20 WHY: Designing for the Medium: Web Physics

Mars and Venus

Adept web designers take care to follow some familiar contextual conventions while breaking or reinventing others. On one site you might use CSS to turn off link underlining; on another, you preserve link underlining because the site is intended for neophyte users who need to be led by the hand. One site requires idiot-proof icons with text labels; another cries out for subtle, dynamic navigational menus. Usability People lecture sternly about the “sins” of web design, but designers don’t sin—they make decisions. A good web designer may break as many rules as she follows. Visitors determine whether the site succeeds as a piece of communication or is merely a failed, cryptic experiment. This book explores issues of navigation and interface in Chapter 3, “Where Am I? Navigation & Interface.” You’ll be exploring them for the rest of your career.

That we devote an entire chapter to navigation and interface should be indication enough that graphic design alone does not equal web design— a point we’ll restate several times in case some of you haven’t had your coffee yet. Choosing and setting type, crafting pretty buttons, and developing a grid are all well and good but not good enough. Above all, web designers are the architects of user experience.

You might feel that your training and experience have not prepared you to build such architecture, but you’ll soon see that it’s the web equivalent of what a designer always does: guide viewers toward an understanding.

WEB PHYSICS: ACTION AND INTERACTION

Design for the Web is different. It’s different because web pages don’t just sit there; they do things. More importantly, they allow visitors to do things. Magazine pages may be beautiful (or not) but the reader’s interactivity consists of reading the page (or not), dog-earing it (or not), and rereading it (or not). At most, the reader might cut it out and mail it to a friend. Strictly speaking, none of this can truly be called interactivity. Beautiful magazine layouts do not change in response to the viewer’s actions. Newspaper ads do not sprout additional body copy if the reader shows genuine interest. The Web invites depth of exploration in ways traditional media cannot. For a designer, the creative possibilities are tantalizing and practically limitless.

Taking Your Talent to the Web

21

On the Web, linear motion gives way to user emotion. Site visitors link randomly as they choose. Set up as many careful hierarchies and navigational cues as you want; visitors will still do what they like on most sites. Not only may visitors move up, down, and sideways, they also can bookmark any page they fancy; download it to their hard drives; save the images from it; and even study the HTML markup with which it was produced.

Readers can order books on the Web by typing in HTML form fields supported by scripts written in Perl, Java, or other programming languages (www.amazon.com). They can post their opinions to message boards (www.metafilter.com). If the designer has given them the option, they may change the background colors to suit their mood (www.camworld.com). On fancy Dynamic HTML (DHTML) sites, they can drag images from place to place (www.dhtml-guis.com/game/). On fancier ones, they can do much more (www.assembler.org). On a corporate intranet site, employees may spend hours updating a group calendar or adding phone numbers to a contact database. (Anything to avoid working.)

Figure 2.3

Non-commercial interactivity: Assembler.org was created with DHTML (here it is done well). As of this writing, the site was optimized for Netscape and Microsoft’s 4.0 browsers, which rely on proprietary coding techniques. Thus the site’s marvels would be invisible to users of recent browsers that avoid proprietary, old-school DHTML. By the time you buy this book, the site should function well in standards-compliant browsers such as Netscape 6 (www.assembler.org).

22 WHY: Designing for the Medium: Web Physics

Figure 2.4

Commercial interactivity: Barnes & Noble, a functional and attractive shopping site. Successful e-commerce sites work in as many browsers as possible and add value to the commercial transaction by providing content and artificially intelligent “shopping tips.” Though Barnes & Noble has a real-world heritage, Amazon.com dominates the online market because Amazon came first. When web brands are effective, users can be incredibly loyal (www.bn.com).

There is obvious commercial value to commercial interactivity; novelty or

“proof of concept” value to dynamic artwork and games; branding value to interactive multimedia (www.barneys.com); and hidden value to still other types of interactivity. (Changing the background color may seem trivial to you or me, but it could be vitally important for a color-blind web user.) Overall, interactivity is a defining characteristic of the Web and thus of web design. Lesbian poetry and physics papers did not drive the rapid expansion of the medium. Commerce did that, and commerce depends on interactivity: the visitor clicks, the sale is made.

No offense to the lesbian poetry sites. In fact, no offense to the hundreds of thousands of noncommercial sites that bring richness, depth, and meaning to the Web. Without these noncommercial sites, the medium would be nothing more than a dialup variation on the infomercial. But without all the commercial sites, the Web’s infrastructure, services, and rate of adoption might never have grown so quickly.

At least, that’s what the marketers tell us. Consider this another Mars/Venus variation for your pleasure. The Internet grew in popularity for at least two years before any commercial sites were allowed on the Net,