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.
Good interview, interesting perspective. I am increasingly seeing a lot of websites where the designer is creating a site that is visually great, but that isn’t practical, is hard to navigate and is difficult or impossible for search engines to index.
I like it especially when Dan says “online experiences come down to a single user, the context they create, and the satisfaction of their individual goals”
Thanks for covering this important issue.
Thank you Alan for the feedback. I agree to all that you said. and we (WOW) appreciate your comments.
Resubmitted with spelling and grammar corrections:
I read Dan Willis’ article with more than a little interest but came away a bit disappointed. The article seemed overly academic and a bit hazy on the details.
First his analogy of the ‘print’ to ‘web’ evolution with ‘theater’ to ‘film’ is apt for Web 1.0, given the dominance of the Document Object Model is 1.0. But it seems to miss that the evolution of Web 2.0 has no clear parallel in the “prestructured attended presentation” domain. Television and radio, as parts of the “broadcast domain” with their long history of content control in their editorial decisions would seem to be closer, though still very inexact analogy. The Web 1.0 seems to me to be a convergence of the domains of print (distributed static document) and broadcast (distributed animated document).
Web 2.0 has no clear parallel as it is the one of the first information channel in which user contribution is as important, if not more important, than editorial contribution, a phenomena not seen in print, film, or television (with the except of game and reality programs). In theater there has been experiments in performance art & guerilla theater to build audience interaction/inclusion and in radio the ‘talk’ show derives itself directly from user input. There is a rational argument to be made that Web 2.0 is a closer cousin to the radio ‘talk’ show format than any other media channel.
Second, “form follows function” is a utilitarian expression that overlooks who is defining “function”. Like many, he bandies about the term ‘user context’ without helping us to understand what that means. Functionally speaking, it is a creation of derived information sets with atomic names associated with a particular entity. Experientially it is the collected preferences and habits of a particular user or group of users. Experiential definitions can be dynamically acquired (profiling) or pre-determined (role based). It is not clear here what is the source of the underlying information? It is not at all clear which, if either Mr. Willis in leaning on.
Lastly, he seems to believe that Web 2.0 design applied to commerce site success will be driven by the aggregation of user goal satisfaction but overlooks the goal / objectives of the site owners. Commercial Web 2.0 and its attendant user contribution ability does not seem to add productively to the commercial interaction instance. Utilitarianism driven design is too one-sided in its user bias and combined with 2.0 principles begs the question of whether a user has any useful contribution to make to a commercial web site, other than collecting endorsements or optimizing user profiles.
Interactive design assumes both the presenter (owner) and user (consumer) have goals and seeks to construct flows and scenarios that are mutually satisfying. It is not so much that ‘everything we know about web design is wrong’ as much as where do you look for a model on which to evolve web design.
I agree that neither print nor radio nor television nor theater nor film are not the right ancestor models. All are strongly depended on pre-defined content and are essentially passively consumed products delivered though different channels but the key is they are all dominantly passively consumed.
I would offer that the ’sales process’ or ‘first date model’ is a better model for commercial sites. It recognizes the process is interactive and has distinct steps that are sufficient though not always necessary: 1) Discovery and Prospecting: You must find and attract people to what you have to offer. 2) Ascertation of Needs: What is it that you have that they need? How do you find out what the their needs are and how do you go about matching those needs to your offers (goals)? 3) Commitment: how do you get the client/user/visitor to say “yes” and commit to you. Oddly this work both in selling nearly anything and finding some one you want to spend time with.
I would argue that the evolutionary future of the Web is less about design than how do we move beyond DOM (Document Object Model) to IOM (Information Object Model). At least, on that point Mr. Willis and I are in agreement.
John,
Great points. Thanks for taking the time to write in.
Thanks for posting the interview Bill. I always take something away.