Web Design is the Fastest Way to Ruin a Website
Posted February 9th, 2009 by Chas GrundyWeb designers and developers are an arrogant bunch. We’re personally invested. We pour ourselves into the work. We call it an “art.” And we tend to flip out when clients want to ruin it:
Could you have a little animated wooden horse slide onto the screen, and then a bunch of little people drop out and attack the logo?
I swear, a client actually asked for this. Some part of my “I have to manage this budget and schedule” brain died that day.
Not all requests are quite so bad. But most of them indicate a far deeper problem: clients focus on the wrong things. Whether your clients are faculty members, administrators, your boss, or even yourself—as soon as we start talking design, everyone turns into a designer.
Design is sexy. It’s exciting. And people are opinionated, so they voice their opinions (hint: be careful about asking people for their opinions on subjective matters). But as designers and developers and writers and marketers, it’s our job to point out the obvious: a great design won’t make a bad website a success.
So what makes a website successful? That’s the question you should ask on day one. And every day after, you should hold your decisions up against that goal: will this [design | paragraph | technology] help or hurt our chances of meeting that goal?
In higher education, like most industries, we’re not here to win awards. We don’t have to wow the visitor and impress them with flashy designs or interactions. That’s not why we’re asked to make the website. And that’s not why our visitors visit. The website has a real goal that aligns with a real business objective (e.g., make money, recruit students, or get donations). And everything we do for the website should start and end at that goal.
So for big projects, I’ve started asking clients (or our team) to come up with a mission statement. Not for the organization, but for the website itself. A simple, clear statement of why the website exists and how it will be measured. What’s the point? If you can’t answer that question, then all the animated horses in the world won’t do you any good.
About the Author
Posts by Chas Grundy:
Start a Usability Testing Program in 5 Days
23 Mar 2009 in Usability
Web Design is the Fastest Way to Ruin a Website
09 Feb 2009 in Design
February 9th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Thanks for putting this in writing. Well said. I’m putting the permalink in a gold frame and pulling it out whenever someone wants anything changed/updated/deleted.
February 9th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Oh so true. I once had to make dancing penguins for an online event invite. I always have people determine their goals and audience first. Otherwise the tail wags the dog and you end up with animated horsies going nowhere, or worse mystery menus that are invisible until you mouse over them.
Clients often lead with form over function, it’s as true in print as it is on the Web. But I think it’s more challenging on the Web because they focus on the things they can see. They look at other sites and they see shiny buttons and things that move. They think these look cool.
But when they examine such sites they’re doing so as though they were looking at a gallery display. They’re not approaching the site as if they were a real user trying to find information, apply for a program, etc. But you can’t judge the success of a site from looks anymore than you could judge a car without driving it or checking under the hood to make sure it has an engine.
In the end their hurting themselves. When they have to show results the following year it’s not enough to say everyone loves the look of the site. You have to show traffic and results. That only comes with goal-driven content.
February 9th, 2009 at 8:19 pm
i’ll forgive your tendency to throw the designers under the bus, as i know that secretly you wish you were one of us, but this article seems to me to be saying that a lack of vision or a lack of discipline or a lack of a defining goal for the project at hand are the fastest way to kill a project.
speaking as a hyper-sensitive designer, a lack of focus on any of the key elements of a project can derail it, not just design. poorly planned content, for example, or a failure of management to control client requests as deadlines loom. design gets the bad rap because it is in the design stage that the client is most heavily involved. I’ve yet to meet a client who really cares all that much about the build of their site if it operates properly. design is so much more subjective that it’s where most clients feel they can be helpful.
Congratulations on joining the blog. Great first article (even if the title unfairly attacks the designers).
