Taking Your Talent to the Web

19

Mars and Venus, left and right brain, utility and artistry. On one side stands a set of Usability Commandments based on roughly a decade of trial and error and a heaping teaspoon of pseudo-science. On the other lies the indefinable essence of art and a horde of marketers who stand ready to exploit it.

Somewhere between these two extremes you will find the appropriate balance for each site. The ideal balance for most sites will not be found in the stone tablets of Mars or the sensual abandon of Venus. Rather, it will come from each project’s intended audience. Your visitors’ needs set the parameters; your taste, inspiration, and expertise do the rest.

That tension between structure and style, function and aesthetics, is key to understanding web design and web technology. Users have needs; technology sets limitations. The conflict will resurface throughout this book and your career—and it is only the beginning. Web design is different in fascinating ways. Following are a few key points of difference.

Where’s the Map?

Books, magazines, CDs, and videocassettes do not need to explain themselves. Most of us read from left to right and top to bottom; we turn the page. We insert the disc or tape and press Play. Websites are not so selfexplanatory. Consequently, web designers spend a great deal of effort creating contextual and navigational cues to guide readers, viewers, and

“users” through the site.

Visitors take their cues from non-web experiences. From a lifetime of newspaper reading, they know that headlines carry more weight than subheads and body copy. They intuitively grasp that right-pointing arrows mean “more” or “continue.” (This intuitive grasp is, of course, the result of previously absorbed social conventions. Red, green, and yellow buttons suggest traffic lights to an American web user; they may mean something different or nothing at all in Papua, New Guinea.) Web users also take their cues from other sites they’ve seen. Soon after figuring out how the modem works, users learn that underlined text is almost always a link, and they know that when the cursor changes shape they are hovering over an

“active” link or image.