WePlay uses its homepage to filter visitors to the appropriate section based on who they are. Undoubtedly this causes some difficulties for visitors, I can’t imagine people are happy to pick just one of the above. An athletic father who coaches his kid’s team would fit in all four, so which should he pick? Any choice will leave him with a sense of doubt, a sense that he is missing out on other features.
This technique is also used by Ireland’s Department of Social Welfare. Here you can be an immigrant, or a parent, or disabled. The logic here is that when you choose one of these categories, the next screen displays information specific to that type of person. This means that if a visitor wants to accomplish task X, they must look through a list of categories to find which one is most closely related their current task. This type of design is risky, and confuses users. There are times when it is necessary, but it should only be used for clear choices from a small list e.g. Home accounts vs Business accounts, Prepay customers vs Pay monthly. The decisions where you’re only ever in one category, and you’ve no interest in the other.
It is best not to get hung up on your website architecture, company architecture, or different types of user when working on homepages. Only designers and managers care about website architectures or company departments. Everyone else is at your site to find out something, or to complete a task.
One quick win here is to just find out the most popular user goals, and list them out clearly. It’s not clever, it’s not high-tech, it’s just clear. I’ve tried and tested this technique many times over and I’m always surprised at how well it works despite its simplicity.
Here is one example, from ESB, which I worked on last year while in iQ Content. It won’t get linked up as an innovative new UI technique, but surprisingly only designers care about that. 
4 Comments
+1 here, I’ve never been a fan of that technique at all. Usually shows a distinct lack of insight - trying to shoehorn marketing/sales demographics into your user model, and doing it crudely. Someone did try and design the setup, but they either didn’t or couldn’t really *think* about what they were doing. Pretty off-putting tbh.
Posted by Dave Cahill at 11:37 am on 7 July, 2009.
Never saw the shortcomings of audience based nav until now. I think combining the two might be the best option. For example….
*Current Customer*
- Pay my bill
- See my history
- etc
Posted by Northa at 8:54 pm on 7 July, 2009.
I have been irritated by self-catogizing navigation before. Not only only do I have a sense of doubt selecting an option but I am also confused as soon as I am faced by the selection. Maybe it is my lack of faith in the designer, but I immediately start trying to put myself into the designers shoes.
“I want to pay a bill, now I guess that if I was designing the product I’d put that in the ‘customer’ section’. This is confusing.
Secondly it can sometimes be vaguely insulting. For example if you don’t fit into the categories. ‘Are you a customer, partner, investor?’ - No I am a member of the public who want to complain about one of your companies vans that blocking the entrance to my house.
Now I’m being forced to select an option that doesn’t apply to me. This tells me that you don’t care about anyone else other than the people that you have created categories for.
Even when the category applies to me I get the feeling that you have made a bunch of assumptions on the basis of your categories. I don’t like people making assumptions about me.
Posted by Caelen at 5:09 pm on 8 July, 2009.
These are the situations when I right-click and open the four (or however many that apply) in new tabs.
Not a solution.
Edmund.
Posted by Edmund Heaphy at 2:56 pm on 14 July, 2009.