Designing for your audience
The upmost importance we see here at viva when creating websites for our clients is designing for the target audience of the client’s website. There are many different categories you could place a website design in, and we’ll go into more detail in those below.
Different people are impressed by different things. The young avid designer will be impressed by a lot of them, but your avid 40 year old business man that is likely to view your clients website will probably not be impressed by a minimal design, or some quirky new way of navigating a site in flash.
Personally I have seen flash websites created that take me 5minutes to figure out how to navigate, I like a challenge and all that, but I would consider myself to be an internet guru and if it takes me 5minutes to figure out how to use, how long is it going to take your average person before they get bored and leave.
The internet user in this day and age is restless, they rely on web pages that load instantly, and if they don’t what happens? They click the link again a few times, which ironically takes them back to the beginning of loading the page, and if it doesn’t load quicker that time, they close that tab and move on. This is not a talk about getting better hosting services but more to set the scene of who we are dealing with when designing websites for different audiences.
Minimal design
Minimal design has been extremely apparent over the past three years in the design field, and has brought a lot too website designers worldwide. 10 years ago when I started out designing web pages you would have never imagined somebody could create a website in black and white with a 48pt typeface and get great recognition for it.
I love minimal designs that work. I really do enjoy seeing new minimalist designs and critiquing every pixel of them, but how would the average 40 year old business man, who is probably still using Internet Explorer 6 view minimal design? Well for a start he would probably say something like this
“There’s no pictures, why is it in black and white, is my laptop screen broken again? Gosh! “
Here are a few of my favourite minimal designs that accomplish minimalism well, but at the same time look really good for all audiences.
- http://rockablepress.com/
- http://www.distrop.com/
- http://selfconclusion.co.uk/
- http://ycnonline.com/
- http://www.super-script.com/
User experience vs. Creativity.
UX is something that should be key in every design that is produced. Looking good is also something that should be common place. So where does the balance lie? Does there have to be a balance between looking good and ease of use?
I would say that is what makes us designers. We are creative problem solvers.
The Problem: Balancing information, ease of use and looking good into one package.
The Answer: Creative, thoughtful and inspiring designs.
There should be no compromise of looks and functionality, the only thing we should be balancing is the flow of information. Too much information over complicates things and makes things look pretty, too little information doesn’t answer peoples questions. It’s a hard mix to get these things perfect, especially on news websites (http://www.forbes.com/) but that is the problem and we are here to answer it.
Flash
Flash has the potential to be brilliant, but also in many cases can be horrific. We at viva try to stay away from building full flash websites as much as possible because it can have so many problems, we prefer using xhtml & css to make websites look beautiful and if there is a need for animation, jQuery does a fantastic job at that while not compromising the accessibility of our websites.
As you can tell from our own website that you’re reading on right now, we use flash text replacement to bring the beautiful Helvetica Neue font into place, but that’s about it.
Flash animations tend to be loved by those who have no idea about web design or development, most of your clients will probably ask for it at some point, although we at viva have got it down to a fine tee in helping them understand why we don’t like to use it. With Google now able to index flash content we will probably see a lot more astonishing things come out of flash in the near future and I look forward to that also.
Conclusion
Design for your audience, or your clients audience is a very important thing, not designing something that you would love to showcase in your portfolio, but creating something that your client and his target audience will love is the key to great words spreading about your business. Your peers will also have respect for your work when you take these things on board.
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