[Sigia-l] the purpose of a homepage

[Reinoud Bosman]

I think a homepage serves dual purposes that support different kinds of user
behaviour. For task-oriented people ( aka 'drillers')  who know exactly what
they want ("I want to buy an espresso machine"). It's the starting point of
a step-like process (search, select, buy)  that will eventually end in the
successful completion of a task, or not.

Another purpose of a homepage can be that it tries to entice people who
don't exactly know what they want yet but are considering to use your site
(aka 'browsers') for their fuzzy goal they want to achieve ("I need to buy a
present for my ..."). In this respect the homepage needs to offer people an
intuitive understanding of what is in it. Think of it as a key-hole through
which you can see the room behind the door.
Engaging content becomes more important now because you need to draw the
users in. A task that an IA can take on their shoulders by grouping
otherwise dull content into more desirable bits.. but I digress.

Success criteria for both types of homepage obviously are very different and
when I see your comment that 'recent usability test in which users did not
read the homepage for any of the tasks' my first reaction is to question the
usability methods. Because it's very easy to focus too much on the first
type of home page when defining the success criteria of a usability test
(task 1: "enter the site and buy an espresso machine") and forget to measure
the browsing behaviour. Which, admittedly, is a lot harder to measure.

cheers,
r.





On 12/14/05 10:44 PM, "mfg345 at aol.com" <mfg345 at aol.com> wrote:

> I was recently having some internal debate with my co-workers about the
> purpose of the homepage in light of metrics showing that most visitors
> to our site (upscale shopping) don't click on links within the homepage
> content, rather using the navigation and search. This was also
> reinforced by a recent usability test in which users did not read the
> homepage for any of the tasks.
> 
> The debate revolved around whether the homepage was failing because
> people weren't using it, or that if users were finding their way to
> content it didn't matter how they did it.
> 
> Does homepage content need to be clicked on in order for the page to be
> successful (especially for a very strongly branded company)? What is
> the tradeoff between creating more engaging homepage content vs.
> filtering users directly into the site more quickly? Is there any
> research or benchmarking on homepage clickthrough rates for links in
> content vs. links in navigation, and comparisons for conversion rates
> between the two?
> 
>  Thanks,
>   Michael
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