View original post found on Smashing Magazine Feed authored by Dmitry Fadeyev
September 24th, 2009 — ui
Everyone would agree that usability is an important aspect of Web design. Whether you’re working on a portfolio website, online store or Web app, making your pages easy and enjoyable for your visitors to use is key. Many studies have been done over the years on various aspects of Web and interface design, and the findings are valuable in helping us improve our work. Here are 10 useful usability findings and guidelines that may help you improve the user experience on your websites.
1. Form Labels Work Best Above The Field
A study by UX Matters found that the ideal position for labels in forms is above the fields. On many forms, labels are put to the left of the fields, creating a two-column layout; while this looks good, it’s not the easiest layout to use. Why is that? Because forms are generally vertically oriented; i.e. users fill the form from top to bottom. Users scan the form downwards as they go along. And following the label to the field below is easier than finding the field to the right of the label.
Tumblr features a simple and elegant sign-up form that adheres to UX Matter’s recommendation.
Positioning labels on the left also poses another problem: do you left-align or right-align the labels? Left-aligning makes the form scannable but disconnects the labels from the fields, making it difficult to see which label applies to which field. Right-aligning does the reverses: it makes for a good-looking but less scannable form. Labels above fields work best in most circumstances. The study also found that labels should not be bold, although this recommendation is not conclusive.
2. Users Focus On Faces
People instinctively notice other people right away when they come into view. On Web pages, we tend to focus on people’s faces and eyes, which gives marketers a good technique for attracting attention. But our attraction to people’s faces and eyes is only the beginning; it turns out we actually glance in the direction the person in the image is looking in.
Eye-tracking heat map of a baby looking directly at us, from the UsableWorld study.
And now the baby is looking at the content. Notice the increase in people looking at the headline and text.
Here’s an eye-tracking study that demonstrates this. We’re instinctively drawn to faces, but if that face is looking somewhere other than at us, we’ll also look in that direction. Take advantage of this phenomenon by drawing your users’ attention to the most important parts of your page or ad.
3. Quality Of Design Is An Indicator Of Credibility
Various studies have been conducted to find out just what influences people’s perception of a website’s credibility:
We don’t know if Fever app is any good, but the sleek user interface and website make a great first impression.
One interesting finding of these studies is that users really do judge a book by its cover… or rather, a website by its design. Elements such as layout, consistency, typography, color and style all affect how users perceive your website and what kind of image you project. Your website should project not only a good image but also the right one for your audience.
Other factors that influence credibility are: the quality of the website’s content, amount of errors, rate of updates, ease of use and trustworthiness of authors.
4. Most Users Do Not Scroll
Jakob Nielsen’s study on how much users scroll (in Prioritizing Web Usability) revealed that only 23% of visitors scroll on their first visit to a website. This means that 77% of visitors won’t scroll; they’ll just view the content above the fold (i.e. the area of the page that is visible on the screen without scrolling down). What’s more, the percentage of users who scroll decreases with subsequent visits, with only 16% scrolling on their second visit. This data highlights just how important it is to place your key content on a prominent position, especially on landing pages.
This doesn’t mean you should cram everything in the upper area of the page, just that you should make the best use of that area. Crowding it with content will just make the content inaccessible; when the user sees too much information, they don’t know where to begin looking.
Basecamp makes great use of space. Above the fold (768 pixels high), it shows a large screenshot, tagline, value proposition, call to action, client list, videos and short feature list with images.
This is most important for the home page, where most new visitors will land. So provide the core essentials there:
- Name of the website,
- Value proposition of the website (i.e. what benefit users will get from using it),
- Navigation for the main sections of the website that are relevant to the user.
However, users’ habits have significantly changed since then. Recent studies prove that users are quite comfortable with scrolling and in some situations they are willing to scroll to the bottom of the page. Many users are more comfortable with scrolling than with a pagination, and for many users the most important information of the page isn’t necessarily placed “above the fold†(which is because of the variety of available display resolutions a quite outdated, deprecated term). So it is a good idea to divide your layout into sections for easy scanning, separating them with a lot of white space.
