If you haven’t discovered it yet, The Baymard Institute is a blog worth taking a look at. The people behind it (more of which later) espouse conversion design, i.e. designing websites with a focus on making users perform certain actions, such as buying a product or making contact.
The Baymard Institute: Nielsen and 37 Signals are clearly influences
There’s a lot to like here. The Institute is very much anti–ornamentation and focuses on action and performance. This makes a change to reading about @font-face and grids. The tone is feisty, confrontational even:
You should never add something just because it looks good – aesthetics are never the end goal but rather a tool web designers may use to achieve a specific goal (and only when it actually helps them achieve that goal). Decoration — the Enemy of Good Web Design
Add to this a Nielsen-esque design (no navbar, lots of bolding, a large, lego–like verdana in my Ubuntu) and you have an intriguing site. Naturally enough, I wanted to find out about the Institute and the people behind it.
Who are you, Baymard Institute?
And this is where I found a problem. The Baymard Institute doesn’t have an About page. True, Nielsen doesn’t have a navbar with an About link, but he does have an About page, the link to which has been inventively implemented.
How Jakob Nielsen links to his About page
So why isn’t there a Baymard Institute About page? Why can’t I reach their Twitter and LinkedIn accounts? Perhaps the Institute felt it wasn’t necessary to add these elements because they don’t fit in with their site’s narrow set of conversion goals:
- get people to read a couple of posts
- sign up for future posts through an e-mail newsletter or RSS feed
The site design reflects these aims in that it’s easy to find subscription links. But as a user this is quite a frustrating experience. Yes, I donned my fedora and did a bit of digging and unearthed Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, but I doubt most users would bother.
Design for complex user needs
If designers don’t consider what users want from a site they’ll lose conversions. An About page meets several user requirements that you may not consider as conversion goals in and of themselves. This is particularly true when users are interacting with an institute that carries out some form of research. How credible is this research? Who’s writing it? Similarly, Twitter may allow me to contact The Institute and gain further insights into its thinking.
Users can’t be frogmarched down a particular route, especially when you’re not running a site with a simple, clear focus (e.g. to sell x). The user experience is key.
The Baymard Institute produces some great content and is marketed in a clever way: the look of the site complements the forthright tone and the use of terms such as research and institute are intriguing. It’s just a shame I had to investigate what lay behind it.