Three Clicks or Else!

When users can’t find what they’re looking for on your web site, they might throw up their hands in frustration (”Arrgh!”) and leave your site. The “Three Click Rule” exists to give a little more consideration to relevant information design and heirarchy.

The “Three Click Rule” is about how designers structure information on web sites. As with many forms of media these days, web site users are skimming over text and navigation, trying to locate their interests and hoping for (and often expecting) instant gratification. It’s not just about having desired information within three clicks on your web site, it’s also about reassuring the user that they are on the right track by looking at your site. Otherwise, they might try to find similar information, products, or services on another web site and leave your frustrating hierarchy of information behind.

It’s like channel-surfing in the sense that TV watchers skip the channels that don’t immediately hold their interest — and stations with a certain demographic in mind will play to their audience. Or, to use another aqueous analogy, imagine a predatory waterfowl that spots its prey in the shallows of a summer lake. A quick dive and it has dinner in its beak, an easy catch of the day. Information that’s hidden deep in murky, confused waters may never be found.

Tangents, as part of an exchange of information, are sometimes interesting and can be pertinent, but only if the path back to needed information is clear on our beloved (and hated, when it fails us) information superhighway. Learning from TV and Kingfishers, a good web site needs to play to its audience to hold the attention of its users and it can do that by keeping the lowdown on their business within three clicks of the web site’s surface.

Information that’s designed well, to fit the needs of your user groups, will be successful as long as it is relevant and doesn’t require endless searching. Throughout a well-designed website, your user will have found what they are looking for within three clicks. Ask your users: are you finding what you seek? The Rule of the Three Clicks is a guideline to help designers and clients to create easily navigable sites where the navigation is broad, but shallow.

To read more about the “Three Click Rule,” check out Jeffery Zeldman’s article “Where Am I? Navigation & Interface” or User Interface Engineering’s testing the rule.