This tip is easy, and it builds on two earlier ones: don’t force your users to make any more clicks than absolutely necessary. Identify what they’ll probably be trying to do, and let them begin that as soon as possible, especially on the homepage.

"Click beetle (Agrypnus murinus)" by Rachel Scopes
(CC-BY-NC-ND-licensed from Flickr)

There are three things to think about here:

• Is there anything you can do to remove an extra click for a user? Do you really, really need that information from them? Or do you really need them to press ‘OK’ here?
• Too many clicks and users will abandon their task especially on sites where people are engaging with government or politics for the first time
• Most users began their task before they arrived at the site

The second point is especially relevant to users of civic sites like the ones we build. This is different from other websites. For example, if you go online to book a flight, or pay tax, or buy flowers because you forgot your mother’s birthday, even if the website is difficult or frustrating to use, you will stay on it until you have finished. The result is more important than the barriers: you need to finish. But people who are thinking about reporting a pothole they just missed on their bicycle that morning, or writing to their parliamentary representative for the first time, or making a freedom of information request — well, these people are already making an unusual effort. If you do anything at all to make that harder for them, then they can and they will give up. Civic sites must make the task so easy that nothing discourages users from finishing the mission they started.

The third point is more subtle. Earlier this year, Francis Irving explained how clicking on Google was part of the product. This means that, by the time a user has arrived on your site, they may already be many clicks and key-presses into the process. The more you prolong this effort, and especially if you prolong it with unnecessary or annoying extra clicks, the more likely it is that they will give up.

A user who gives up does not accomplish the task you wanted them to do.
A user who gives up might never bother to try again.
Civic engagement can be that fragile, especially for first-time users.

As we’ve already pointed out in a previous blog post, it’s likely that someone will arrive at your site on the “wrong” page, and so they will click again to get to your homepage. That click has already prolonged their journey. Click-fatigue starts to set in. You must help them to start doing something — instead of still clicking around trying to get to the place where they can start — as soon as possible. This is why you should think of the homepage as the centre of your website: it’s not the cover page or an introduction — it’s where people already on your site go to get things get done.

Or, to put it another way, by the time users have got to your homepage, perhaps they won’t have any spare clicks left.

Of course, we have to be pragmatic about this and make sensible guesses about what users will be trying to do — it’s silly to try to cover everything. We study our web analytics and do user-testing, but even if you can’t do that, it’s usually fairly easy to identify the key tasks. We don’t just think of the homepage as an introduction, or a cover page, or a portal (although it can also sometimes serve those purposes): ideally, for the most common tasks, it must be the start. The task does not need to be finished — that can be several pages further on. As we showed in an earlier blog post, we just need to get users started.

Let users make a useful click — even better, a successful click — and they stop thinking about giving up, and start getting things done.