternatives.

The problem relies in searching and selecting the product’s alternatives. You see, the thing is that people (consumers) hate choices, because it involves an extra process, extra brain power.

It would be much easier if there were just a handful of products for every need, or better, just one product that is perfect from every perspective, but unfortunately no such product exists.

How a marketer should handle this situation, when he/she knows exactly the competitors. In my opinion the most effective strategy is a straight to the face marketing, not targeting the whole segment, just a little part of it, just a niche.

And the message should be clear, The X product satisfies Y need.