With gratitude for (and apologies to) James Lileks and his outstanding book “Gallery of Regrettable Food”, this is the second in an occasional series called “Regrettable User Experience”. In each “Regrettable” article I briefly highlight a website or application practice that should be avoided entirely or executed in a very different way.
Next on our list is the common but regrettable practice of overwhelming users with information.
“Too much information” can take many forms. One of my favorite examples can be seen on the Joann Fabrics website. Consider the map that’s displayed as soon as a user clicks the Store Locations link from the site’s home page:
Joann Fabrics default store locator map
That’s a lot of fabric! But unfortunately this display does almost nothing to help answer the high-probability question “Where’s the nearest Joann store?”. This is way too much information to be useful. To be fair, once users enter a zip code or other search criterion the store locator is adequate, but this map is really out of hand.
I’ll be covering store locator best practices in another article soon. In the meantime, let’s look at another example.
This one’s taken from a discussion forum. This navigation display enables users to easily switch between pages of threads within a section:
You can't see it in this image, but this multi-page navigation goes all the way to 148.
It looks familiar and similar to multi-page choices you see on many websites. But here the page numbers actually go all the way up to 148, causing a massive amount of horizontal scrolling. It looks like this:
Displayling links to all 148 pages is definitely too much of a good thing.
Yikes. I’ll be covering multi-page navigation in a future article, but for now let’s just say this isn’t the most sensible or efficient way to present these options.
Look at it this way: a glass of water and a fire hose are both capable of quenching your thirst. Which would you rather drink from?
Good, usable information displays deliver enough of the right information without overwhelming users and risking information overload.
Photo by singsing_sky. Creative Commons licensed.
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