What if there were no stop signs, and your company was in charge of designing one? Would you really be trusting "marketing gurus" to come up with ideas to design them?
Hilarious, but the simple fact is that while stop signs aren't designed this way, many of the websites that we see on the net are. Think about it. How does that enterprise software you are developing look like today?
I thought so. But of course you'd say "these are business requirements -- the client will complain if we remove them, or place them elsewhere." So how do we strike the balance between being noisy, and being useful, and all the while being feature complete?
In the book Don't Make Me Think, Steve Krug discusses about two types of noise:
- Busy-ness. Some Web pages give me the same feeling I get when i'm wading through my letter from Publisher's Clearing House trying to figure out which sticker I have to attack to the form to enter without accidentally subscribing to any magazines. When everything on the page is clamoring for my attention the effect can be overwhelming. Lots of invitations to buy! Lots of exclamation points and bright colors! A lot of shouting going on!
- Background noise. Some pages are like being at a cocktail party; no one source of noise is loud enough to be distracting by itself, but there are a lot of tiny bits of visual noise that wear us down.
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Users have varying tolerances for complexity and distractions; some people have no problem with busy pages and background noise, but many do. When you're designing Web pages, it's probably a good idea to assume that everything is visual noise until proven otherwise.
The next time you dive in to add yet another field into your form, or your boss asks you to implement yet another pop up menu to "catch the users' attention", stop to think about them stop signs. Could you find a place where it will be less intrusive? Can you place it on the page such that it won't clutter your design, or won't disrupt the current work flow of your user?
It's worth the effort to think about why that very simple sign just works.