For further information please take a look at the articles Unfolding the fold (Clicktale), Paging VS Scrolling (Wichita University – SURL), Blasting the Myth of the Fold (Boxes and Arrows). (thanks, Fred Leuck).
5. Blue Is The Best Color For Links
While giving your website a unique design is great, when it comes to usability, doing what everyone else is doing is best. Follow conventions, because when people visit a new website, the first place they look for things are in the places where they found them on most other websites; they tap into their experience to make sense of this new content. This is known as usage patterns. People expect certain things to be the same, such as link colors, the location of the website’s logo, the behavior of tabbed navigation and so on.
Google keeps all links on its websites blue for a reason: the color is familiar to most users, which makes it easy to locate.
What color should your links be? The first consideration is contrast: links have to be dark (or light) enough to contrast with the background color. Secondly, they should stand out from the color of the rest of the text; so, no black links with black text. And finally, research shows (Van Schaik and Ling) that if usability if your priority, sticking to blue for links is best. The browser’s default link color is blue, so people expect it. Choosing a different color is by no means a problem, but it may affect the speed with which users find it.
6. The Ideal Search Box Is 27-Characters Wide
What’s the ideal width of a search box? Is there such a thing? Jakob Nielsen performed a usability study on the length of search queries in website search boxes (Prioritizing Web Usability). It turns out that most of today’s search boxes are too short. The problem with short boxes is that even though you can type out a long query, only a portion of the text will be visible at a time, making it difficult to review or edit what you’ve typed.
The study found that the average search box is 18-characters wide. The data showed that 27% of queries were too long to fit into it. Extending the box to 27 characters would accommodate 90% of queries. Remember, you can set widths using ems, not just pixels and points. One em is the width and height of one “m†character (using whatever font size a website is set to). So, use this measure to scale the width of the text input field to 27-characters wide.
Google’s search box is wide enough to accommodate long sentences.
Apple’s search box is a little too short, cutting off the query, “Microsoft Office 2008.â€
In general, search boxes are better too wide than too short, so that users can quickly review, verify and submit the query. This guideline is very simple but unfortunately too often dismissed or ignored. Some padding in the input field can also improve the design and user experience.
7. White Space Improves Comprehension
Most designers know the value of white space, which is the empty space between paragraphs, pictures, buttons and other items on the page. White space de-clutters a page by giving items room to breathe. We can also group items together by decreasing the space between them and increasing the space between them and other items on the page. This is important for showing relationships between items (e.g. showing that this button applies to this set of items) and building a hierarchy of elements on the page.
Notice the big content margin, padding and paragraph spacing on The Netsetter. All that space makes the content easy and comfortable to read.
White space also makes content more readable. A study (Lin, 2004) found that good use of white space between paragraphs and in the left and right margins increases comprehension by almost 20%. Readers find it easier to focus on and process generously spaced content.
In fact, according to Chaperro, Shaikh and Baker, the layout on a Web page (including white space, headers, indentation and figures) may not measurably influence performance but does influence user satisfaction and experience.
8. Effective User Testing Doesn’t Have To Be Extensive
Jakob Nielsen’s study on the ideal number of test subjects in usability tests found that tests with just five users would reveal about 85% of all problems with your website, whereas 15 users would find pretty much all problems.
Source: Jakob Nielsen’s AlertBox
The biggest issues are usually discovered by the first one or two users, and the following testers confirm these issues and discover the remaining minor issues. Only two test users would likely find half the problems on your website. This means that testing doesn’t have to be extensive or expensive to yield good results. The biggest gains are achieved when going from 0 test users to 1, so don’t be afraid of doing too little: any testing is better than none.
9. Informative Product Pages Help You Stand Out
If your website has product pages, people shopping online will definitely look through them. But many product pages lack sufficient information, even for visitors doing a quick scan. This is a serious problem, because product information helps people make purchasing decision. Research shows that poor product information accounts for around 8% of usability problems and even 10% of user failure (i.e. the user gives up and leaves the website) (Prioritizing Web Usability).
Apple provides separate “Tech Specs†pages for its products, which keeps complicated details away from the simpler marketing pages, yet provides easy access when they’re needed.
