What is design?: March 26, 2001 issue of New Thinking

March 26, 2001 New Thinking:
Boring is beautiful in Web design

Website content management

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March 26, 2001

What is design?

By Gerry McGovern

If you designed a door whose handle was two inches off the floor you would soon find that out that your design would not work. If you designed a car whose steering wheel was in the back seat, you would soon find out that your design would not work. If you designed a chair whose seat was made of brittle glass, you would soon find out that your design would not work.

This is a critical problem with design on the Internet. We don’t get that overwhelming feedback that we get from watching someone trying to use the thing we have designed. This results in a situation where flaws that would become immediately obvious in a physical design, often go unnoticed by a website designer. (Of course, the person who’s trying to use that website notices them!)

But what is design? Design is about creating something with a purpose. A door is first and foremost something that allows you in and out of a room. A car is something to drive. A chair is something to sit on.

The problem with Web design is well articulated by Jeffrey Zeldman in an article for Adobe. He warns about how style is becoming a fetish on the Web. “Many young Web designers — and let's face it, most Web designers are under 30 — view their craft the way I used to view pop culture,” he writes. “It's cool or it's crap.”

Design has gone wrong on the Web where young designers believe the hype that style is all that matters in design. But that’s not the way design works. Nike may now stress marketing and stylish design. However, Nike has been in the business of designing running shoes since 1964. Long before Nike embraced style they embraced solid, functional design. Benetton is a style champion, sure. However, the Benetton family have been knitting jumpers since the early Sixties. Long before they advertised, they made clothes that didn’t fall apart the third time you wore them.

A product can function without a distinctive style. It cannot function without a good design. On the Web, the obsession with visual style is actually damaging design. Young, inexperienced designers are missing the point of the Web. They need to learn the true craft of Web design, not some surface sheen.

Nike and Benetton had initial success because they were masters of their craft. The craft of Web design is not visual, graphic oriented design. Rather, it is design centered around content. Some are calling it information architecture.

Information architecture is about helping your reader to quickly find the content they want. To achieve this, web designers need to:

Create simple paths through large quantities of content.
Create Web pages that are fast to download
Translate business strategy into classifications/links that customers understand and can intuitively navigate through
Understand how people read on the Web and how they like to navigate
Create search processes that deliver accurate, descriptive results
Relentlessly focuses on the function of the website
Actively seek feedback from the people who read the website with the objective of constant improvement
Recognize that in a text-based content environment, the style resides in the content itself, not the graphics that surround the content.

Gerry McGovern

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Design is about creating something with a purpose.

On the Web, the obsession with visual style is actually damaging design.