Design: Too Important for Just Designers

Posted on July 14, 2008 by Asi Erenberg

The look of your site is a lot more than looks

We naturally want a website selling our goods or service to look good. That’s a no-brainer.

But striking the right balance between aesthetic attractiveness and the best kind of functionality doesn’t come easy. But it’s really important.

It’s surprising how often clients give their website designers a basic brief, and then leave matters to the “creativity” of the designer to produce a good site according to his or her own lights. Then the clients are surprised that the working results, in terms of customer behavior (and that of course means BUYING - not just visiting) turn out to be disappointing.
Design User-Path
We - by contrast - put a lot of emphasis on our clients’ purpose and intention, over and above design. Not that design isn’t important - of course it is, and we deliberately track in great detail where, and what order, the human eyeball is drawn to visual elements on any given web page - but functionality always must come first. “What’s to be achieved here?” is the constant question. “What do we want the visitor to do, exactly?”

We experiment too, of course … tinkering with just where on the page a certain feature is placed … changing it … and then measuring the difference in visitors’ behavior.

In fact we have it down to a fine art now (or, you might prefer, science). And, though this might shock many designers who don’t share our outlook, when we’re preparing a site we draft out a kind of a wire-frame diagram, very detailed in its layout - and in its internal traffic-flow, as it were. We then hand that over to designers to make it attractive to the eye.

I don’t want to disrespect some very valuable skills of creativity … but you wouldn’t entrust the building of a house or an office-complex to a decorator, would you? We are performing the essential function of builders and engineers, with decorators contributing their own valuable role.

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