Design vs. UX: It’s the Wrong Argument: I

Let’s face it—we’ve been having this debate since the Web became the Web as we know it, way back when Nirvana was a cultural force. Graphic designers and creative types want Web sites to look beautiful (or striking or whatever). Web programmers and user experience folks want Web sites to be functional, content-driven things. The “look” is secondary to what kind of experience the site provides users.

We’ve been having this argument for almost two decades, and though it made sense to debate it back when most sites were just java jumble, it doesn’t anymore. We can’t apply this either-or thinking to the—for want of a better term—“graphic” look of a Web site. The Web is not an either/or medium—it’s much more complex, and nuance is often as important as strategy when it comes to building an effective Web site.

The thing is in a content-driven environment, the look is as important as the functionality because they serve the same purpose—to enhance user experience. Web design is not just slapping a bunch of colors and a pretty face on a Web site. Usability is not a hard, cold science—user experience designers often make decisions about content and navigation choices that are creative.

When talking about Web design, we need to get away from thinking that design and functionality are two separate categories. We should start by outlawing the word “skinning”—it’s a superficial version of what Web design needs to accomplish. People don’t go to Web sites because of pretty colors—on the other hand, people don’t spend much time on ugly sites. “Web design” is a holistic phrase made up of several components: visual, practical, user experience, graphic appeal. It’s a process that includes decisions on fonts, colors, and imagery as well as architecture, navigation, and wire framing. What the graphic or visual end of Web design can do is create an aesthetic environment for the user experience to thrive in. Sure, there’s a level of subjectivity in this—your preferred aesthetically pleasing user experience will probably differ from mine. But there’s no question that aesthetic considerations help shape that experience as much as usability considerations.

Decisions about the use of positive and negative space, for example, will effect how well users see links and other key content. Color plays an important role in influencing a user’s conscious and subconscious perception of his or her experience. And imagery helps extend the imaginative framework of the user’s path through a site. As simple as the Nike site seems, there’s a strong look at work. The same is true of Boston University’s recently redesigned site. Positive and negative space is very much at work here—the photographs frame the visual hierarchy both in placement and in style. Even something as minute as the use of green in the word “video” on the largest photograph has both an aesthetic and user-based, practical impact.

So how do we get to the point where design in the graphic sense and user experience come together? It starts in the development process. Too often, visual design enters that process late and plays second cousin to user considerations. There’s a good reason for this—creating the look of a site before the navigation and wireframes are nailed down leads to a site that won’t work. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t start talking about the look much earlier on, thinking in images. In his book Change by Design—a book we should all be reading—Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, consistently ranked as one of the ten most innovative companies in the world, talks about design thinking as opposed to design process. Design thinking is about more than just style, it’s a way of merging the rational with the intuitive, the analytical with the inspirational:

“Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as functionality…”

To benefit from this approach, we need a Web development process that is iterative, not lockstep, one that mirrors the creative process of vision and revision. In this process, the visual side of Web design sits in the driver’s seat, right next to usability.

I’m going to continue this in a future post, but for now, how are you incorporating the visual with the analytical in your Web development process?

Photo by procsilas