Why Design Matters
Posted on April 12th, 2006
By Tom McCormick
The first ten years of the Internet are over. The web is no longer a new
thing. It is an ingrained part of our lives.Studies show that users form
their first impression about a website in 1/20th of a second. What are they
going to think if that time is spent watching Flash animation load? Or
watching a marquee slowly scroll through a list of headlines? Or searching
for creatively placed navigation? They'll think it's time to visit another
website.
As Internet users get more sophisticated and impatient, the need for designs
that emphasize usability becomes paramount. Here are a dozen guidelines for
web designers that we've developed over the years. We try to have these
principles guide all of our design work.
1. Know your audience. Not only in the marketing sense. Know the technical
boundaries you're working within. The user experience for a high school math
student in Jersey and a journalist in Zimbabwe are very different. Bear this
in mind when making initial decisions.
2. Understand the purpose of the site. The client can lose sight of this,
but the designer must not. If the site's purpose is to raise funds, that
component must be ever-present in the design. If the client decides to punch
the site up for the sake of visual impact, this must be addressed
immediately, before the project loses its focus.
3. No Surprises. Web sites are not meant to be mysterious. The web is not
new. Certain standards of usability remain because they work. Users stampede
away from sites that remain mysterious. Links should be written clearly,
marked clearly as links, and users should be alerted to the mildest of
surprises like opening a .pdf or Powerpoint.
4. The Cool Backlash. Usability has been talked to death, and thanks to
Jacob Nielsen (and his useit.com site) there seems to be a slight backlash
against website design that is cool for the sake of being cool. While the
art created with programs like Flash is spectacular, most websites simply
shouldn't use these technologies. Inevitably, they cause more problems than
they solve and end up frustrating users. Animation has been eliminated on
most business sites. Even the slightest motion is an irritation to the user.
The eye still sees it as an animated gif from 1999 and will ignore it as
surely as the client deems it "jazzy".
5. Sweat the Details. The nuances of the design are what will create a
positive or negative user experience. The forms must be as simple to
complete as possible, and work perfectly. The search must be useful. The
FAQs and Help links must be worth the user's time. The contact us
link/form/phone number being difficult to find is the easiest way to lose a
user forever.
6. Column A, Column B. Clients like the palette from the first design, and
the layout of the second. This will happen for a variety of reasons (adult
attention deficit disorder, failure to take meds, it doesn't matter) and is
difficult to control. Some clients will always want to mix and match. If you
can't beat them, help them. Take their concerns seriously, and move past the
simple step of combining designs. You may take a beating in the short run,
but the client and user will benefit in the long run.
7. Keep an Eye on What's Next. How easy a design will be to implement should
be a consideration. Changing a design, while not sacrificing quality can
sometimes save hours of maintenance time. For example, if it is obvious that
a client will change their mind frequently on what will appear in the
navigation, it would be best not to create a design that requires images to
be created for every change. In general, maintenance time and site loading
time will be less when using fewer images. When the audience is made up of
people who are most likely to use the latest browsers, designs that can be
implemented almost entirely without images are the best option.
8. The Information is Key. While the design of a website is important, and
often the quality of design validates the website content for a user, in
most cases the design is not as important as the information on the website.
It is more important that the information on a site is accessible for every
user than it is that every user sees the exact same design in every browser.
Redirecting a user to download other software should never be an option,
there are plenty of ways to design and build sites so that they degrade
gracefully for every user.
9. Keep it minimum. Monitor size ranges from 640×480 pixels to today's
standard size of 1024×768 pixels to even bigger sizes. Your design should
try to look good in all of these sizes. Current practice accepts minimum
size of 800×600. Design for that size and use the extra space most users
will see for non-critical additional content.
10. Mind the browser and platform loyalty. Keeping in mind the numerous
browsers available and platform loyalty of users, you need to make sure your
site is designed for and tested on a variety of browsers and platforms to
ensure compatibility. Your personalized scrollbar may work with your IE
browser but won't work with Mozilla browsers.
11. Create a style guide. The more content a site has, the more likely that
multiple people are contributing to content editing. As the content is
handed off from person to person, one finds that the design and the layout
deviate from the original. One should create a style guide for the
consistency in look and feel.
12. The brand is in the experience. Yes, the site needs to be visually
appealing. If a user can easily find your site, get what they need, and be
on with her life that's what'll drive the memory - the site experience. And
they'll tell others about it.
source: www.bivingsreport.com/2006/web-design-matters/