Face Value: Good Interface Design is Difficult but Worth the Effort

by Karen Heyman

As Tom Lehrer once put it, "The reason most folk songs are so awful is they were written by 'the people'." Desktop publishing briefly had its giddy tools-for-the-masses phase when every creator of a PTA newsletter was supposed to be the equivalent of Milton Glaser. Design is like code: done right it's elegant and unobtrusive; done wrong, it's misery-making. Worse, just like buggy code, that misery may be subtle, forcing the user to think, "What am I doing wrong?" instead of, "Why didn't they do this, instead of that?" Similarly, just like code, any 14-year-old can do it, but aside from the occasional genius it still makes more sense to work with professionals. As Chris Kitze, president of Point Communications puts it, "Since you have no 'cost of goods', spend some of that money on a great designer. All you're selling is electrons, and you'd better make those electrons look good."

Perhaps the best caveat about designing for the Web comes from Marc Andreessen: "Blink was a joke." It's a succinct summation of many professional designers' words of advice: just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should. Appreciating that Web design do's-and-don'ts lists are proliferating like Internet guides and free AOL disks, we nevertheless hope the following guidelines will be a useful summary of both basic and advanced considerations.

Netscape isn't the only browser out there. Remember that the corollary to "this page optimized for viewing with Netscape" is "without Netscape, our design stinks." There's already a conspiracy theory developing that the commercial services' browsers won't implement certain HTML tags so that the Web won't look as good as the services' own proprietary interfaces. Whether you buy that one or not, it would be better to make more than one version of your site--one with backgrounds, centering, and whatever else Mozilla's up to this week, and a simpler version for a more diverse viewing audience. Nick Rothenberg, Principal of W-3 Design, suggests that high-end clients might be sold on the idea of proprietary browser detection software. With seemingly as many browsers as flavors of Unix, it may be impossible to convince clients that they should pay to have sites customized for everything out there. But for the sake of clients looking as good as possible, unfortunately at the present time, they'll have to have at least two versions in order to be seen to absolutely best advantage. Not everybody has a T3 connection. Of course, not everybody's stuck on a 14.4 modem either. There is only one prime directive: you are designing for your client, and you must first determine what hardware that ultimate end user is running. The site you're designing might be accessed over a corporate LAN connected to a T3. But if it's information that a sales force will be accessing over wireless modems--then for God's sake, keep it fast.

An important corollary: Test by time, not by size: a 30K GIF from an overloaded consumer site may download more slowly than a 100K GIF from a rarely accessed corporate server. Nathan Shedroff, creative director of vivid, and one of the co-authors of Multimedia Demystified (Random House Electronic Publishing, 1994), warns that file overhead can be different on different machines. In addition, some browsers may download only image data, and others may download both image data and overhead. For all those reasons, trust time in a real-world test, not by file size alone.

Further, a user's willingness to wait may be affected by when they're waiting. Too long a wait for a home page, and the user may lose patience and leave before the page is even completely downloaded. But once inside a site, you may be able to use long download times as a tool to create suspense, suggests John Gratting, project architect of COW, an award-winning design studio in Santa Monica, California. Not everybody has an Onyx. We love SGI as much as anybody, but don't believe the hype when you hear users can run VRML on 486s with 14.4 modems. Technically, yeah it's true, but technically you can drive from L.A. to N.Y. by moped. There are few truly cross-platform file formats. Always indicate file size and format type for every link. Nothing's more frustrating for your users than long waits for something they can't see/hear/play anyway. The Web has a global audience. Remember that citizens of other countries and other cultures will be reading your page. Someone from another country who visits may find the "Americanness" of the site charming--unless, it's intended for a more universal audience, then what was charmingly specific will seem clueless and boorish. On the other hand, if your page is intended to be read primarily by Americans, using designations like, "US$50." will only seem pretentious, especially if, like Wired magazine, you then neglect to include metric equivalents for weights and measures.

Most importantly, if your market requires you to translate the text of your page into other languages, do usability testing in that country as well--the meaning of icons and the navigation route may be interpreted quite differently. Multimedia interface specialist Dr. Jill Strawbridge cautions that symbology and colors may not translate--not every culture assumes that red means stop and green means go. And that cute little teddy bear icon might be read as "info on wild animals" rather than "stuff for kids."

Search engines add great value. Not everybody has the time or patience to follow a complicated navigation scheme, no matter how good it is. If it's at all feasible, invest the time and effort to put a search engine on your site. Mention it prominently on the home page, and then make sure to include a link to it on every subsequent page. Search engines still beat index pages by a long shot for helping users navigate your information, for the simple reason that not everybody organizes information in the same way. Doubt that? When was the last time you found the exact topic you wanted in a software program's online help program?

Further Reading

There's a wealth of pointers on good interface design in a number of online Web tutorials. Two that are rapidly gaining a reputation as definitive primers are the Yale Center for Advanced Instructional Media's WWW style manual, and Sun Microsystems' guide to interface design. In addition, Peter R. Nolan, principal consultant with Vertical Research, Inc. has put up an excellent page of HCI resources. And to help keep your enthusiasm for Web design in proper perspective, be sure to visit the Enhanced for Netscape Hall of Shame.

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