20 people, 20 opinions
von Mark Howells-Mead
As anyone with a little experience of design or creative work will tell you, appreciation is a subjective thing. You may think that what you’ve just created is a work of art: perfect, beautiful, unique, expressive or amazing. Ask twenty people for their opinion, though, and you’ll receive 20 opinions; many of them will be different and highlight aspects of your work which you may have seen and specifically chosen. Some people will bring up aspects which you’ve chosen to avoid, or about which you and they totally disagree. Some will give a point of view which highlights their mis-interpretation of your idea, or which show their lack of knowledge in the creative sphere. Not just art, but all creative processes always throw up plenty of differing opinions: none less than web design.
Unlike works of art, there is more to the typical design of a website than is immediately apparent. A website is like a consumer product, which not only has to look good and appeal to the visual senses of the visitor, but also work well. Can automatic internet search machines find the website? Can users find it easily? Once there, can they find their way around and get the information they need, without having to spend a long time battling with complicated navigation systems? Can your blind next-door neighbour use the website to buy your product? All of these aspects are critical to many websites and any negative experience will lead the visitor to seek out a better, more attractive and more useable website. No-one ever refused to visit a website because they didn’t like the photo on the front page, but millions abandon or avoid services which make the search for information more long-winded and complicated.
A good example of the importance of interface design is the Google search service. When Google launched, back in the 1990s, many search machines were heirarchical and complex. When Google arrived, with a simple text field and two buttons, users exclaimed, “that’s it! Just what we want!”. In their early days, Google single-handedly made thousands of web designers re-think their strategy overnight by proving that less is more. The fact that the principles of Google’s interface have remained largely unchanged since their beta version from 1998 makes the validity of Google’s principle obvious. While their website looks very basic at first glance, being a simple white page, the fact that it looks almost as if it has no real design is, in fact, a very well thought-out and planned aspect of a surprisingly detailed – yet inconspicuous – design concept.
An example of how people’s opinions differ when it comes to the visual aspects of web design was highlighted when I prepared a design for a small business a couple of years ago. I spent several days analyzing the business and its goals. I drafted several layouts and matched colour palettes before providing the client with a detailled, structured suggestion based on my findings as well as years of experience as a systems developer and visual designer. The website was modern and clean, followed design principles of legibility and ease of use, and dovetailed perfectly with their existing printed materials and company identity.
A week or so later, I received an email from the MD of the company, showing me the alternative which they’d selected, which had been presented by an alternative designer. Using techniques and styles from a wordprocessing programme, the designer had struck a note with the client because it involved elements which they’d seen countless times before. Style which was familiar, having been used so much for several years and which they recognized. The comfort of seeing the familiar had, for this client, won out over what they saw as a “daring” change to make their web presence look more modern. This proves that when a designer looks at a website, he engages in a different experience to an MD, or a housewife, or a school child. When a local client plans the future of their online presence, they think and plan differently to larger and more world-aware companies.
Examples of how different websites and different audiences place value on varying aspects of web design can be seen here;
- The website of pharmaceutical giant Roche was awarded the top spot in the Bowen Craggs Index by the Financial Times in April 2009, ahead of the remaining 74 largest companies in the Index (based on market value). In this instance the technical and design aspects are well integrated and planned, allowing visitors to quickly find pertinent information and navigate the clean and modern website with few distractions or complications. While the website may look boring and corporate to many eyes, it has many modern features and achieves its goal of communicating vital company information perfectly, with the minimum of fuss.
- The website for Peruvian Wharf in London won the Interactive Media Award for 2007, proving that the use of a modern font and slick colours and animation win out over the fact that the pages cannot be printed out, that you can only see the important information if you have the Flash browser plugin installed, and that the loading times are vastly increased by the technologies at hand.
- Graphic Design USA magazine awarded one of their top spots to the Adobe Brilliant site this year, which is hosted by a software company with a massive presence in the design community. As both the awarding company and the winners are design professionals, and the website itself is targeted to designers and potentially more visually-oriented users, the visual aspects of the design and interface play a much more obvious role than the content or usability concerns for alternative visitors. (For example, using Google to search the Adobe Brilliant website for information on Maki Kawakita finds no results, even though this photographer is featured there.) Many non-professional visitors may find some aspects of the website’s design confusing and many possibilites offered by modern web technology have been excluded in favour of the visual impact of animation and video.
Geschrieben von Mark Howells-Mead am 8. Juni 2009 um 15:50 | Permalink
Tags (Schlagworte): adobe, design, gestaltung, graphic design, internet, roche, web design, webgestaltung
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