Does Design Matter
Notes from a panel on the role of design on the web with Zeldman, Santa Maria, Clark, and Goto.
Designers operate from the perspective that ugly, incoherent visual design is an obstacle to success. Sites like eBay and others seem to fly in the face of this perspective. Interaction design and user experience present interesting questions for pure graphic design. Do traditional understandings of design matter on the web?
Is it possible to accomplish on the web what the iPod or the WalkMan created in the real world: a fundamentally new need.
Does flickr make me want to take more pictures and tag them or does it fulfill my need to do that? Moreover, flickr's design presents itself as utilitarian but because of minimal use of color the photography, the point of the site, is the primary design element on each page.
Avoiding Consumer Schlock
Design must be meaningful on the web. A Grape Nuts box or the ebay home-page represents a well designed product but aren't things that a designer would be proud to have in a portfolio.
Perhaps because ebay is an undesigned experience it offers what is appropriate to the nature of that commerce. Look at this site. There are gif images of unaliased Arial as a menu! A crime against humanity to be sure.
Piracy sites are also not well designed. Users are willing to endure unimaginable interfaces to get what they want.
Difficulty can, in a weird contextual way, can become an enticement says Zeldman.
Joe Clark argues the contrary. You cannot know what undesigned experience will work. (You are using a shotgun blindfolded at that point)
Look at craigslist. Look at Southwest airlines.
The point is that many pages that we use are functionally undesigned. We use bugzilla and it is arguably the most unusable product on earth. It's enough to make Zeldman find warmth in his heart for IE.
Amazon.com is a cunningly designed interactive experience. Again, poor information design and content design result in a very successful site. Think about the number of options the user is given that could take the user away from the product at hand. If you aren't following an Amazon link and are just trying to find something it is a hassle but one that we tolerate and use exclusively.
Amazon is how we learned to use the internet. They used tabs so everyone used tabs. Comfort is created because of years of experience with filing interfaces. Now tabs are used where they don't make any sense because there isn't thinking about the user experience, just about what the rest of the web is doing.
Design helps but it needs to be part of the larger picture, it has to make the site better not just prettier.
Size and download time matter but again it is strangle. Google is great but Amazon loads hundreds of gifs. How we balance gorgeous design and speed is an important concern but not the concern.
Interface, utility, and brand are the things to think about.
Is Amazon a cluttered mess because of innovative cross-promotion or a just because it is a mess? It sure looks like just a mess but it works and that is hard to argue against.
The question is would it perform better if it had better information design and there are very few examples of serious efforts to find this out. Unlike CSS, quality information design has not yet caught on.
What about extreme customization? Should the internet be like Windows 3.1 where we can all make links purple with green backgrounds? God I hope not, that was a dark time. You don't give clients too much control so don't give that control to the user either. We all agree that clients will only hurt their goal why would users be different?
Yeah people can do custom style sheets but who would do that, it's crazy. Design is a plan for sensory experience and the web needs to made by people with design sensibility. It just makes it better. (A site like Amazon is ugly and cluttered but at least it makes a certain sense. There are so many bad web sites that don't make sense and leave users unable to find what they are looking for. While eBay and Amazon often represent that kind of site there are so many that are so much worse. They are why design matters.)
Who is this guy?
Leave a comment