My first article is a brief summary of a helpful 5 step process for designing a website. It’s here.
I liked the article because it’s very concise guide that makes some great points without ranting on. In particular, you can tell it was written with a backbone of real world experience, as evident in its focus on client interactions and forming measurable goals for any design project.
The writing presents no wildly remarkable ideas. It offers something similar to the research-brainstorm-roughs-and-final approach we’ve already had a lot of exposure to, but there are a few hints which I think will be particularly useful in the future. Of these, I think the first paragraph was the most insightful. The advice to “reformulate the client goal in your own words, and present that to the client” in the very first step of the process makes complete sense, but seems like a step many designers (including myself) might overlook in their zeal to dive straight into brainstorming ideas; in other words, to get straight to the “fun stuff” without staying on track with the client’s notions of what needs to be done. This kind of simple but very relevant advice is what I took away from this excerpt.
The second article deals with the role of testing landing page alternatives until you reach an optimized and ideal design to drive visitors to register, buy, click, or whatever your hoping to make them do.
I think too often student designers focus too much on the purely aesthetic aspects of building a site (or in this article a landing page) without keeping a very basic premise in mind: test, test, test. I have had some exposure to this at my current job, where even now I make three to four alternatives for a prospective landing page and then choose a winner based on click-through results and registrations. It’s quite interesting to see this concept taken to a much higher level with the 1,000 possible design combinations used in this story.
It is revealing how this kind of thorough testing can dispel design “rules” that you often hear about. In fact, I have previously been told of the classic warning to avoid using flash on a landing page unless absolutely necessary, because it distracts a user’s eyeballs or makes things more complicated than needed. Pretty interesting to see that this is not entirely the case as seen in this writing.
February 3, 2009 at 10:56 pm |
I think usually web designers put too much focus on the look of the website, and ignoring usability. I like your approach, after all, websites are there to make someone money, and things like conversions need to be tested with multiple landing pages. I really think one of the more important things every web designer should have in mind are eye tracking studies. When you get familiar with those, it`s not that hard to figure out how to combine esthetics with usability.