Upon navigating to the UPS homepage for the first time, you as the visitor are presented with an interstitial page asking you to choose your country and language so that you can be redirected to a localized version of the site. These interstitial pages are quite common for companies which have global operations and customers in many countries.

In the case of UPS this page is generally very understated and well-designed. One way in which it could be improved, though, is by increasing the size of the button. Fitt’s law states that the clickability of a target is a function of the target’s size. The button here is 17×18 pixels—an area of 306 pixels. That’s only 0.0236% of the screen on my 1440×900 display—two ten-thousandths of the available pixels. There’s not much else on this page taking up any space, so there’s plenty of real estate to make this change.

Critically, pages like these are barriers that potentially keep visitors from continuing further into your site. They are simply one more hurdle the user must jump over before doing what they want to do on your site. Presenting visitors with a very small (and therefore difficult to click) button is one additional thing that could lead to premature abandonment. It could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. There’s a tradeoff between making buttons microscopically small and comically large, and I think this button could definitely be enlarged to minimize the effect of the hurdle of an interstitial page.

What do you think? What else could be improved here? Stay tuned for a couple more posts about this page.

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