1. Mega, mega menus
There’s nothing more frustrating than thinking you know what you want, until you see the menu. You may have experienced this with your local pub menu, but the same applies to website menus.
One of the top mistakes we see as web designers are bloated and tedious menus. One of the key principles in UX (user experience) is to keep content findable, this means keeping content easy to read and navigate. It has been proven time and again that, according to Hick’s Law, the amount of time it takes a user to make a decision is influenced by the abundance and complexity of choices. Keeping choices simple and to a minimum will allow your users to make confident decisions.
In addition, although SEO is a significant contributing factor to your website’s success, it’s important to ensure you are not over-optimising your site for SEO at the detriment of UX. After all, bots don’t buy your products or services, people do. Whilst SEO helps people find your website, your overtly black-hat SEO-centric links will soon have your customers in a muddle and looking at your competitor’s much simpler, less stress-inducing website.
A good example of this is being too specific with your menu items by trying to hit your short and long-tail keywords. For example, you wouldn’t expect your everyday DIY customer to innately know the difference between a…
- Solid 24-tooth circular saw,
- Segmental 34-tooth circular saw,
- Carbide inserted 40-tooth circular saw — you get the picture!
Instead, try to keep your menus user-centric by grouping pages, products and/or services into high-level categories that are easy to understand:
- Saws
- Manual Saws
- Coping Saws
- Hack Saws
- Mechanical Saws
- Chain Saws
- Circular Saws
- Jigsaws
- Manual Saws
Keeping your navigation simple, concise, and correctly labelled will make it easier and ultimately faster for your users to traverse your site and find what they need. After all, 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to your website after a poor experience, meaning you could quite literally lose your clients in amongst all that extra detail.