It seems like people are confronted weekly with new things to learn involving technology. What is more frustrating than a new set of confusing instructions for a new gadget?

It's the same with websites. When we are looking for something, we want to find it as quickly as possible. When confronted with a maze of website "noise," most of us throw up our hands and move on to the next site. After all, there are many to choose from.

Website experience experts call this phenomenon learnability¹. How long does it take for visitors to learn how to find what they want?

Here's an example I picked from the site Web Pages That Suck. It's a great place to go to learn about what not to do.

In this example you are confronted with an seemingly random display of flashing, colors, text, cartoons and photos. It's all you can do to figure out what the site is about much less how to find what you want.

At Conversion Rate Experts the experience is much simpler. You know immediately that you are on the site, Conversion Rate Experts, and you know immediately what the site is about thanks to the prominent identifier, "Get more customers without spending a penny more on advertising...using 'conversion rate optimization.'"

As a matter of principle, it's hard to go wrong with an upper left site name and a prominent identifier.

So the visitor to this site has a learnability experience so simple, so elegant that he or she never realizes that learning has happened and in a twinkling is free to move on to complete the task at hand utilizing the prominent, forthright navigation bar.

Keep it simple. Make it easy to learn.