The effective simplicity, elegance of a website and reduction of confusion in navigation achieves the desired goals of increased subscriptions and sales. But it is often not so easy to achieve the simplification of a website and achieve a result like the one obtained by Apple as an icon of the goal to achieve.
“Simple, fast and easy to use”: mottoes of Tech companies
This is the motto of most technology companies today. Driven by agile methodologies, these companies strive to deliver faster services and products and more frequent iteration cycles.
The problem is that "simple" usually ends up being treated as "minimal", resulting in a problem that doesn't add much value to the user until the next iteration, leaving the user experience flawed.
Thus, in the digital domain, it is important to know the right balance. To do this, working with several specialists remains mandatory. All this to say that getting to a "simple" thing in the field of Tech is the result of a long and complex process.
Focusing on the essentials remains complicated
This first step that seems so obvious, to focus on the fundamentals of the site, is not very often translated into practice and it is surprising how many websites fail to achieve this.
The result is a big mess of jumbled elements all over the page, without any hierarchy, which makes for a chaotic visualization.
It is difficult to be objective and prioritize what is important, because everything seems essential. If you want your website design to be simpler and more effective, clearly identify the points you need to focus on, just like any good visual design or artwork. And that means focusing only on the essentials.
Use the 80-20 rule (Pareto's law): what takes up 20% of a page's content is 80% of the value and content people are looking for on it. This could be content, social input (review snippets, testimonials, media icons) and a signup or link to an action button, for example — that's 20% of this page.
Web ergonomics: a task reserved for professionals
The design of web pages is carried out by the web designer taking into account the different image sizes and screen resolutions. The displayed content is further limited to the visible area of the browser window, the rest of the content is reached by scrolling. Scrolling should be avoided as far as possible for the design and ergonomics of the site.
In the early days of website programming, web designers used tables to create a layout. It used to make the job easier, but is no longer relevant today and has a negative impact on search engine optimization and website design. Today, the design of a layout is mostly dynamically programmed using XHTML Strict, HTML5 and CSS syntax. This approach certainly makes programming a bit more complex in comparison, but it pays off in the long run.
As you have probably understood, to simplify your website, you need the intervention of several specialists. The latter must agree on a common point of view. In practice, this turns out to be quite complex and difficult to implement. At EtOH, we have teams that work with the same techniques and the same tools, developed internally to be able to collaborate at best. And that's why we have our own agile methodology that allows us to best develop your projects: the sprint method. It is this method that makes us have the best results and we achieve the objectives of our customers.
