I’m just back from a trip to Spain with a friend of mine, where we ate tapas every day. Tapas is a traditional Spanish cuisine, made up of many small plates: seafood, olives, cheese, tuna, chicken, potatoes, mussels,  octopus, and lots more. Traditionally, they work as an appetizer to the main meal in Spain or a snack to keep you going. Here and in America we tend to have more ‘tapas meals’, where we substitute our main meal with lots of tasty little dishes – and conversation ensues. Eating tapas is a very sociable thing. A tapas meal encourages conversation and sharing, mobility and mingling.

My friend and I ate the traditional tapas and our own experimental homemade tapas. I found it so much more enjoyable to the way we’re accustomed to eating, i.e. filling a plate with food and devouring it all on your own. With tapas, a meal is more relaxed; you take your time. You interact with different flavours, textures and with the people you dine with. It got me thinking about the web.

What’s tapas got to do with the web?

Websites offer users many different plates in the form of stories, information, applications, tools, games, etc. Websites have a variety of and many interactions. A homepage is like a tapas menu. We each have our own tastes, our favourites. Users are task-focused. They want to get stuff done. They don’t start at the homepage and devour everything at once. One user will rarely visit every section of a site, let alone every page.

If we take Facebook for example: Some people use it to check their ‘friends’ status (i.e. be nosy), others use it to share their photos, others to chat, others go on to play some Texas Hold ‘Em. We can dip in to each of these functions and sample them but usually we have our favourites. No one stuffs themselves on everything Facebook offers.

People like variety. They like to bite into the tasty parts without over-indulging. We like to share the nice bits we find and discuss them – like we do with food. We may not be sitting at the same table but the web lets us share and discuss and interact with each other just as instantly and intimately: through social media such as Twitter and Facebook, instant messaging with Gmail Talk, Windows Live Messenger and Skype.

How this can become a design principle

When designing, we need to remember these behaviours. People use different parts of many sites for a multitude of reasons. This has many design implications:

• Provide more than one navigation aid to get users where they want to go.
• When users enter your site on a content page (via a link or search engine), signpost it: make it clear where they are and where they can go to from there.
• Make each element (page/application/form/whatever) fantastic and leave your user satisfied.
• Remember that homepages are important but they’re not the be all and end all.

A website is a sum of parts. It’s like a tapas meal. Users will dip into various parts but nobody will devour the whole lot. They’ll share with friends, they’ll chat about the good and the bad bits.

Clamoring for the homepage

Too often during website design, the client emphasis is on the homepage. It gets a lot of attention: numerous iterations, sign-off processes, inter-departmental competition all vying for home page real estate. They each want to sell their wares and have them served up on a big plate to users. The homepage should provide tasters, let the content do the rest.

But web users are sociable beings. They like to poke into different websites, sections of sites and content and pick up the bits they like or need to use. They can take or leave the rest most of the time. They won’t look at everything on the homepage, and moreover, they may not enter the site from the homepage at all.

Based on this behaviour, websites should offer up a variety of high quality tapas-type bits. Websites are an amalgamation of good content, applications, forms, images.

Let’s not forget our propensity for tapas (also known as a short attention span). The little bits add extra value to the meal.