Archive for March, 2008
Design Approach for Print and Web Design
I started in print. I was a designer for a local newspaper in 1996. I then moved onto a magazine and then an agency. The whole point of graphic design for print was to present information in the most visually appealing way in order to differentiate your information from a competitor’s information. Visual design was king. My approach was to find elements of design that would grab a user’s attention as they flipped through the pages or sifted through their mail and then make the information stand out so the user would stay once I had their attention.
When I made the shift to web design in 1999 I tried to apply this same style of graphic design to web projects. What I quickly found out was that most of us were designing web pages for other graphic designers. We were trying to “out-cool” one another through the use of moving graphics, 1-pixel-wide borders, and the smallest fonts we could use. The designs were stunning and drew praise from other designers but fell short when launched. Why were these sites failing? They were cooler than anything we ever got away with in print.
Late 2000 or maybe early 2001, I was working on a design late into the night. I thought I really had a winner on my hands and wanted my wife to try it out before I presented it to the client. She sat down at the computer, looked at the web site and said “where do I click?” I was a little stricken by that question because it seemed so obvious to me. I prodded her to click where she thought she should click and she pointed the mouse around the page until she found something clickable and went in. Watching her struggle with my design was a very eye-opening experience. It occurred to me that it could look like the coolest thing in the world but if the user couldn’t interact with the design and couldn’t get to the information, then the site design was a failure. This was an epiphany and it shifted my thought on interactive design altogether.
At that point in my career I began to define design as the way a person worked with the thing. I no longer considered design as the front-end graphic design or “skin” of the site. I began working with the information architect on staff and naturally gravitated toward information design. Once I saw design as the structure and the method for navigating the structure, my web designs achieved a much greater acceptance among the users. Because my web design was thought through from the ground up, it wasn’t getting in people’s way and they were able to accomplish their goal on the site. The “skin” didn’t even matter to the people. Users only seemed to notice the graphic design when something stood in their way of doing their task. Bad design was noticed and good design was overlooked as something that worked the way it should work.
What I learned in my transition from print to web is that you can never assume someone will understand your intentions. No matter how obvious a design choice seems to you, it will probably confuse some users. More often than not “boring” design is effective interactive design because it doesn’t distract the user from their goal. If you take web design seriously then your approach should change dramatically from your approach to print design. Design is how it works. How it looks is icing on the cake.