Is Less = More?

with the ever increasing "I want it now!" mentality

[old_expat]

I just registered a new domain name for the purpose of building a minimalist travel information site.

Looking at one of my other sites that is pretty sticky (averages 4+ pages per visit), I still see 60% of users stay on the site less than 30 seconds .. another 13.6% under 2 minutes.

So I'm thinking about short snippets of information .. even terse. Maybe even presented in bulleted lists.

Maybe a maximum of 50 pages.

Any thoughts as to:

Is it a viable concept, and if so:

1 - How may words will the average user "see at one look"?

2 - How many items
a - in a cluster
b - on a page
c - on a side menu

[zulu_dude]

Great idea. When looking for travel information, I can look at photos and decide for myself whether the place looks good or not. I don't need flowery language describing the location in every minute detail.

I think that it would work, as long as:

- You have good headings. No-one wants to trawl through millions of bullet points to find the info they're looking for.

- You have a great site structure. If you're only going to put a little bit of info on each page, you're going to have a lot of pages! A good site search will be invaluable.

[old_expat]

"Great idea. When looking for travel information, I can look at photos and decide for myself whether the place looks good or not. I don't need flowery language describing the location in every minute detail."

Hmm .. would thumbnails (50x50) as the "bullet points" be too much white space?

"-You have good headings. No-one wants to trawl through millions of bullet points to find the info they're looking for.'

Very good point. If the navigation was good, what would you think might be the maximum number on a page?

"-You have a great site structure. If you're only going to put a little bit of info on each page, you're going to have a lot of pages!"

Yes

"A good site search will be invaluable."

I agree. I just spent the past several hours adding and configuring SWISH-E for 2 of my sites.

[zulu_dude]

You mean the maximum number of bullet points?
If the navigation was good, then I would guess at about 20.

But they would need to be 20 points about a specific topic. In other words, I'd be quite happy to view a page about 'What to take when travelling to Timbuktu*' that had 20 bullet points like:

-A big hat.
-Bananas for the monkeys
-Satellite phone

But I wouldn't be happy to view a page that had 20 points about totally diverse topics. And it also depends on factors like how long each point is.

I hope this can give you an idea of my opinion, but it's almost impossible to give a decent answer without actually seeing a site. You'll have to experiment and test and experiment some more. Not sure if you've heard of Jakob Nielsen? Awesome usability guru, you might find some tips on his site, www.useit.com [useit.com]

*Timbuktu is an actual place, in Mali :-)