Easter Sunday is on April 8, 2012. Easter is the last part end of Lent, a forty-day period of fasting, prayer, and penance. Fasting is practiced by almost every global religion in one form or another. The concept of stripping one’s self of physical pleasures to find deeper meaning and simplicity is key to a healthy lifestyle both physically and spiritually. Modern research has proven that fasting has profound health affects on the body, and doctors have started recommended fasts for certain types of physical and emotional diseases.
A fast removes something that otherwise seems critical. Let’s focus on this concept with a few design examples. First lets take an e-commerce site:
Woot.com – the daily deal giant took a big step forward in e-commerce with a simple idea: Offer only 1 item. They stripped their site of navigation buttons, shopping carts, complicated user interface and feature sets. One button exists that says, ” I want one”. We all know about the success and copy cat sites that followed.
Another example:
Twitter took the simple status bar idea from social media sites and built an entire community from it. By removing and stripping site functionality to one simple status bar, users were able to take in mountains of information and updates in a matter of minutes. And of course, the web design does not get any cleaner.
With Easter around the corner, lets all take a look at what extra fat our websites have and try to return to our core. Doing so will improve layout, user experience and ultimately conversions.
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