You can handle too much information
Frequently, clients would love to add lots of information to a page. Their first instinct is that they want to fill up every square inch of a page. A lot of people think that “if they could just add…” then they would get the sale; that they can convince the reader that they should buy something. This can be counterproductive.
I’ve read that it takes a person about 8 seconds (and this figures keep going down) to make up their mind of a purchase. Creating the visual clutter that comes from too much information just overwhelms them. What then happens is that creating chaos leads them to subconsciously think “this is way too much work“.
You’ve lost them.
My best example of chaos:
As you can see from this example, there is a lot of information on this site. The owner includes a lot of articles and this site is updated with the day’s news headlines that he felt were pertinent to his faith. He felt that if the people wanted to read it, they would sift through this site.
If you were interested in this content and if you stumbled upon this site, and see this jumbled mess, would you try and sift through it? If it’s true that people take 8 seconds to decide whether they will comb through the site, do you think that they would stay on this site?
Highly doubtful. I think they would simply move on to a site that has the information readily available for them to go through.
My makeover: Or, as I like to call it “creating order out of chaos”
Please note: that no information has been removed from this site! I simply took all the info and organized it. This is not a live site and just an exercise in how to handle wanting too much information on a site (and having no plans on removing any of it.)
What to do when you have a design that has way too much information:
Obvious answer is to shorten the amount of text. But oftentimes sometimes it’s not possible to do that. Heck, I even had one client ADD text after I told him that there was too much. He started re-reading and realized he “forgot” something!!!
The way to deal with too much information is to use contrast to establish a clear visual flow.
Quick ways of establishing a visual flow:
- Established categories for the information
- Placed this in order of importance
- Organized the various categories by color (for example: green was the website’s information, blue was multimedia, gold was used for articles and burgundy was for resources like links to other websites)
- Used lines and boxes to differentiate the categories and establish boundaries
- Created contrast by having a banner that although the height is smaller, it actually looks right because all the information is compact and presented with a burst of color.
- Included a few pictures to break up the text-heavy site.
C O N C L U S I O N :
Good design is about visual hierarchy. Like items should be placed in proximity of each other.
You also have to design with your reader in mind. You have to make it easy for them to go through your website. As he hits your website, within a few seconds he has to know what the site is about. A few seconds is all you have to convince them to stay and continue reading.
SEE INFORMATION RICH DESIGN IN ACTION
Stroll over to my case studies and check out my information rich sample.
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