Provide detailed information about your products, but don’t fall into the trap of bombarding users with too much text. Make the information easy to digest. Make the page scannable by breaking up the text into smaller segments and using plenty of sub-headings. Add plenty of images for your products, and use the right language: don’t use jargon that your visitors might not understand.
10. Most Users Are Blind To Advertising
Jakob Nielsen reports in his AlertBox entry that most users are essentially blind to ad banners. If they’re looking for a snippet of information on a page or are engrossed in content, they won’t be distracted by the ads on the side.
The implication of this is not only that users will avoid ads but that they’ll avoid anything that looks like an ad, even if it’s not an ad. Some heavily styled navigation items may look like banners, so be careful with these elements.
The square banners on the left sidebar of FlashDen are actually not ads: they’re content links. They do look uncomfortably close to ad banners and so may be overlooked by some users.
That said, ads that look like content will get people looking and clicking. This may generate more ad revenue but comes at the cost of your users’ trust, as they click on things they thought were genuine content. Before you go down that path, consider the trade-off: short-term revenue versus long-term trust.
Bonus: Findings From Our Case-Studies
In recent years, Smashing Magazine’s editorial team has conducted a number of case studies in an attempt to identify common design solutions and practices. So far, we have analyzed Web forms, blogs, typography and portfolios; and more case studies will be published next month. We have found some interesting patterns that could serve as guidelines for your next design.
Here, we’ll review some of the practices and design patterns that we discovered in our case studies in this brief, compact overview, for your convenience.
According to our typography study:
- Line height (in pixels) ÷ body copy font size (in pixels) = 1.48
1.5 is commonly recommended in classic typographic books, so our study backs up this rule of thumb. Very few websites use anything less than this. And the number of websites that go over 1.48 decreases as you get further from this value.
- Line length (pixels) ÷ line height (pixels) = 27.8
The average line length is 538.64 pixels (excluding margins and padding), which is pretty large considering that many websites still have body copy that is 12 to 13 pixels in font size.
- Space between paragraphs (pixels) ÷ line height (pixels) = 0.754
It turns out that paragraph spacing (i.e. the space between the last line of one paragraph and the first line of the next) rarely equals the leading (which would be the main characteristic of perfect vertical rhythm). More often, paragraph spacing is just 75% of paragraph leading. The reason may be that leading usually includes the space taken up by descenders; and because most characters do not have descenders, additional white space is created under the line.
- Optimal number of characters per line is 55 to 75
According to classic typographic books, the optimal number of characters per line is between 55 and 75, but between 75 and 85 characters per line is more popular in practice.
According to our blog design study:
- Layouts usually have a fixed width (pixel-based) (92%) and are usually centered (94%). The width of fixed layouts varies between 951 and 1000 pixels (56%).
- The home page shows excerpts of 10 to 20 posts (62%).
- 58% of a website’s overall layout is used to display the main content.
According to our Web form design study:
- The registration link is titled “sign up†(40%) and is placed in the upper-right corner.
- Sign-up forms have simple layouts, to avoid distracting users (61%).
- Titles of input fields are bolded (62%), and fields are vertically arranged more than they are horizontally arranged (86%).
- Designers tend to include few mandatory fields and few optional fields.
- Email confirmation is not given (82%), but password confirmation is (72%).
- The “Submit†button is either left-aligned (56%) or centered (26%).
According to our portfolio design study:
- 89% of layouts are horizontally centered, and most of them have a large horizontal navigation menu.
- 47.2% of portfolios have a client page, and 67.2% have some form of standalone services page.
- 63.6% have a detailed page for every project, including case studies, testimonials, slideshows with screenshots, drafts and sketches.
- Contact pages contain driving directions, phone number, email address, postal address, vCard and online form,
Other Resources
Have any thoughts on what we’ve covered, or know of other useful usability findings? Please leave a comment below.
