Everybody Loves Easter Eggs
Easter eggs are great! It’s fun to look for them, and there are already many people beyond the spring festival who amuse themselves all year by hiding or looking for them in movies, TV series and games, and then telling everyone about it.
They are also fun because they are not essential, but just nice. An encore, a bon-bon, after the essential has been delivered. You won’t therefore schedule an Easter egg hunt (at Easter) before breakfast, or put the easter egg in the whodunnit on top of solving the mystery.
Speaking of breakfast, people on the web behave a bit like people before breakfast (quasi before coffee): easily irritated and single-mindedly looking for what they want.
Let’s assume that such a person would have to search for breakfast in a kitchen that is unfamiliar to them. That person will then not systematically get to know the kitchen in a way that would allow them to prepare a 5-course meal in the evening. They will search the kitchen for what they need for breakfast: coffee, bread, jam, butter, margarine, cereals, milk – depending on their preferences.
And woe betide you if you find the butter in a milk jar, the bread in a flour pot labeled “Processed Grain-based Food,” and the coffee between thick Java reference books – because it’s creative and fun.
Actually, it’s the same on the web: nobody is interested in understanding your website or application. But everyone has a need that needs to be fulfilled: for example (just for the sake of argument) buying a few chocolate bunnies for the easter festivities at the best chocolate store in town. And for that you would like to know the current opening hours. And then they go looking for it on the website, and hopefully find they find the right subpage and finally the text on the page (or the pictures, or something).
Word that a navigation should be built to meet the needs of the visitor, and not the Kafkaesque structures of the company behind it, has already gotten around. But the same applies to a text: The content should be structured in an understandable way, succinctly worded and clearly highlighted. So that you can see at a glance – to stay with the example – when the store is open.
Boring perhaps, not funny and creative, but important. So that you can then close the page and happily go back to playing, or looking for Easter eggs.
By the way, there are none here, so you can switch off now.
