Space...My Current Frontier

More and more, I've found myself thinking about what makes a website usable. Now I'll come right out and say, I'm no UI expert and I'm a pretty below-average designer. I have worked with some talented UI folks and picked up a few principles along the way. Whether or not I use them correctly, I have no idea, but I do try to use them. Bear with me as I opine about my current perspective.

The more the interweb grows, the more important it is to give users meaningful content ASAP. Let's be honest...there's a lot of crap out there, and the crap isn't going away. As a web user with an extremely finite attention span, I want content now and I'm not going to give any more effort than I have to in order to get to it. Here's a real world example.

I've pretty much abandoned Myspace in favor of Facebook for a couple of reasons. On MySpace, I see:

• When I log in...I see ads, I see giant logos, I see a huge picture of me, I see how many people are in my network (a meaningless 9 digit number), and a whole bunch of other crap I'm not interested in.


• My profile is pretty locked down and I still get tons of spam. I don't want to look at your web cam or buy your pharmaceuticals


• Clutter. "Cool New Videos", "Profile of the Day", and tons of other garbage I have to wade through to get to what I care about.
  

Meanwhile, on Facebook I get:

• A tiny logo, unobtrusive but functional navigation, and most of the screen dedicated to the site content.


• Speaking of the content, I care about it. The micro-blogging of my friends is a great, low-impact touch-point. Because the content they post comes from people I know, it's mostly pre-screened. Sure, there's stuff I'm not interested in, but because I've got so much functional space, I can scan and dismiss in a matter of seconds. It takes very little work to get what I'm looking for.

Anyway, I've done a few major functionality releases on foodfinder.net lately...search revamp and add restaurant functionality to be exact, but I've also worked pretty hard to give my users more meaningful space. Specifically, I cut the logo size by about half, removed most of the ads (all but one), and got rid of some other filler/dead spacing. Particularly on the restaurant page, I've got much more substance above the fold.

I don't know if this will pay off or not, but I definitely feel a lot better about the user experience. Hopefully, it will translate to more users. What have I missed?