Creative Tension
Cheryl Bentsen
Some Web designers push the medium. Others scorn the flashy stuff. We asked five leading designers where they stand in this budding religious war.
Forget the bells and whistles, the slow-loading, resource-draining flashing thingies. Flash is so last year. These days, Web design is all about usability, ease of use and enhancing the user experience. According to a Forrester Research survey, poor user experience has "helped drag down a number of online retailers-both pure plays and click-and-mortar companies."
The hand that cracks the usability whip these days is Jakob Nielsen's. Nielsen, principal of the Nielsen Norman Group in Fremont, Calif., and a former Sun Microsystems distinguished engineer, developed the field during the past decade and now travels the world offering advice to companies (his fee: $20,000 a day). Nielsen's website (www.useit.com) is its own small wonder of usability-extremely user-friendly and a terrific resource for gleaning the master's ideas. But Nielsen is at the center of a professional disagreement involving usability. As you will learn below, some leading lights of the Web development world question whether his advocacy has given usability more prominence than it deserves.
Should it really be the driving force in Web design? While usability disciples abound, a lot of designers say no. Advocating what he calls "no-brainer" design, Nielsen believes that users "don't want to have to think about design; they want to think about their problem." He recommends that sites "scale back the [creative] vision and scale up what the user is allowed to do." But how do you identify the users' "problems" or define what they ought to be allowed to do? "You need warm bodies," he says, "direct observation of real human behavior." Indeed, in his years at Sun, Nielsen based design and information architecture on exhaustive research of users' behavior.
The design stakes are high. According to estimates from research company IDC (a sister company to Darwin's publisher, CXO Media), businesses will spend $99.1 billion a year on Web development by 2004, over a tenfold increase since 1998. And when you're ready to spend your share of that market, you'll have plenty of options-today there are more than 6,000 Web development and consulting companies, according to The Firm List (www.firmlist.com), a guide to Web design and development companies around the world. We can't tell you which one to hire. But we can give you a sampling of the current thinking on Web design-what works, what doesn't and where we may be heading.
Kevin Farnham, 29
Cofounder and CEO, Method, San Francisco and New York City (www.method.com) Farnham has worked on more than 100 websites for such companies as Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, Disney, Excite, Hewlett-Packard, Kodak, Levi-Strauss, Microsoft, Netscape, Sony and Yahoo. He began his design career in 1994 at Organic Online in San Francisco, a pioneer Web design company. Prior to founding Method in January 1999, he was director of Web development at MetaDesign. As a film and animation student in Chicago, he paid the rent by promoting and staging raves.
Down with Vanity Plates!
People come to us and say, "We want this, this, this and this on the website." And we say, "No you don't, that's not where your audience is going to get that information. You'd be better served by a print piece than a website." [Companies should ask themselves], What's the business imperative? What is the gain? Where is the ROI? For example, what is McDonald's doing online? The company is spending all this cash for a website that no one is going to come to. Like, why would you? I hope that some companies realize that they don't need to be online. A website is not a vanity plate. It should be a part of your business.
No Size Fits All
You have a number of gurus talking about usability. But it's impossible to [decree that] everything needs to be or do X-because it's just not true. Some users want interesting experiences on the Web. Others are trying to understand somebody's brand or business. And others want to see research. There are so many uses for the Web at this point that to go out there and say something in a blanket way is ridiculous, especially in terms of brand experience for companies.
Segment the Market; Tailor the Message Lately we're really interested in mini- and microsites. [These are small, targeted sites within a larger site that can address a niche audience with specialized content and tone.] For Adobe we developed smashstatusquo.com and Defytherules.com. Both target Web developers who use Adobe products but don't [identify] them with the Adobe brand. These sites are technically-and graphically-advanced branding exercises that make Web developers go, Oh yeah, these [Adobe] guys really get it. We think there's a huge future in targeted sites backed by print or TV advertising. People are getting information from different sources. For the most part we've seen that people don't want to read on the Web. So we give them short, impactful messages tailored to the business and the audience.
Designing Within Constraints
The displays of new handheld devices are full color. There's going to be a proliferation of [various nontraditional] devices. Who knows what direction they're going in? We've translated a personal information manager to a Web-based cell phone interface.
You're always going to have some sense of limitation around the device and its view size. It's all about working with constraints. You've got constraints in every medium-print, motion, the Web. It's a design challenge. There are definitely ways around the constraints if people are willing to dedicate the time and money. Again, you have to ask, what's the ROI?