February 10th, 2009 at 5:58 am
I’ve been thinking of writing a blog post with something along the same title. Actually, I think it could be a series of titles (Application Programmers Can Quickly Ruin a Web Site, etc). Basically, if any group starts driving the development of your site without considering the other groups or the overall Web mission then the site will suffer. Since many people (that may not even know anything about the Internet but still have management authority) have strong opinions in the graphic design realm (a color they like, etc), I think designers also get the short end of the stick sometimes (getting guidance that just isn’t good or even relevant). The Web site mission statement is a great way to ground work on a site, but if the Web team isn’t set up correctly then the designers could still get poor direction. For a very large Web site, all aspects of Web Operations Management overall should be refined (looking at Strategy, Web Governance, Web Team, and Measurement).
February 10th, 2009 at 6:11 am
@heidi – Dancing penguins? Fantastic… can you share? I’ve always wanted to put dancing penguins as my avatar.
@oak, the title doesn’t attack designers, it attacks design.
February 10th, 2009 at 6:19 am
@chas Six of one, half a dozen of the other…
February 12th, 2009 at 5:32 am
thanks for posting it across, you are true in certain aspects and as one of the fellow commentor @oak said, its true its nt attacking the designers
February 12th, 2009 at 9:19 am
Let’s not call animated horses and penguins design. They are gimmicks that people think are either cute or eye-catching. Good design, be it on the Web or in print, should always be a melding of many elements to create a visually appealing and well communicated piece of information. I agree with your observations of what is needed to communicate through a Web site/page and would add that a poorly designed Web site will not present good information hidden in poor font choices, colors, images, etc.
February 17th, 2009 at 9:30 am
Chas,
Great article. I have to agree with everything you say, and could give some of the most crazy requests I’ve received for the last two years working at the University.
In any case I would like to point that the title of the article is a bit misleading or at least not totally faire.
To me the base for this conversation should start by establishing what “Web Design” means, and like any other “design” it should be more than what the eye meets.
I’ve been working as a graphic designer for a long, long time. I started in the early 80’s as a print designer and jump to the web as soon as HTML was a bit stable (Did that ever happened?). Although I’ve worked for a great part of my career as an interactive designer in a lot of projects that were more “eye candy” than anything else, I’ve grown to become quite of a student of the “art of design”. I call myself a very strategic designer, and really hate when I get to be introduced as the “guy who does the cute images and gets to make everything look nice”.
Because design is not about creating nice pictures, selecting colors or choosing a type, but it is about using graphical elements and design principles (did we ever heard about “Gestalt”?) to support the content. Helping to organize the messages so the user finds the info they are looking for should be the main goal for web design.
Of course nobody hates a nice looking dress, of course we buy with our eyes and of course emotion is a big part of a web experience (this could be the theme for a complete different article) and taking care of these is the designers responsibility too, but the final product will be a disaster unless the designer understand that he is not creating a piece of art for its own pleasure and ego buster, or simple aesthetics, but to serve the communicational needs of the project.
Bad design is as fast of a way to ruin a website, as it is bad objective planning, bad architecture, bad written content and bad programming. The big difference is that design is the first thing we see, and probably the only thing that a client (or any other non-expert) thinks to posses certain knowledge to criticize. They would not dare to mention a bad use of PHP, disastrous organization of content or even bad simple writing and boring content. That would be just too complicated for them. Let’s blame it on the bad color choice, or the horrible selection of stock photo.
As you, I try to ask the client why the web site exist, and most of the time their answer is: “I want an animated horse”.
Note: I apologize for my bad grammar. English is not my first language and I guess my strong accents still translates on my writing:P
February 17th, 2009 at 10:26 am
Luis, excellent comments. As you saw right through my deceptive title, rushing into design without giving thought to strategy, content, etc. is a common mistake for many projects.
I like your point about design and “art for its own pleasure.” Sometimes clients forget this, as do some designers. I’m fortunate to work with designers who rarely fall into this trap.
February 17th, 2009 at 10:56 am
I have developed a graphic map that presents the process of building a web site and I try to start any conversation with a client going over it… unfortunately most of the time they end up asking: “so when can we see the design?”