January 2010

 

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Everything You Know about Web Design is Wrong Says Dan Willis User Experience Consultant

While researching Web design best practices over the holiday, I came across an interesting piece entitled “Everything You Know about Web Design is Wrong” by Dan Willis.

Dan Willis’ design career began in newspapers more than 20 years ago. After working as a print designer and magazine art director for Tribune Co., he designed his first Web site in 1995. He was washingtonpost.com’s first Director of User Experience and had the same title at PBS.org. Now a consultant for Sapient, his clients have included the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and the FBI.I’m on the phone with Dan Willis, User Experience consultant to Sapient. Has clients include American Museum of Natural History in New York City and the FBI. After working as a print designer and magazine art director for Tribune Co., he designed his first Web site in 1995. He was washingtonpost.com’s first Director of User Experience and had the same title at PBS.org.

Check out the eleven minute interview on today’s Web Professional Minute.

A full transcript will follow in twenty for hours.

Below is an excerpt of the article. To review the entire article download the entire PDF

Netscape’s introduction of a commercial Web browser in 1994 sparked evolutionary change at a phenomenal pace. Despite a couple of international economic collapses, that blistering rate of change has continued into this century, but tenets borrowed out of desperation from the rigid traditions of print design still prevent the Web’s presentation from keeping up with its development.

We still treat pages, grids, color usage, and the placement of elements as the primary tools of Web design. These print design traditions hinder our ability to appropriately present the 21st century Web as much as the conventions of live theater hobbled filmmakers a hundred years ago. Louis Augustin Le Prince invented a single lens motion picture camera in 1888, but it took almost 30 years for artists to master the emerging technologies of film and transcend the boundaries established by stage plays. Early masterpieces like Georges Melies’ Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) introduced stunning special effects and showed remarkable creativity, but also reflected an adherence to live theater’s static point of view and restrictive stage design. Because it was little more than 30 independent scenes of moving images strung together, the film failed to move the form forward in any meaningful way.

It wasn’t until 1915 when, despite its overt racism and its aggrandizement of the Ku Klux Klan, D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation elevated film from a five-cent curiosity into what would eventually become the most influential art form of the 20th century. Griffith’s movie popularized expressive close-ups, dramatic lighting, flashbacks, and other techniques that are now part of the common language of film. Also, the financial success of Birth of a Nation helped convince the industry to take Griffith’s film “grammar” seriously. There’s beautiful work online today that reflects the best efforts of wildly talented designers.

The introduction and mastery of Flash as well as the industry’s embracing of standards-based design have resulted in elegant visual solutions, but like Melies’ film, these solutions haven’t elevated the form. Designers are churning out evermore- sophisticated work, but the work is more print-design-in-disguise than transcendent Web design. There are plenty of examples of the former, but recognizing the latter is going to be more difficult. It’s useful, therefore, to identify the key concepts that could help design finally transcend the boundaries of print.

Concept 1: In transcendent Web design, form will follow function Of course we’d like to say the same about print design, but if we’re really being honest about it, the tenet for Print-design-in-disguise: This Harry Potter site won the Web Marketing Association’s 2007 Web Awards Best of Show. It relies heavily on blocks of dense, beautiful, unreadable type and slow-loading Flash animation. It treats its three Web-native features like sections of a glossy print magazine, rather than as primary features of the site.print is more accurately “form follows function … as long as it’s really pretty.” And unfortunately that more forgiving interpretation has dominated the last decade of Web design.

In the 21st century, it’s essential that form follow function in order to cater to the utilitarian nature of the Web. Print communication blasts generic messages to clumsily defined masses of readers, but online experiences come down to a single user, the context they create, and the satisfaction of their individual goals. With older forms, user goals tend to be more general (“to be informed,” for example) and user expectations tend to be lower (“that TV show was kind of funny.”) Because of the blunt force nature of print and television products, measuring success comes down to raw numbers of readers or viewers and that has unfortunately carried over online where a similar approach to metrics is more distracting than meaningful.

Someone will always pay for ad banner impressions and online versions of print advertising, but eventually Web profits will depend primarily on satisfying enough of the most important goals of enough of a product’s most important users. How Web design looks doesn’t determine how well it works. Aesthetics are important, but they are a means to an end, just a tool one masters in order to design successful Web solutions. Transcendent business model: All Netflix.com screens seem to lead back to the movie queue and support the user’s primary goals while encouraging continued membership. Its application tailors interactions to the individual, here by sorting lists of other members’ favorite movies based
on past choices.

Check out the eleven minute interview on today’s Web Professional Minute.

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