Week 8 - Design and Infrastructure - “And those values — uhh — being universal, ought to be applied everywhere.”
This week’s reading contained many excellent considerations in designing websites. The more open nature of website design and ownership allows users to create a vast array of styles, but many tend towards terrible, difficult to navigate, ugly to look at sites, but following these guidelines allows users to reap the benefits of good design without having to research every style for themselves.
I was interested by Cohen and Rosenzweig’s dispute of the idea of that web surfers have short attention spans that should be catered to. At some points they obviously argue that you need to make your website fit the audience, but on this point they adamantly claim that this dumbing down is unnecessary as we underestimate surfers. I fully agree. I think this harkens back to our discussion of PowerPoint in various ways. Both have the tendency to dumb down information to an extent that readers/users are no longer gaining significant benefit from the website. Reading is a good skill and it should be maintained on websites. People can read, and will, if the writing is good.
I think Cohen and Rosenzweig make some great points, but at some level they’re basically saying don’t make a crappy website. We all know a crappy website when we see one, but somehow we still create crappy websites and think they’re cool. Part of this surely comes from simply having too many options - when you can choose from 53 bajillion colors why in the heck would you choose black for your text color? Because it’s better that way. Basically, I think we just need to visit our own website as if we’ve never seen it before and think about how it comes across. It’s very similar to how some people suggest reading your papers outloud when proofreading them. In our minds we skim over a lot of mistakes, etc, but when we slow down and let the text or website speak for itself we can start to see it’s shortcomings more clearly.
In terms of how to navigate sites, fortunately streetprint will solve some of these problems for me on my site. However, it’s good for me to think about how people want to navigate the site and what would be most helpful for users. This requires running through a variety of user types/scenarios and seeing how different people might navigate the site differently. This of course will inform the types of search categories that are available, how articles/issues/pages are divided up for most simple browsing, and a variety of other navigation information.