Why is this your homepage, HopStop?
The popular wayfinding site launched a redesign this week. It’s cleaner, better organized and more attractive then its predecessor. One thing baffles me, though. Why is the HopStop directions form not on the homepage? Why make users make that extra click?
The only reason I can fathom is precisely the one that makes the decision so irksome—they want that extra click. At what cost, though? If I had never used HopStop before and I landed on their site, I would be completely unaware of what makes the site so unique. At first glance, it looks like any other local travel site—and that doesn’t bode well for traffic. They could have very easily integrated the directions form into the homepage, employing the standard basic vs. advanced search features you see on airline sites.
Let’s, for argument’s sake, say that they were trying to bolster their editorial content, give it more prominence by transforming the homepage to focus on it. Why not put it on the Directions page, too. I can only assume that is the most popular page on the site, yet there is absolutely zero of this new content on that page. The site does not try to leverage the tool’s popularity into more clicks.
And that’s what the issue boils down to. I wonder if the people who run the site conflated the poplarity of the tool with the popularity of the url. That is to say, HopStop.com is not popular because it’s HopStop.com; it’s popular because it housed an incredibly powerful and useful tool. Leaving it off the homepage may hurt them in the long run.
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jaketbrooks posted this