About the Author
Dmitry Fadeyev is the founder of the Usability Post blog, where you can read his thoughts on good design and usability. Follow Dmitry on Twitter @usabilitypost
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© Dmitry Fadeyev for Smashing Magazine, 2009. |
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Post tags: findings, research, usability
View original post found on Smashing Magazine Feed authored by Dmitry Fadeyev
December 15th, 2008 — ui
By Dmitry Fadeyev
Web design consists, for the most part, of interface design. There are many techniques involved in crafting beautiful and functional interfaces. Here’s my collection of 10 that I think you’ll find useful in your work. They’re not related to any particular theme, but are rather a collection of techniques I use in my own projects. Without further ado, let’s get started.
1. Padded block links
Links (or anchors) are inline elements by default, which means that their clickable area spans only the height and width of the text. This clickable area, or the space where you can click to go to that link’s destination, can be increased for greater usability. We can do this by adding padding and, in some cases, also converting the link into a block element. Here’s an example of inline and padded links, with their clickable areas highlighted to show the difference:
Obviously, the larger the clickable area is, the easier it is to click on the link because there is less of a chance of missing it. Converting links into block elements makes the text area span the whole width of the container, unless the width is specified otherwise. This makes it ideal for links located in sidebars. We can do it with the following code:
a {
display: block;
padding: 6px;
}
Make sure to also add a healthy dose of padding to the links, because converting a link into a block only affects its behavior and width; adding padding ensures that the link is high enough and has some room to breathe.
2. Typesetting buttons
Attention to every detail is what separates a great product from a mediocre one. Interface elements such as buttons and tabs are clicked on many times a day by your users, so it pays to typeset them properly; and by typesetting I mean positioning the label. Here’s a couple of examples of the kind of misplaced labels I sometimes notice:
At first glance they look okay, but notice that the text is placed too high because the lowercase letters have been used as a guide to align the text vertically in the center, like so:
However, if we use uppercase letters as well as lowercase letters with ascenders (â€t,†“d,†“f,†“h,†“k†and “lâ€), the balance shifts upwards, making the label appear too high on the button. In such cases, we should set the type using the uppercase height as a guide — or set it a little bit higher if most of the letters are lowercase. Here’s what I mean:
This gives the whole button a more balanced look and feel. Little touches like this go a long way towards making your interface more polished and satisfying to use.
3. Using contrast to manage focus
Similarly, you can also manage the focus of your visitors’ attention with contrast between elements. Here’s an example of a post headline and some meta information underneath regarding who posted the article and its date:
All the text is set in black. Let’s decrease the contrast between the meta information (the date and author’s name) and the background by putting the text in a light shade of gray:
The highest contrast element here is the headline, so it literally pops out at us. The other elements fade into the background. Here, I’ve chosen the author as the second-most important element, and the date as the least. The font also differs in size and style, but the contrast level can be very powerful. Let’s reverse the order of importance to date, author and headline:
You can see how effective it is in shifting focus: the date now pops out at you, while the headline fades away. This technique comes in very handy for information-heavy websites, such as blogs, forums and social networks, in which you want to make a lot of information easily scannable while still showing a lot of additional things, like dates. Fading the extras allows visitors to easily focus their attention on the most important pieces of text.
4. Using color to manage attention
Color can also be used to effectively focus your visitors’ attention on important or actionable elements. For example, during the US presidential election, pretty much all of the candidates’ websites had the donation button colored red. Red is a very bright and powerful color so it attracts attention, and it stands out even more when the rest of the website is blue or another colder color.
Warmer tones like red, yellow and orange are naturally bright and so tend to attract the eye. They also “expand†when set against colder colors like blue and green. This means that an orange button on a blue background looks like it’s flowing outwards and taking the front seat. Conversely, a blue button on an orange background contracts inward, wishing to stay in the background. Here’s a picture to illustrate:
Here’s a couple of examples of websites that use color effectively to direct users’ attention to the important elements:
Function features a “We’re Hiring†link on its jobs page. To ensure the link is not missed, the designers set it against a red background that pops out from the dark background header, effectively grabbing attention.
Causecast use color effectively. Four bright pink elements pop out at you: the logo, the feedback link, the donate link and the website description message.
Want the “About†blurb on your website to grab the visitor’s focus? Make the background yellow. Want to make the “Join†button stand out? Color it orange. Make sure not to highlight too many elements, though; if you do, they may get lost in each other’s company.
