SXSW: High Class and Low Class Web Design

[Panel with Christopher Fahey, Liz Danzico, Khoi Vinh, Brant Louck]

CF: Think about an airplane because it's one of the few places where class is very obvious in our society. But it exists in many places more subtly.

So why talk about class here? There have been many conversations about ugly web sites like MySpace, EBay, and Craigslist. People denigrate these sites by saying that they don't know how to design but maybe they are aimed at different people than elite designers work for.

When we talk bout class in general we use terms like taste, target audience, usability, etc. Social class is more than income, it is education, skills, etc. and these things matter in design.

See: classism.org for good information on class in society

Class is something that we don't talk about because the American mythology holds that our revolution separated us from the old English class system. We believe that we have a flat system and we use euphemisms to obscure our prejudices.

See: Hollingshead Index of Social Status
See: Class by Paul Fussell

Most Americans want to be upper-middle class but most designers are in Class X, they believe that they have transcended the system, they drink PBR ironically.

• NYTimes vs. NY Post
• Economist vs. People
• Harvard vs. Correspondance School
• Mark Rothko vs. Bob Ross
• Cartier vs. Zales

Aspiration plays a large role in design. Coffee creamer branding might look like Cartier.

Apple is a high class brand. It isolates some people and the store is designed to look like Cartier or Tiffany. This carries over to their web site.

Why should design for web site be different in terms of class consciousness than every other kind of production?

This is true with the NYTimes and the NYPost online.

So are designers out of touch with this?

Do you design for yourself, or for your audience?

How can you get in the shoes of someone whose class experience is different from your own?

KV: At NYTimes they do lots of user research but don't take class into account directly.

LD: Lots of user research but must rely on gut instincts to decide what to do.

BL: There are multiple audiences. On the one hand there are people who will buy anything with a WWE logo and on the other hand they are trying to get into new audiences. Within the industry the customers are seen through the lens of "our guy." Will it make "our guy" uncomfortable is the question that gets asked.

KV: At NYTimes they don't talk about their audience in terms of archetypes. There is an understanding that there is an NYTimes reader out there but they don't resort to generalizations about people based on how much they earn or know when you are just trying to help someone find a button.

CF: Both daylife and NYTimes use profiles to evaluate how the site is used more than who the people are.

LD: Did used to include more demographic data but don't do this any more because the behavior aspects seem more important.

CF: Do you respect your audience? Are they your equals?

BL: The audience is not my peer group but the thing you have to do is find what is great about your product that they like. Didn't come to the company as a wrestling fan but now eat it up. That's how he can find common ground. This isn't true in the whole business. Within the industry they call customers "marks." This harkens back to the "carnie" history of the business. The smarter fans are aware that they are seen this way and don't seem to care.

KV: You have competition from Ultimate Fighting?

BL: They are are showing more growth.

KV: If you become too conscious of class it will do a disservice to you. That lack of respect for your customer, that distance, can be damaging. Seeing yourself as other from your customer is dangerous.

CF: So what about design methodology? You can be detached in an almost clinical way where you try five our six different things, A/B testing, and this leads to a solution. This method takes the decision making out of the hands of the designer and makes it purely statistical. Do you use something like this?

BL: We get sales number back on everything right away. This gives immediate knowledge of what works and what doesn't.

LD: It is interesting to watch what they do and hear what they say they are doing. One man was talking about how he just wanted financial services content but when pushed insisted that celebrity news content remain but be secondary.

CF: Web sites and products targeted to lower class tend to rely on more statistical methods while high-end relies on expertise. Think of Apple or fashion products where they are designed and put out in the world instead of testing.

KV: The NYTimes does do a tremendous amount of statistical analysis. Invest a great amount of time and effort into evaluating these things. Don't do A/B testing but want to. They won't do blinking to encourage click-throughs but they do experiment a great deal.

BL: If you have someone visionary you might need less data.

LD: There is great value in trusting your gut.

CF: Do you move toward your audience, or draw your audience closer to you?

LD: By looking at what people are doing you can get a sense of how much is too much, of how far outside their comfort zone you are.

BL: The mission at WWE was to take a magazine that was working and to expand the readership to get more casual fans to pick it up without being embarrassed to have it. They moved it more to ESPN, Stuff, and Maxim.

CF: The evolution of television and movies follows this same direction. The move from Starsky and Hutch to Lost is possible when companies stop looking down on their audiences and explore what can be done.

The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with. The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring. Paul Rand

Is there an inherent goodness or badness that transcends background?

KV: As a society we have general understandings of what is good or bad but it isn't necessarily inherent. NYTimes and Craigslist aren't good or bad, they are appropriate.

BL: This is complicated. It is in everyone's nature to choose the most comfortable option. What constitutes those parameters is a learned experience. You have to work within those parameters to make someone comfortable enough to choose your product.

LD: It doesn't matter if they are good or bad, it matters if they are useful.

CF: So what about words like ugly and beautiful?

LD: They don't have meaning.

CF: One thing about class that is interesting is the Class X, the class of the design culture. If you drive down the highway you see interior designers instead of interior decorators, the word design has cache. In the web we see this all over the place with more people becoming designers.

LD: Perhaps this has always gone on but now it is just more visible.

KV: Technology is flattening. It helps to transcend class and make information more available to more people.

CF: The emerging social dynamics of technology break down the traditional barriers.

KV: The cathedral vs. the bazaar.

CF: Even design itself is not exclusive.

Audience Question: Things like MySpace are considered low-class but it is what people do when they are given design tools. But what about the so what question? How does design intersect with social mobility?

CF: What this points to is the question of whether or not there is a political agenda.

KV: I'm not sure what the question is but I don't really know what the practical application of the discussion is. There's another point here about technology being a flattener. We talk about MySpace as democratizing design but many of this has to do with the nature of technology and design to begin with. For a century design was about controlling the flow of information. Now design is about creating platforms for interactions.

LD: To build on this point, maybe the focus should shift from designing artifacts to designing platforms or services.

Audience Question: Is it more fun to design for Spin or WWE?

BL: Much more fun doing wrestlers. They are superheroes and I'm selling them to dudes. It's not as cool as Spin but it is more fun. I get to use beefy fonts.

Audience Question: In terms of a web site as a service or a product the important thing is that people are able to use it. Regardless of beauty the measure of success is if people can find what they are looking for or accomplish their task.

CF: This is a question of business strategy and brand strategy. This is the slow-moving layer of business design.

Audience Question: Work with industrial clients and were once told that their audience was not intelligent. How do we approach these groups in a way that connects with them without looking down on them or mocking them?

KV: Clients that don't like their customers or situations where you don't like the client cannot be successful.

BL: I want to reach the fans and I find a way to do that for them. If you don't feel for your client it isn't going to work.

Audience Question: Sometimes you forgo to design to get right to the meat of communication. Don't people know that what they are looking at is ugly but then talk about the thing itself?

KV: Great point.