Imagine creating a product so well-known, so pervasive in the market, and so closely identified with a particular solution, that your product name becomes synonymous with the product itself. ‘Kleenex’ is a well-known example, as is ‘Jacuzzi’, ‘Aspirin’, ‘Band-Aid’ and even ‘dumpster.’ These all began as trade-marked names for products before becoming synonymous with the product category itself.
The same thing has happened in web design. It wasn’t long ago that every website you visited seemed to be trying to outdo the last, using the latest graphic wizardry to get your attention.
Fortunately, most web designers have realized that all this “fluff” might look good, but doesn’t help move visitors along the conversion path – in fact, it hinders the process.
As more advanced designs have developed, built around the user experience instead of the latest technical flash, they have resulted in layouts now considered most effective for certain purposes or industries.
Take, for example, search engines. If you search for something on Google and then do the exact same on another search engine, like Bing or Yahoo, you’ll see very little difference with any of the page layouts, even though they all compete fiercely for search traffic.
So, as ‘Kleenex’ has become synonymous with facial tissues, Google’s SERP (Search Engine Results Page) layout has become the standard used by all other search engines.
The same phenomenon can be seen on OTA sites. Hotel listings on Expedia have a similar layout on Hotel.com, Trivago, Booking.com, Kayak, and many others.
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