Designing for the web is more than just making something look beautiful. It involves creating an experience for the user where he or she can interact easily and respond through the process of communication.
Confusing Design
During my last semester of college, I was able to have a very eye-opening experience participating in a practicum for communication students called i-Comm. This was a class where students create and implement marketing and design strategies for local clients as well as maintain a campus newspaper called The Scroll. Being a graphic design major, I naturally chose the role of designer for these various clients and in the process I learned a lot about how bad design happens and why.
I had the to opportunity to design many small newspaper ads. These ads were usually limited on the design end, most of them being black and white and only taking up a few inches of space. And what I found was that clients continually seemed to think that the ads I was creating for them were too boring. They wanted centered text with four different decorative typefaces and polka dots in the background.
And then my eyes were opened. The client wanted the ad to stand out in a way that would ignore the basic principles of design and in the process, make the information a nightmare to decipher. They just didn’t understand that combining Comic Sans with Papyrus would not create hierarchy, only confusion. This is a very simple example of how ignoring design can actually hurt the communication process, and this was just for a small piece of print. Imagine how much more important of a role design plays in a situation where the user must not only read text, but must also navigate and find what the client wants him or her to find.
Why it Matters
The question to address then is why good design – or aesthetic – matters so much. There is a misconception that many of us have probably heard of that the role of designers is to make things pretty based on adherence to basic design principles and what “feels right”. What these statements fail to address is the connection between how something looks and how it communicates.
Aesthetics and Communication
Designing an interface for the web is not as simple as it looks. The designer must be concerned not just with how the interface looks visually but also with how it communicates to the user; in other words, how the user responds to it and uses it. So how does design affect the usability and user-friendliness of a website?
First, we must understand that designing is not decorating. Graphic design is not a fine art and it did not evolve into what it is simply because artists wanted to make things beautiful using new mediums. It became what it is because there was a need for it. In the early history of graphic design, posters, advertisements, and magazines all became the primary forms of communication to larger audiences. People were discovering that everything – from the size of a headline in relation to the body copy, to the type of imagery used – affected how people responded to and understood information. In short, they discovered that communication could be enhanced or diminished depending on how it was presented visually. So although designers are concerned with basic design principles and do make aesthetic choices, for the most part these choices are based on a knowledge of how users respond to and interpret different elements.
Taking this into consideration, it is clear that graphic design itself enhances communication and therefore, its role in web design is to communicate through user-interaction and experience. That is not to say that because an element is designed to communicate something specific, it can’t be designed better.
There is a good, better, and best in design. A website can be good; it can communicate that there are links which indicate clearly that they are a form of navigation. The site can be well laid out and organized and have a clear hierarchy of information. A website can be better; it can use those same principles and add to them. The links may look like buttons that could be physically pushed. Or, a website can be best. It can have navigation that is pleasant to look at and therefore more usable. It can feel like one, consistent piece that embodies a friendly, professional tone that is inviting to the user.
Although graphic designers are first and foremost concerned with communicating the intended message, by successfully implementing good design – not decorating – they make the message that much more inviting and usable.
Interaction Design
There is a reason that web designers often call themselves interaction or experience designers. It is because the whole process of visiting a website – clicking through different pages, searching for information, posting a comment – is an experience to the user. It is with this knowledge in mind that designers make creative choices about a site’s design. What should matter the most to the client and the designer is the visitor who goes to the client’s page.
How can design either help or interfere with a user’s experience when they visit a site? If a link looks too similar to the regular text on a page, then the likelihood that it will be clicked on is less. On the other hand, if a main navigation link is too loud and different, it may distract the user from other important content. Design can also invoke emotional responses from the user. The look and feel of a site can say, “We are a professional company that gets things done for you.” Or it can say, “We’re really not a legitimate company.”
Recently, I visited a website that was created by a professor to promote a free e-book that he wrote. The information itself was great and very useful. But navigating his website was confusing. The text was hard to read and the information was not very well organized. The design itself was not thought-out or even inviting. After viewing the site, I thought, “Wow, this would be a great website if it was just better designed.” Simply because this site was not well designed, the information – which should have been the most important aspect of the web site – was ignored.
The role of the interaction designer is to look at a site’s design as if he were the user. He must ask questions like, “If someone just found a random sub-section of this site through a search engine, could they still navigate easily and find any information they were looking for? Does the sidebar information take dominance over my main content? Do my in-text links disappear in the context of the whole page?” Asking questions like these solve problems and result in aesthetic choices – the same choices that so many people say are based solely on design principles and whether it “feels right.”
The Beauty of Communication
The fact is, aesthetics and communication are linked. Beauty cannot, and should not, be separated from communication and function. Our minds are drawn to things that are beautiful. This fact affects the clothes we wear, the cars we buy, and also how we navigate a website and what our perception is of the company after we interact with the website. Designers do not just decorate websites. They design them in a way that communicates to the user and when this is done successfully, it is inherently beautiful. That’s just what works.
