We have to experiment. I would like to stress this a lot! Experimenting is everything. We cannot just find something interesting and use it. For example, I am still debating over the use of many links in my sidebar [for my main site], even though it seems to be something that promotes a community. I would love to have less links, and I think I am going to clean it up more. Some sites can get away with no extra links other than the sidebar, and some sites can get away with a lot of links on the side.

Choices are good; however, like some of your previous tips mention, we have to market our presentation in ways that users can understand and appreciate. We also have to see if the choices we are presenting to people are necessary or optional. For example, presenting links to other sections of a site can be necessary, but showing “latest comments” is optional. That optional component, the “latest comments” area in a sidebar, can both help people get involved more in a blog by showing them other commentors who are also commenting, and at the same time, that “latest comments” area will confuse a lot of readers who already know that clicking a post will show them comments for that post and seeing that extra information “only” allows them to participate more, but does not really give a strong incentive as to why they should participate. Does that make sense? I hope I am not too confusing.

In the sidebar, I can put a couple of hundred links to outside places and to areas on my own site, and they can all be relevant to the user. However, simply adding a choice on top of other choices, when there are other ways to find out those exact choices by going through different places on a site, probably confuses people. Think about redundancy also; having the latest comments on every page while viewing pages with comments that show those same latest comments also confuses people more. It somehow adds more links pointing to the same page, the way we talked about in your other post regarding removing links from single titles. Of course, we can have dynamic sidebars, where going into specific single posts will not show certain elements of a sidebar, or even the entire sidebar all togther.

Off-topic: there will be hundred different views on the same concept out there. That does not mean that what Daniel described was wrong/inferior compared to Hick’s Law, Donald. 🙂 The link you mentioned is interesting and we can incorporate it into our sites somehow too, as it seems to be more numberized; thanks for sharing. 🙂

Some people are running 3, 4 and even 5 column WordPress blogs and its just too much fluff content. I’m actually thinking of removing the “Recent Commenter” off the right sidebar of my blog, which is sparse in design to start with. The reason is, I question how much value it really brings to the site and more importantly, what it adds to the users experience.