Why your homepage sucks (and what you can do about it)
From a UX perspective, most homepages suck. It’s basically a fact of life. Most homepages aren’t built with the user (or customer) experience in mind. Instead, they tend to be an uneasy negotiated settlement across internal business stakeholders, each wanting to leverage the visibility (or perceived visibility) of the homepage for their own goals and initiatives.
Like it or not, the homepage is a nexus point for an organization. It’s under an intense amount of scrutiny as the most looked-at page within your company (although not necessarily by your customers).
The result of this is often a cacophonous page that scrolls on forever, delivering rapid-fire information and initiatives down the page, with the “above the fold” area an ever-shifting battleground for anyone in an organization in need of some results. But in their attempt to be all things to all people internally, homepages fail their external users. They’re confusing, largely useless, and don’t drive results relative to their traffic.
I’m going to cover some of the prominent issues that plague the homepages of websites and apps, and then discuss some strategies to fix them. While my principal concern is UX, many of the problems have deeper roots than what’s designed. In my opinion, a good homepage is one that works best for users, and it’s the role of designers and product folks to create homepages that align what’s right for the business with that goal.
Disclaimer: this is not an easy task. If it were, there’d be no need to write about it!
“We’d love to get a spot on the homepage”
It’s a thing that you hear pretty often working in large organizations. Take team sports as a parallel. Go to any bar while a sports game is on, and you’ll find a room full of barstool coaches, general managers, and a few people who’ve had too many who think they could play better than the teams on the screen. The reality is that if the coach, or the GM, or the players listened to each person in the room, they’d get a lot of contradictory advice. No reasonable person would think this was an effective way to run a team. But this is how a lot of homepages are constructed and maintained.
They’re always full of things we think people might use, or should use, or that we hope they would use. Every department in the company wants a piece of the homepage, all for different things. Brand wants it to communicate who the company is. Marketing wants to push services and value props. Media wants to monetize it with ads. Merchandising wants to add curated products.
People have their biases. They think whatever they focus on is important, and I’m not necessarily saying that it specifically isn’t, but I think we need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that everything important needs to be on the homepage. It doesn’t.
So who decides? This too is an issue. Consider what’s known as “Conway’s Law” — the notion that the products an organization produces reflect its own internal structures. Homepages are the purest expression of an organization’s structure. If — for example — the marketing department has incredible influence in the business, you’ll see that reflected heavily on the homepage. If you ever see blog posts on a non-blog company’s homepage, you know someone has successfully pushed for them to be there. Whether they should be is a different question.
Next, homepages often have to absorb the failures of other parts of the UI. If navigation isn’t effective, the homepage has to step in and support users being able to navigate to key areas. If the customer journey has no effective points for conveying important information, directing users to points of discovery, or advertising products and services, then guess where those things get placed? The homepage. Always the homepage.
Fundamentally the homepage is just one page, and one page can only do so much. It’s when we ask the homepage to support every job of the user, and every initiative of the business, that they end up failing both groups.
A final homepage design pitfall lies in how its success gets measured. An overemphasis on the wrong metric could easily send your homepage in the wrong direction. Defining success metrics set the path for experimentation and feature development, and too much focus on the wrong thing might even frame actual improvements to the customer experience in a negative light.
It’s tempting to look at all that homepage traffic and think about all the conversions, sign ups, add-to-carts, etc., that could be had. Don’t fall for it. It’s not the job of the homepage, and if you try to make it that way you might end up affecting its ability to be truly effective. Consider what would happen if an NBA team chose their players with their height as the number one consideration. Would that team be very good? Probably not–not because it’s bad to be tall in basketball, but because it’s the wrong metric for the success of a basketball team.
How to fix your broken homepage
One large aspect of this is control. A homepage needs a coach, a GM, whatever. That doesn’t mean the wishes of an organization (those people in the bar yelling at the TV) have to be ignored, but they do have to be filtered, and ruthlessly prioritized by someone with the authority to do so. And that someone needs to be fully concerned with the needs of the customer.
