Website Usability Tip: Eliminate Excess Steps

Have you ever visited a website where you feel like it takes you five clicks when the action could have taken only one or two?

That means there are excess steps present. Congrats, you've just identified an area for improvement!

If it's an action you complete only once, this is only slightly irritating. It may not be something that you even notice, depending on where you fall on the UX obsession spectrum. Even if you don't think you noticed, I'd be willing to bet that you don't walk away with a completely positive outlook on that site.

Let's say instead that the excess steps are required on a website that you use frequently, or every day. This can cause an immense amount of frustration, to the point where users find a different site that serves their needs.

Little annoyances add up to large frustrations over time, often without the user being able to pinpoint what went so wrong. We're very familiar with this psychological principal as it relates to relationships, but seem to overlook how it applies to our experiences on the web.

Email unsubscribe pages tend to violate good UX practices all the time. Think about it – this is a page you don't want your users on in the first place (you'd rather keep them on your mailing list), and the page isn't indexed on search engines, so it gets far less traffic than other pages on your site.

It's these often-forgotten pages that can cost you more users than you think.