I am an amateur website designer. There are a lot of professionals who have in-depth knowledge about User interface and interaction, but every now and then I do like to take a look into design, simply because any web application is what the user can see. Not the data structures used, not the fancy algorithms attached to core functionality. Just what the users can see (and probably how fast they can see it).
In general, I find that website designs can be divided into three broad categories:
Designed websites
Nothing much to talk here. We all know designed websites. There’s a banner, a good stylesheet, possibly a menu with a roll-out animation which doesn’t work anywhere except in IE6, and so on… you get the idea. The craze nowadays is to use glassy effects and some reflection to show “we’re so web 2.0″, not realizing that Web 2.0 was never associated with images. Not just on major icons but everywhere including menu buttons, command buttons, external links. Even favicons are not spared.
But let me rant about “Web 2.0 images” some other time. Coming back to the point, designed websites form the major chunk of what we see on the web. Corporate Information sites, dotcoms for companies highlighting their activities, all social networking sites, most portals, microsoft.com, even this blog: All fit in this category.
Non-designed websites
Any personal website created without a stylesheet, good coloring or imagery falls into this category. But its not just personal pages. Sites like Craigslist and some dev mailing list pages fall in this range as well. The default font in the browser (mostly the very inappropriate “Times New Roman”, if on Windows), white background, the occasional spurt of color (full saturation red or blue) to highlight an important point, it is all very ugly, but still it “works”. The information can be read, and it ends at that. These sites mostly operate on two norms:
- Content is King
- I am individual, attempting to post this page in spite of not being very good at this stuff
At the first glance, it seems the beauty of the site (or lack thereof) will most probably lead to the content being treated as junk. After all, looks matter a lot more than these guys think. But this thought doesn’t last long.
I don’t know whether it was Linux mailing lists or TLDP Howtos, but after a while, non-designed pages started to look a lot more sincere than pages in designed websites. The trust factor is possibly explained by the fact that these pages are mostly by “community” and non-profit orgs, as against designed websites which are owned by someone who had the money to pay for a good design (with 3D bulky images, it cost a lot back then), and are mostly planning to earn that back some way. Mostly, the words “evil money-making megacorps” come to mind.
Undesigned websites
I’d love to write a few pages on this, but Alex Bainbridge wrote about it perfectly way back in 2007. I’ll just quote him.
There has been some chatter about the concept of “undesign”. I struggled to find a definition of it that I could publish so I am going to come up with my own:
I now define undesign as a web design that has the following characteristics:
- Copy / text is the user interface – The words, the size of text, the length of the sentence, the paragraph breaks – all of this forms the user interface (rather than creating containers with graphics – and placing text / copy inside those containers)
- Links are text based – not images
- There are no gratuitous user interface elements - I define gratuitous as those that either don’t provide information (for example stars on a star rating) nor assist with usability (for example lines between sections – acting as dividers).
- Usability is prioritised over visual branding - the design is engineered to be used – not admired like a piece of static art.
So what you end up with is a mainly text website. It sounds dull but it isn’t.
Some examples of undesign
- 37signals – Homepage and corporate website. Very clearly the text copy is the user interface
- Google – search and search results
- Amazon – product page – there are very few visual elements on the page except for product images. Apart from that it is mainly text. Some graphics are used to divide sections – but these are kept to a minimum.
- ClearTrip- A travel website example. ClearTrip offer flight bookings for flights within India. The hint towards their design mindset comes from their name!
The cleartrip homepage. See how there is very little imagery. This is travel undesign. Go and take a look at one of their flight results pages as well. Very clean. (While you are there – go one step further – the accordian checkout is interesting)
The idea of undesigned sites has gained a lot of strength recently and portals like cleartrip and 37signals are sure helping the process. I hope this theme catches on as we move forward.