5. White space indicates relationships
One of the most crucial elements in an interface is the white space between elements. If you’re not familiar with the term white space, it means just that: space between one interface element and another, be it a button, a navigation bar, article text, a headline and so on. By manipulating white space, we can indicate relationships between certain elements or groups of elements.
So, for example, by putting the headline near the article text we indicate that it is related to that text. The text is then placed farther away from other elements to separate it and make it more readable. Here’s an example in which white space could be improved:
The text looks all right and is certainly readable, but because the spaces above and below each heading are equal, they don’t separate each piece of text clearly. We can improve this by increasing the white space between each section and also by slightly tightening the line height of the paragraphs:
This results in more clearly defined blocks; we can easily tell which headings go with which pieces of text and can see the separate sections clearly. Good designers often squint or glance at their work from a distance, which lets them see the blocks of elements separated by white space as they merge together. If you cannot see these groups clearly then you may need to tweak your white space.
6. Letter spacing
Web design is pretty limiting for typographers. But while there are only a few safe Web fonts and not a great many things you can do to style them, it’s worth remembering that we do still have some level of control. “Tracking†is a term used in the field of typography to describe the adjustment of spacing between letters in words. We’ve got the ability to do this with CSS using the “letter-spacing†property.
If used with restraint and taste, this property can be effective in improving the look of your headlines. I wouldn’t recommend using letter spacing on the body text because the default spacing generally provides the best readability for smaller font sizes.
Here’s an example of letter spacing in use:
And here’s the CSS code used for the above examples:
h1 {
font-family: Helvetica;
font-size: 27px;
}
h2 {
font-family: Helvetica;
font-size: 27px;
letter-spacing: -1px;
}
h3 {
font-family: Georgia;
font-size: 24px;
letter-spacing: 3px;
font-variant: small-caps;
font-weight: normal;
}
The effect can be useful when you want to craft a more aesthetically pleasing or more original heading. Here, I’ve used only a couple pixels for letter spacing, but already it makes a big difference to the style of the font.
7. Auto-focus on input
Many Web applications and websites feature forms. These may be search forms or input forms inviting you to submit something. If this form is the core feature of your application or website, you may want to consider automatically focusing the user’s cursor on the input field when the website loads. This will speed things up because users can start typing right away without having to click on it. A good example of this is Google and Wikipedia’s websites.
Upon arriving at Wikipedia.org, the search box is already highlighted, ready to accept text.
To automatically focus on input fields, you’ll need a little bit of JavaScript. There are various solutions, and the one you should use depends on the functionality you want to achieve. The simplest way to do it would be to add the following to your body tag:
<body onLoad="document.forms.form_name.form_field.focus()">
Your form code should look something like:
<form method="get" name="form_name" action="#">
<input type="text" name="form_field" size="20" />
<input type="submit" value="Go" />
</form>
Now, every time the page loads, the text field called “form_field†will be automatically selected, ready for input.
The only problem with this is that if your users want to return to the previous page using the Backspace key, they will be out of luck because they’ll just be deleting characters in the input field. Thankfully, Harmen Janssen has another simple JavaScript solution you can find here. Harmen’s script allows the Backspace key to go to the previous page when there are no characters left in the input field to delete.
8. Custom input focus
While the default look of form elements suffices for most functions, sometimes we want something a little prettier or a little more standardized across various browsers and systems. We can style input fields by simply targeting it with an “id,†“class†or plain old “input,†like so:
input {
border: 2px solid #888;
padding: 4px;
font-size: 1em;
background-color: #F8F8F8;
}
What’s more interesting is also being able to style the input field when it’s in focus; that is, the state it’s in when it has been clicked. To do this, we need to attach a “:focus†after the “input†property:
input:focus {
border-color: #000;
background-color: #FFFE9D;
}
If you’re using custom backgrounds to style your input field, they may clash with some browsers and operating systems’ default focus styles. For example, here’s a screenshot of a custom-styled form clashing with the default blue OS X glow effect:
In such cases, you could also use the “input:focus†property to remove the default styling. The default blue glow in the screenshot above can be removed by disabling the “outline†property:
input:focus {
outline: none;
}
The blue glow effect will now be gone:
Obviously you would only want to remove the outline if you’re replacing it with your own styling, so that you don’t negatively affect the accessibility and usability of your forms.
