You’ve seen sites plagued with this problem. Their home pages suffocate under a glut of content, topics within them scarcely distinguishable from one another. The navigation proves a meaningless thicket of selections, all granted the same weight and prominence to the point that you don’t know what to focus on: Nothing stands out. These sites treat everything as Important. And you’d like to take a machete to the resulting jungle.

I feel your pain. One of the greatest lessons we can learn as designers is that everything is not important. It’s an easy one for us to grasp. After all, it’s our job to sort through huge amounts of information in order to decide and to highlight what is important. How do we convey that message effectively to our clients?

Over the past few years, I’ve learned about or uncovered many principles we can employ to keep a site orderly — to really focus on what’s important. Principles that we can and should pass onto our clients when we can, too. Here are just seven of the most helpful I’ve been thinking about.

1. Consider Your Audience

Let’s get the most obvious point out of the way first: Giving proper thought to who defines a site’s audience will also help you to clean out the chaff. First, remember that your site typically has multiple audiences. Second, remember, not all of them necessarily need to be addressed at once. Third, consider the amount of exposure the audience needs on a particular page. (It may be zero.) That’s where personas can still come in handy (even if informally articulated): By understanding and prioritizing types of users, we can better understand how and whether to address their needs in a particular section of the site. Every audience doesn’t have the same needs, nor do they need to be equally addressed on every page, including and especially the homepage.

Some simple examples: You may need to address investors on a retail site, but they’re clearly not your primary audience. Let visitors find the link for Investors in the footer or within the About Us section of the site. Similarly, visitors to an automotive site needn’t be confronted with build-and-price features for a new vehicle once they’ve clearly indicated they’re interested in owner-related content. And if you’re designing an event-oriented site, you may wish to offer a feature, which enables users to add an event, but it shouldn’t distract most visitors, who are probably just looking to browse events.

Know your audience: It’s the oldest adage there is for ensuring effective communication.

2. Scent of Information

One of our client’s biggest fears is that their stuff won’t be found. That’s why they try to cram everything onto the homepage in the first place. One of the primary ways we can give them confidence that their content will be found is to educate them about how users rely on the scent of information. To be clear, the old “three-click” rule is bunk. As the good folks at User Interface Engineering discovered almost a decade ago, users will actually click four, five, six, a dozen times on the way to finding content and not even notice it. That doesn’t mean that a shallow site isn’t a good thing: It means there’s a dynamic tension to be maintained between designing a site that’s too deep and Byzantine and a site that tries to aim a fire hose at users in order to give them everything at once. That middle ground is maintained by providing strong information scent. Essentially, if content is well-organized and labeled intuitively, we should trust users to find it. Put simply: Users are frustrated when they can’t find things, not due to any particular number of clicks.

Muji keeps its navigation simple, offering strong scent to respective product lines

In the Muji design above, for example, I don’t need an explicit link to “jeans” to know where to look for them. I see a clear link to “Apparel,” which presumably will present more information if I click on it. “Apparel” is a succinct label, yet it provides me with a strong scent for where I need to proceed. There are surprisingly few links on the Muji homepage (especially compared to many other sites), but they provide quick access to Muji’s hundreds of products.

As an aside, yes, robust search functionality and an effectively deployed taxonomy and metadata strategy also mitigate the need for insisting that everything be a couple of clicks away. But that certainly doesn’t negate the need for a concise, intuitive site architecture.

3. Progressive Disclosure

Once you’ve educated your client about the scent of information, it’s much easier to argue for integrating progressive disclosure into your designs. Using this technique, we tease the user’s interest with the scent of information to draw them deeper from an experience, which provides brief descriptions towards an experience, which provides complete or greater detail — if that’s what they’re looking for. In the process, we decrease clutter and distractions and create a much cleaner experience.

Brands like Nike and Apple have mastered this. Look at what they do: Tease you with a product image and some snappy copy, send you to a page with a series of striking images and some select bullets, calling out the primary features a customer is looking for, then perhaps linking off to an even deeper page with all the technical details — leaving the gory details, in other words, for the wonks, who really seek them out. This makes for a clean, segmented experience. Nothing’s difficult to find. It’s not buried. It’s simply prioritized.

YouTube allows users to hide filters and navigation until they’re needed

Of course, progressive disclosure can also be implemented within a single page, as content is revealed based on user selections and modules open or page states change accordingly. Complex forms benefit tremendously from suppressing fields the user doesn’t need to see or hasn’t yet elected to see. Robust features like filters can be hidden until users indicate they’d like to see them, too. YouTube, for example, now allows users access to robust filtering and channel selections, which can be dismissed behind a “Guide” button just a few pixels wide. That leaves much more of the screen real estate open and offers a much less distracting viewing experience.

4. Information Clustering

Information clustering isn’t a difficult concept to grasp. It simply means that instead of spraying content all over the page randomly like a subway tagger, we make the effort to corral content into meaningful groups. You know when information is clustered appropriately, because users can quickly come to terms with the intent of the page content. Similar content and features are grouped into modules and sections and labeled appropriately.