People are easily distracted when you present them with too many options. By limiting the amount of choices you give your visitors, you control their experience and ultimately have the ability to guide them to the information you want them to see. If you present them with too much, they become confused and have a hard time finding the most valuable information.
Let’s face it. Your site should have one or two main goals. Do you want to collect names and email addresses? That’s a great goal so you can market to your prospects again and again for free. Or maybe you’re selling a product and you want to guide people to your shopping cart. Or maybe you’re just trying to generate phone calls. Any of those goals are fine, but which one is the most important? How about the second-most-important?
Those are the things that you should focus on and try to get people to reach your intended action at every point in their experience. On the other hand, if you offer too much, and vomit all over them with your content, they’ll likely miss the most important things.
That’s one reason why we try to guide people to no more than 3 places with a site at any point. Tomorrow, we’ll go into the Zeigarnik Effect and how it can limit a person’s experience on your website.
Chadd Bryant