9. Hover controls
Some Web applications have extra utility controls, such as edit and delete buttons, that don’t necessarily have to be shown beside every item at all times. They can be hidden to simplify the interface and focus visitors’ attention on the main controls and content. For example, these hover controls are used in Twitter when you hover over messages:
These hover controls can be achieved with some simple CSS code, without any JavaScript. Simply style the <div> with the controls when its parent <div> is in a hover state. Here’s the code to hide and show the controls (using a <div> with the class “controls†inside a <div> with the class “messageâ€):
.message .controls { display: none; }
.message:hover .controls { display: block; }
When you hover over the “message†<div>, the “controls†<div> inside it will appear, along with all of its content, giving you the same functionality as shown in the Twitter screenshot above.
There may be an issue with accessibility because screen readers may not be able to read the hidden <div>. There are plenty of other ways to hide the inner <div>, such as offsetting it with a negative margin that takes it off the page (e.g. “left-margin: -9999pxâ€), coloring its text the same color as the background or simply placing another <div> on top of it.
This technique should of course be used with restraint because you don’t want to hide your important controls; but if used correctly, it can be useful for cleaning up your interface by removing those extra utility links that you don’t want to show up at all times.
Note that this doesn’t work in IE6, so you’ll need to override the hiding property in your IE6-specific style sheet or, if you don’t have one, simply use the following IE6-specific code inside the <head> section of your code:
<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<style type="text/css" media="screen">
.message .controls { display: block; }
</style>
<![endif]-->
10. Verbs in labels
You can make options dialogs much more usable by thinking through the labels you use on buttons and links. If an error or message pops up and the options are “Yes,†“No†and “Cancel,†you have to read the whole message to be able to answer. Seems normal, right?
But we can actually speed things up by using verbs in the labels. So, if instead of “Yes,†“No†and “Cancel,†we have “Save,†“Don’t Save†and “Cancel†buttons, you wouldn’t even need to read the message to understand what the options are and which action to perform. All the information is contained in the button labels.
Using verbs in labels on buttons and links makes the options dialogs more usable because the labels contain all of the information the user needs to be able to make a decision.
To Conclude
Hopefully, you’ve found a few new techniques that will be useful in your work. As always, using them effectively comes down to restraint and thoughtful implementation. For example, controls that appear on hover may clean up your interface, but they will also increase the learning curve because people may not notice these controls at first. But showing all controls at all times may not be the best strategy either because users would need to scan more things to find what they’re looking for.
Striking the right balance between what you show and what you hide is a delicate art and is completely in your hands as the designer. Don’t use a technique just because it exists: use it if it makes sense in your context.
About the author
Dmitry Fadeyev is the founder of the Usability Post blog, where you can read his thoughts on good design and usability.
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View original post found on Smashing Magazine Feed authored by Dmitry Fadeyev
November 25th, 2008 — ui
by Dmitry Fadeyev
Your website represents your brand. New visitors will form a first impression of your service or product within seconds of arriving at your website, and the visuals, layout and aesthetic will play a large role in shaping that impression. Sure, your website may be very usable and have great content, but it’s the aesthetic that will evoke feeling, and it’s the aesthetic that will be used to judge the quality of your website in those first few seconds before the visitor has had time to browse around.
Use this to your advantage and fashion a unique style that will set your website apart from the rest — a style that will impress and delight your users.
Throughout history, great artists always found new ways to express themselves and create new techniques to set their work apart from the rest. Think about the styles of Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Jackson Pollock. Think about the different movements of art, from Impressionism and Expressionism to Surrealism and Minimalism. These styles couldn’t be more different from each other — and that’s the point. The artists’ names live on because their art is unique.
Do you want to simply follow the latest design trends and create a website that works well but looks just like many other websites out there? Following trends won’t set you apart from the rest; it won’t help your work make a strong impression. To make something memorable, you’ll need an element of creativity and novelty.
