A web user or reader has one overarching priority: speed. Speed may kill on the streets but on the web “the faster the better.”

The challenge with giving your user quick unfettered access to the information they desire is striking a balance between the need for speed and an overly cluttered home page. If you provide lots of content, buttons and links on the home page then you may provide your users with faster access to content with less clicks. The risk of course is too much home page information that is overwhelming to the user. The tradeoff is clicks for speed.

Some websites like Amazon.com have had enormous success despite a busy home page. There is no denying Jeff Bezo’s success: Amazon.com is the most successful e-commerce site on the Internet. Period. But Amazon’s home page is scary and completely overwhelming. Amazon.com is not a model for site design, layout and usability. In these areas, it fails many tests.

When I told this to the audience of some 300 at last month’s IABC International Conference in Washington, D.C., (see The Site Is Right 2005) I was not surprised when I was challenged.

“How can you say that?” exclaimed one woman. “You can’t argue with Amazon’s success!”

Amazon.com’s success is largely due to its first mover status, unparalleled selection, innovative technology and entrepreneurial approach (strategy), and last but not least, it’s brand.

The Amazon home page contains about four screens of extremely busy and crowded content.

Amazon.com’s outrageously busy and crowded home page.

Perhaps Amazon will learn the lesson that Yahoo! now knows: there is a fine line between too busy and not enough speed. Traditionally Yahoo! has suffered from the same problem as Amazon: an overwhelmingly cluttered home page (mind you they have improved in recent years).

The Yahoo! home page

The Yahoo! home page has been reduced to only two screens versus the four of Amazon – but it’s still a massive amount of content and links (more than 150 in all). However Yahoo! has learned a lesson or two and is listening to their users. It recently hired a usability whiz and is currently in the process of redesigning the home page with a less cluttered look and layout.

Yahoo! hired Larry Tessler, a 60-year-old technology veteran and a former Xerox Parc innovator who invented ‘cutting and pasting’ to spearhead the redesign process. It’s huge job for the world’s most visited website that garners 15 million visits per day.

Tessler and team have been quiet about the process so far but has provided some hints in an article Carefully Clearing Yahoo's Clutter in Business Week. “One thing I've been pushing hard since I got here is that using Yahoo! should be a delightful experience," Tessler told Business Week.

Business Week also took an educated stab at estimating some of Yahoo!’s design tactics: “Expect him (Tessler) to take advantage of more advanced Web browsers, and he may reduce clutter by "hiding" material so users can opt to see more news, for instance, by rolling their mice over a topic. That would be a big improvement (sic). But he has a long way to go before Yahoo is a delight.”

MSN knows this lesson too. It recently redesigned its home page and eliminated 25% of the links that were on the previous version. The same lesson should also be learned and applied to your corporate intranet.

As I’ve written before, one of the great rewards of being a traveling intranet consultant is the opportunity to learn from many organizations, clients and colleagues about their intranet success and failures.

I’ve had the privilege to come to know and learn why Xerox continues to be an intellectual leader which is well exemplified by their intranet portal, WebBoard.

WebBoard is actually a series of internal websites but they are held accountable to defined governance, style and standards. The governance model is what I consider text-book ideal for most organizations (though what is good for one is not necessarily good for another). The intranet is owned by corporate communications but ultimately governed by a small senior executive team. Policy includes effective use and intranet development – with guidelines on content, technology, etc.

This policy and the accompanying standards create a unified, seamless user experience that is a hallmark of most successful intranets.

“It brings people to one seamless experience from an intranet perspective for broader employee access to tools and information,” says Karen Allen, Manager of Employee Communications and the Xerox WebBoard. “There’s a sense that it is familiar, you’re not jumping to different sites or experiences – we’re trying to create a simple, seamless experience so users know what to expect.”

The home page features true portal functionality including individual personalization and role-based customization (e.g. human resources professional, marketing communications, internal information, technology support, etc.). Customization options include stock market ticker, news sources (still working on external news feeds), organization news, weather, and formatting options.

All 58,100 Xerox employees have intranet access and the site enjoys 3-4 million page views per month – roughly two page views per employee per day. Not bad at all. That’s an engaged user population.

I believe however the key to Xerox’s intranet success has been their strategy. They developed a plan with defined objectives and goals and they engaged and involved both employees and senior executives in developing their strategy.