Three clicks or bust

There are lots of popular design myths passed off as ‘best practice’ these days by armchair designers, particularly within the web design industry. Somehow these guidelines manage to work their way into the public consciousness, often taking root in briefing and specification documents where they eventually become criteria used to measure the quality of a delivered product.

Whilst in some cases these guidelines can be helpful, and can actually hasten the adoption of progressive thinking, more often than not they are overly simplistic band-aids designed to make life easier for lazy designers. These rules of thumb take the hard work out of problem-solving, effectively removing the need for what I consider to be the most important part of any design process: Thinking the problem through.

The three-click rule is one such guideline; A dark, festering tumour in the colon of user experience design.

Okay, so that’s probably a little unfair. The 3-click rule never hurt anybody, and is borne of a perfectly logical assumption that frustrated users will abandon your website in disgust if they have to click more than three times to find what they’re looking for. Makes sense, right?

Popular wisdom has it that the optimal navigational system for any website, designed for anyone for any given purpose, is one that requires no more than three clicks to find anything. This is, of course, a gross generalisation and completely unfounded.

The fact is, the number of clicks a user has to endure has no bearing whatsoever on user satisfaction or conversion. Joshua Porter of UIE carried out a number of tests that concluded that the number of clicks is largely irrelevant, and rather it is the quality of those clicks that count.

In terms of conversion, Jakob Nielson’s usability tests concluded pretty clearly that “users’ ability to find products on an e-commerce site increased by 600 percent after the design was changed so that products were 4 clicks from the homepage instead of 3.”

This is especially important in e-commerce, where failure to think the project through properly can cost you significant revenue, and potentially your business. Forcing a 3-click information architecture on an inventory that doesn’t support it means grouping too many products into too few categories, resulting in a confusing shopping experience where customers are confronted with too much choice.

So if it’s nonsense, why is this rule so pervasive? The answer is simple: It’s been around forever. Since neanderthal man carved the first mouse from a block of granite with his bare hands, the 3-click rule has been gathering strength, and has now become so deeply rooted in our media-savvy consciousness that even clients with no experience of interaction design have embraced it emphatically into the bosom of their marketing doctrine.

It helps to remember that this rule is the product of a pre-standards, dial-up age, where each click meant waiting 20 minutes for a poorly hacked Flash monstrosity to download; Any more than three clicks meant an hour of irate thumb-twiddling and astronomical phone bills to boot.

Fast-forward a decade and we no longer have the same issues with speed. Fast-loading, AJAX-enabled, standards-based web pages served over unlimited broadband connections mean that those three clicks quickly become insignificant, and the quality of the user experience becomes more about intuitiveness, rather than brevity.

Whether the 3-click rule is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how you look at it. On one hand, it has encouraged clients and stakeholders to think about the experiences they create from their customers’ point of view, which can only be a good thing, and makes life much easier for the UX designer struggling to fight for user’s rights above the needs of the brand.

That said, it also leads to a lack of compromise in design, forcing the user experience into a structure that can’t (and shouldn’t) properly accommodate it, making life unnecessarily difficult for the end user, and therefore ultimately losing you business.

So what are the rules? If I could define one rule to er… rule them all, it would be this: “Design something that works”. Nothing performs better than a website or app designed specifically for a purpose, and there’s no substitute for thinking a problem through properly. Crutches like the 3-click rule only make us lazy.

No rule of thumb will ever be a substitute for attention to detail. If your navigational structure and user-journeys are designed properly to be logical, intuitive, provide your user with a good sense of place where they can move around unhindered, you can use as many clicks as you like.

As long as the user feels they are making good progress, they couldn’t care less how many clicks it takes.