Unlike certain other forms of art, such as painting and sculpture, Web design is very limited in its expression because more often than not your website has to serve a very specific function and achieve certain goals. Successful designs are influenced and driven by those goals. There is, however, still room to develop your own unique style and aesthetic. Doing so will help you stand out from the competition and allow you to develop a strong identity.
Web design isn’t art
Having said all that, Web design isn’t art. Art is self-expression that is meant to be enjoyed and appreciated on its own. Design is communication; and, more specifically, Web design is an interface for content. Sure, there are websites out there that are purely art, but the large majority of them perform a certain function or deliver information. The website acts as the interface between the user and that function or information. This means it not only has to look nice, it actually has to do its job well, too. Indeed, in most cases, function should come before form.
I believe I can say that websites today are much better than they were 10 years ago. What do I mean by “better� I mean to say that Web designers have learned from their mistakes over the years and have picked all the low-hanging fruit of usability. Websites today are more usable and more user-friendly because we have greater experience in and increased knowledge of how to build websites that work and interfaces that are easy to figure out.
Yet, I cannot say that art today is “better†than it was ten or a hundred or a thousand years ago. Impressionism isn’t “better†than Realism. Expressionism isn’t “better†than Minimalism. They’re just different.
Web design as architecture
While Web design incorporates an aspect of art, it also incorporates function. In this way, I think it actually has a lot of similarities to architecture, for which you need a healthy dose of both style and function.
The world’s earliest treatise on architecture, “De architectura,†written by Vitruvius in around 25 BC, outlined three principles that all good construction should fulfill: firmitatis, utilittis and venustatis: durability, utility and beauty. I believe that today these three principles apply to Web design as well.
Your work should be durable in that it should scale well — or handle a lot of traffic — which is ensured by having code that is clean and optimized, as well as a means of making future modifications and updates with ease. It should fulfill the goals and function of the website, whether they be to advertise a product, sell goods, show off a portfolio or perhaps display articles from a blog. Finally, it should look good; it should have its own look and feel. We need to make the Web browsing experience enjoyable for our visitors by crafting a pleasing aesthetic.
Over centuries, architects and engineers have figured out better ways to construct buildings, to make them stronger and larger. These advances in function are similar to advances we’ve seen in Web design. We’ve figured out better ways to make registration forms, navigation menus that are easier to use, layouts that are simpler to figure out; generally speaking, we have greatly improved the usability of our websites. This is because we’ve had years to look at how people use the Web and to fix the usability problems that pop up most of the time. We see what works best and implement those things in new websites that we build.
Venustatis
But let’s not forget Vitruvius’ third principle of beauty. In architecture we see different waves of style. Different centuries bring different looks and feels to buildings. Houses are designed to be lived in, but life would be really dull if they all looked the same and focused only on function.
The design of the Opera House in Sydney is so distinct that it’s more than just a building — it’s an iconic city landmark.
In Web design we have very similar waves. Most notable is the Web 2.0 style, in which we had things like glossy buttons, mirrored floors, starbursts and so on; it even inspired various Web 2.0-style logo and website generators, because the style was so formulaic in nature.
New trends like this appear, and some get picked up and quickly adapted across the Web. Does your current website design follow a trend? Perhaps it is setting one? If you copy other trends, then your website will be just that, a copy, but if you can go the extra mile and create a unique look that differentiates your website, then your website will be memorable. Of course, being different isn’t the only thing you’ll need. The unique style and layout must also be attractive and must accomplish its goals.
Fresh inspiration
So how do you go about creating something different? Where do you find inspiration to create something unique? When Cordell Ratzlaff and his team were designing the new interface for the Mac OS X operating system, they found their ideas in the most unusual places.
Cordell saw a great opportunity to change to an appearance that was fresh and fun, in contrast to the existing state of the art. He decided to change from gloomy, square, and bevelled, to light, fun, and colorful, with a very fluid expression. He asked, What’s the opposite of a computer interface? He came up with things like candy, liquor, and liquids, to inspire a new visual design of the interface. The designers collected magazine ads for liquor, with delicious looking liquids in glasses with ice cubes, sparkling with reflections and highlights.
