Joey Primiani | Pioneering the New Internet Revolution

KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid.

A law that I abide by in my everyday life, including web standards. I have been learning (sometimes the hard way) the balance between good ethics in web design and user navigation.

When I am in my creativity and brainstorm mode, sometimes I realize some web designers (including myself at times) reinvent the wheel when it comes to the ease of use to the end user.

Ajax and scriptaculous provide fun and powerful scripts that enhance a pages simplicity, but if used incorrectly the end user can easily get frustrated and leave. This can make or break a internet ecommerce business model.

There in lies the battle between developers and designers. Two different mindsets. The designer, usually visualizes the way the site will encapsulate the features, how it would be laid out, and visualizes the tree of links. The developer, makes the features happen, but often does not know what is the best to represent visually to the end user. Just because a design looks aesthetically better, doesn’t always make it simpler.

For example, I have done work in the past with an online lapel pin company that creates sports trading pins and corporate identity promotional items (aka schwag).

Click heatmap in a 24 hour period using CrazyEgg.

On the left you see the first web page design, showcasing the product and making the links to the objects visually appealing and pretty. On the right, a simple wordpress SEO optimized theme with easy left hand navigation.

FIGHT – Which one wins?!

Well, pretty obvious. Overnight, when we switched from #1 to #2, we saw a dramatic increase in sales.

Major flaws include:

1) Lack of navigation on the top half of page. Also, navigation must be clear and consistent from page to page. It seems like a no brainer, but many designers ignore this key fact.

2) First one had many false clicks; users were not clicking on correct links. As the second, people had a much better understanding of where and where not to click.

3) The first had too many unnecessarily large elements (icons and images) and wasted space making it somewhat complicated for navigation.

As a designer, I learned a lot that day… I thought that the first one would be more appealing to have the main product showcased and representing a visual for each of the categories in such a way. In some sense it is, but it doesn’t matter, it all comes down to usability and the end user, Google’s #1 Philosophy.

Also, both developers and designers should build their site around the intended target audience before pencil hits paper. The audience for this site is mostly middle age moms, coaches and business employees. If it were more of a tech crowd, it often gives a little more flexibility for the designer to push the boundaries of age old web customs with navigation, page elements, etc.

Bust most importantly, it is about finding the balance between creative designing and user comfort. If you want to make sure that a website can be easily accessed and navigated, don’t be afraid to beta test someone in real life and ask what they think. The results might shock you, since no two people surf the internet the same way. There is no tool that measures this except user input and the powers of trial and error.

Photos Curtsy of Planet Argon