The goals of web design Part 1

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The goals of web design

To understand how to create well designed websites, it is worth understanding the fundamentals of design. Good design creates experiences that makes people’s lives easier, and is also aesthetically pleasing. Here are some examples: a well-designed store makes it easy for customers to find products they are looking for, or maybe even products they never knew they wanted. Drivers can see well-designed road signs from a distance and the message of 

the sign can be immediately understood, even at a high rate of speed while driving. A well-designed chair is comfortable to sit in and also fits in with the style of the room.

In all these cases, the designer took time to plan the outcome using their skill and experience, as well as resources such as materials and available budget. 

Different disciplines require different 

design tools. The web designer is often required to organize information, give it meaning, and 

assemble it in a way that is visually attractive using available tools.

When designing for the web, there are some unique challenges compared to other disciplinesarising from the fact that web design is still in its infancy and is evolving rapidly. Even the definition of web design is evolving and difficult to define. Originally, web design meant 

designing pages for a web browser. While this is still true, you now need to consider the rapidly evolving nature of mobile devices, tablets, smart phones, and consumer electronics that access the web. Some people make the distinction between mobile design and web design, but this distinction is evaporating as mobile devices are evolving. For many web professionals, this rapid evolution of the medium is part of what makes it such an exciting field. 

Although the design of websites is an evolving field, designers do not need to reinvent the wheel. Web design’s closest relative is print design, and although the two are distinctly different it is worthwhile to compare and contrast them.

The difference between print design and web design

Print involves seeing; the web involves doing. Books, magazines, posters, newspapers, brochures, and advertisements all contain information, usually text and images, whose intent is to deliver some sort of message or content to a reader. More importantly, designers often 

try to build a call to action into their work that makes a customer believe there is some. 

action they should be taking as a result of the design.

Compare a print flyer for a shoe sale with its online counterpart. The call to action for the print flyer is, “Show up at the store this Saturday to buy these shoes at a discount.” The 

information regarding the sale might be enough to compel the customer to get in their car and go shoe shopping on Saturday, but the designer helps to present the information in a way that is well organized and gets noticed. Using color, type, and perhaps anillustration or image, the designer helps to convince the potential customer of the value of this sale.

In some sense, you could say that the print designer’s job is done when she sends the file off to the printer. If the customer shows up in the store, it becomes the salesperson’s job to 

complete the sale.

Now let’s examine the web designer who is largely responsible for leading the prospective customer through the entire process. If an interested customer comes to the shoe store’s 

website, perhaps there is a button that the user clicks to see the shoes that are on sale. The customer then needs some way to gather more data on the shoes; perhaps there is a table listing the available shoe sizes, colors, and brands. If the customer takes the leap and puts a shoe into the site’s shopping cart, this shopping process needs to be designed as well.

In both of these examples, the end result is hopefully the same for the shoe store’s owner: the customer buys the shoes. In both cases information is transferred from the store to the customer; however, in the case of the website, the designer is involved in all stages of the sale 

process. This is a crucial concept to understand: the web is an active medium and the term to describe this design process is user interaction design.

The web demands user interaction

The experience of a website is defi ned by the interaction the user has with it. For example, a user clicks on navigation or scrolls down to read a page.

Even the act of reading a book can be defined as user interaction. In the Western world, people read from left to right down a page, they turn pages, and scan page numbers and tables of contents in order to find a certain chapter or topic.

Coming back to the web, you don’t just have readers — you have users. Think of the verbs that describe what you do online: you search websites, watch the weather report, transfer money between accounts, book airline flights, and do many other things. The designer needs to think in these terms when designing pages, anticipating the user’s motivation for coming to the site.

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