Bill Moggridge, Designing Interactions
When working on your new website or Web application interface, don’t simply look at what everybody else is doing. If you look inward to your own industry and similar websites, you will no doubt find a lot of likeness. This is because many of these websites borrow from each other, and when new websites launch, they borrow from them in turn. What we have is a monotonous experience in which you are only looking inward, blind to the world of possibilities outside.
Take a lesson from Cordell Ratzlaff and seek inspiration from new sources. Look at nature, look at real world objects, look at the things that symbolize and evoke the kinds of emotions and feelings you really want to elicit with your design and aesthetic. Cordell looked at things like ice cubes in liquor, which inspired him to create the liquid Aqua interface for Mac OS X. The glossy gel buttons and other user interface elements in Aqua have since inspired many Web designers in the rise of Web 2.0 and all of the glossy and shiny visuals it brought.
Let’s take a look at a few trendsetters, websites that break the mold and feature successful designs that get picked up and adapted by others.
Leaders and Followers
Twitter, the popular micro-blogging platform, has created a unique flat and colorful look that features illustrations of clouds and birds (and whales). The bright, cartoony feel is accompanied by an elegant and simple layout.
Yammer, a recently launched “Twitter for businesses†application, takes on a similar appearance and an almost identical layout. The cartoony feel is gone, but the shape and feel remain very similar, due to the iconic Twitter layout.
Facebook, the social networking heavyweight, has won its audience partly because of the uncluttered, minimalist design that puts the content right in the front seat. The clean layout is accompanied by a simple blue and gray color palette.
Social Median, a social news website, features the familiar minimalist look and feel of Facebook, together with a similar color palette and layout.
Highrise, a CRM application, features a very powerful landing page. On one page, visitors can see a description of the app, an overview of several features, a video tour as well as a bunch of links inviting them to explore. The typography and colors work to focus the visitor’s attention on the most important things.
Presently, another internal communication tool for businesses, features a landing page that is very close in its composition to that of Highrise, or indeed that of any other 37signals app. This powerful layout is now used by a lot of Web start-ups.
Apple’s website incorporates the same aesthetic as that of its product interfaces, and indeed its entire product line. Over the last few years, it has transitioned from the watery Aqua style to smooth aluminum gradients, light-gray shades and rounded corners.
Newspond, a news aggregator, features a different layout than that of Apple’s own website, but the aesthetic is strikingly similar. There are many other websites today that use very similar styles that are inspired by Apple’s industrial designs and interfaces.
Basecamp, one of the most popular Web project management applications, from 37signals, has pioneered this simple and effective layout that you can find in a lot of other Web apps today. Everything is clear and structured, with a minimal use of images to speed up downloading time.
Blinksale, an invoicing Web application, is one among many to borrow the popular design and structure of the 37signals website.
SimpleBits, Dan Cederholm’s design company, uses his signature minimalist layout and typography. Dan takes out everything that doesn’t absolutely need to be there, tweaks white space to pixel perfection and focuses on really polishing the little details. The result is beautiful minimalism.
The Twiek blog design looks like it’s heavily inspired by SimpleBits.
Conclusion
If you want to craft an iconic website that stands out from the competition, you need to come up with a unique and novel aesthetic. You need to design a look and feel that’s different — something that doesn’t look like all of the other websites in your industry. Getting inspired by great work and beautiful things is a good thing, but you have to make sure you don’t fall into the trap of mimicking other designs too closely, or else your website could end up looking like a cheap copy.
Seek inspiration from outside your industry. Focus on the emotions you want to evoke and the character you want to give your website, rather than on what everybody else is doing. Design a layout unique to your website or application by focusing on its goals and objectives rather than on what other people have done.
While Web design isn’t art, and while there are limits to how much you can express yourself and how many visuals you can use, there is still plenty of room for a unique style. Just as Vincent van Gogh’s post-Impressionism style and Pablo Picasso’s unique art set them apart from the rest, breaking the mold will give your website a powerful and memorable identity that others will want to mimic.
Don’t follow trends: set them.
About the author
Dmitry Fadeyev is the founder of the Usability Post blog, where you can read his thoughts on good design and usability. (al)
