today over lunch, we started a discussion on what constitutes good web design, and someone brought up the “3-click rule“. i guess i’m the mountain tortoise (with failing memory) among the folks cos this rule has never sinked into my mind, nor my surfing pattern (unknowingly) conformed to this rule in anyway. without the time nor resources to verify this research, joshua porter has done some studies 7 years back and revealed:
there wasn’t any more likelihood of a user quitting after three clicks than after 12 clicks. When we compared the successful tasks to the unsuccessful ones, we found no differences in the distributions of tasks lengths. Hardly anybody gave up after three clicks.
does less click means good web design? if 3-click is the limit, 2-click would be nicer, and 1-click would be nicest! is that so? compare Sohu (a popular chinese search engine) and Google, or Baidu for that matter. sohu sure has a lot of DIRECT 1-click links on its home page, does it really lead on to good user experience? i totally agree with what david hamill wrote:
But there’s too much to look at and I can’t see the link I need. By the time I find it, I’ve spent a long time scanning the page. On this site, I have a bad experience, despite being only a single click from what I needed.
baidu is obviously been ‘googlised’, cos it’s design is very UNchinese. trust me, i avoid visiting chinese webpages cos too many of them are sohu-styled, many 1-click direct links, but too cluttered for comfort. i wouldnt be surprised if these webpage designs were guided by the 3-click rule.
what’s good web design principle today? this portal’s layout is a result of my personal belief about good webpage design. yes 不要脸 “don’t want face” i know. but over the years, i think the use of google to turn up webpage(s) of what i would like to find out has somewhat changed my personal expectation of a good website. a powerful search engine that turns out good search results for content within a website is somewhat more useful for impatient surfers like me. if i cannot find what i need on the home page at one glance, i will zoom straight away to the “Search” box and tap away! and if the search does not turn out useful information, it’s time for me to go on to another site, or revert to google and hope that google has crawled and mapped out the site content that i needed.
the 3-click rule, whether it’s true or false, does not hold much meaning personally (:
[credit: williamhook via flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0]