Who wins? Ok, a little bit of context first. On a project to re-design a full website of a Non-Governmental Organization where I’m involved, a few debates have surfaced about the benefits of reducing clicks for the users and by that delivering loads of information right from the Homepage.

Fewer clicks

Reducing clicks is a metric that most technical people can relate to easily, it’s a hard number that they can share quickly on a slide.

In large organizations, it’s common to find their websites have been growing for many years without many rules and processes in place, bringing more and more content to the top levels of navigation, closer or in the Homepage, just to reduce the number of clicks, as that is the only metric they know of.

During interviews with users that I ran, they claim that the navigation is difficult, the Homepage is overloaded with images, buttons, texts, and titles and it’s difficult to find the right information. It doesn’t invite click-through.

We can conclude that reducing clicks didn’t solve the users problems, instead just making them worse and creating a disconnect between the organization and their target audience.

Progressive Disclosure

The opposite of fewer clicks, in my opinion, is Progressive Disclosure to invite the user to discover more content at each click from a landing page down to detailed content.

To attract the user to click through the content strategy has to be around the specific personas that compose the universe of users, by delivering landing pages specific to their goals.

The benefits that I can think of, from the top of my mind, are:

• Better SEO, because the website will have some nice landing pages in the middle, dedicated to specific topics;
• More ownership from the different divisions and teams towards the content they publish on the website.
• The users are not bombarded with information that doesn’t concern them.
• Lower bounce rate from the landing pages.

What are your thoughts about this? are you also in favor of Progressive Disclosure? or you just care about reducing the number of clicks?