A good homepage is a finely tuned machine, and organizations need to do their best to keep it from being weighed down by everyone with an idea.
Sometimes it’s important to go back to basics. What are the jobs (read: jobs-to-be-done) the user/customer is here for, and how to do those jobs group together? A user coming to a site for customer service info has a job that’s different from a user coming to view new products, for example. Keep in mind that tasks imposed by your business (logging in, entering a location, etc.) are not customer jobs. They are the things that are required for a customer to complete a job, an important distinction.
A homepage should act as a router for these jobs. It should visually impress the brand, and then deliver the pathways for a customer to proceed into the job they’ve come to do. In a world without politics (queue John Lennon’s “Imagine”), what would a job-routing homepage actually look like?
A crucial step in getting there is to ensure that other pages do some of the lifting. Don’t make the homepage do all the work. A homepage can start a user on their journey to do a job, but it doesn’t have to let the user DO the job. What’s more, many of the business initiatives that normally pollute the homepage should undergo scrutiny about where they’d truly be most effective in the customer journey (hint: it probably isn’t as soon as users arrive on your site/app). Increasingly, in the e-commerce and publishing worlds, users don’t interact with homepages at all, instead dropping into the journey further down the road, having followed a search, ad, email, or shopping link.
If the other parts of your journey aren’t equipped to handle those things, well, this is where you should turn your attention. A digital product that uses its homepage for everything is akin to trying to play basketball using only your face. I don’t recommend it.
Last, make sure your metrics are aligned with your customers’ expectations and goals at the outset of their journeys–these are the types of things a homepage can do really well. Measuring the right thing is crucial to maintaining an effective homepage, and avoiding content and features that stray from that focus.
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one
There are some good homepages out there. I will say that this is generally much easier to achieve with small businesses (fewer cooks in the kitchen) and in businesses that provide solutions to fewer customer jobs.
One example is in big tech. The biggest tech. What does Facebook’s homepage look like? What about Twitter? Google? Social media companies have learned that homepages don’t really do much for their customers, other than maybe to get them logged in. What about marketing? What about brand? What about ads? What about ______ (insert your organization’s latest homepage concern here)? Those things are baked into the rest of the interface. In fact, many companies are embracing non-homepage homepages, ditching the long messy scroll in favour of moving users to the pages they use most often.
Another great example is Apple. Here’s a company with dozens of product and service verticals. Hardware. Software. Cloud services. Content. Plus all the corporate/shareholder stuff. Supporting a lot of different customer jobs. You’d naturally think that their homepage would be filled with things. It isn’t. Why? Their navigation does the work to route users into these funnels, leaving a nice, clean, fun homepage to show off anything new.
Well-designed apps take advantage of logged in users’ preferences and behaviours to deliver personalized experiences that fast-track user jobs. Why should a user start from scratch every time they load your app? No matter what, less is more. Ikea — which sells a lot of things — (currently) has just six widgets on their homepage. One of those is search, and one of those is login. Don’t make your users have to dig through a homepage to start their jobs. That’s what they’re there to do.
Homepages are easy, good homepages are hard
If you’re left feeling a bit badly about your own homepage, don’t despair! There’s a reason most homepages suck, and that’s because it’s not easy to make a good one. Making a good one involves making key decisions on the organizational level, and it’s not always up to you, reader, to make them. It’s a valid exercise to seriously interrogate what “needs” to be there, and what folks really mean when they say “need.”
But your homepage might never be perfect. You might never get certain things off your homepage. It’s important to know that this doesn’t have to happen all at once either. Better homepages demonstrate their value over worse ones, so it’s still a valid exercise to make your homepage suck…less. Good luck!
Further Reading:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/top-ten-guidelines-for-homepage-usability/
https://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-engagement/web-design-the-decline-of-the-homepage-007269.php
