Get lost

Oct 15 2007

In my post about web site navigation yesterday, I said that menu navigation tends to confuse visitors and get them “lost” in the site, which is a bad thing. Well… only most of the time. Some web sites are more about the experience than the information and are completely unconcerned with telling a linear story.

Chipotle, for example, makes a heck of burrito and a heck of a web site. Loaded with fun, goofiness and little hidden easter eggs everywhere, they WANT you to get a little lost. Once you’ve seen a couple of pages, you’re almost compelled to see them all, just to see what happens even if you don’t care about the information on them.

But be careful about taking this kind of approach. Chipotle has hundreds of restaurants across the country along with billboards, radio ads, sponsorships and more to help them establish that fun, tongue-in-cheek personality. Not to mention loyal fans that probably number in the millions. Small businesses don’t have these kinds of luxuries. We can look at Chipotle’s mildly confusing web site and think it’s cute because we know them pretty well. If the site’s main purpose was to convince complete strangers to come in and eat, they may have gone in a different direction.