Experiences and Web Page Elements

One of the recent discussions in my geekroll of blogs and news sites has been Mark Hurst’s resurrection of “The Page Paradigm“. In his own words, this is the idea that:

On any given Web page, users will either 1) click something that appears to take them closer to the fulfillment of their goal, or 2) click the Back button on their Web browser.

Mark is a champion of the user’s experience, as evidenced by his site name “goodexperience.com“. He’s taking a “page” from The Experience Economy, which says that each person in the new economy demands a unique experience, personalized to their needs. Since web technology currently does not enable a different interface for each person (note to self: but can it?), the best thing we can do is get out of their way. That means get rid of the universal menu bars, stop forcing them to scroll past everything the designer wants them to see, let them deal with the site as they wish.

It demands radical simplicity in design, something which I see so rarely it’s shocking. I mean, that’s the easiest eay to create a webpage. It’s hard to make navigation bars, to design buttons and widgets and menus. I should know–my company pays me well to do it.

Yet the disturbing fact remains that some of the most successful and money-making websites are those universally deemed as “bad” designs. Slashdot is atrocious, eBay assaults the eyes, and Amazon is constantly blinking at you and features marketing-driven tabs. All of them have terrible, invalid, non-semantic code that gets in the way of changing styles and transforming formats. Through brute force and good content, they have succeeded. But is that all?

Jakob Nielsen has documented the fact that internet advertising doesn’t work. Users have become accustomed to its presence and even its placement in the page. They simply skip it subconsciously, finding the content hidden around the ads.

Do people react in a similar way to good-looking sites? Somehow, I could see someone thinking “This site looks too good–they must be trying to trick me into something”. In contrast, a bad site would be viewed as “Their product must be really great to succeed with that kind of site”.

Paul Scrivens recently added fuel to a fire started by Jason Fried of 37signals, asking if design really matters. Fried had questioned the recent CSS mania, saying that too much attention is paid to code, and not enough to helping users achieve their goals. Scrivens followed up by questioning the business value of style. My question is whether it’s actually counterproductive. Does good style actually make you less successful?

I don’t think so. People will still choose an aesthetically pleasing and harmonious design over one that sports unnatural colors and forms. Style also provides a chance to deliver that holy grail of experience design, a customized interface tailored to a user’s preferences. But we have submitted to feature creep for too long, and need to get back to basics.

Responses to Hurst’s “Page Paradigm” prompted him to write the following:

Anything that helps create a good experience is worthwhile. Anything else must be discarded. Job titles, methodologies, and breadcrumb links are good only to the degree that they help create a good experience for the customer.

My thoughts? I just don’t want to design any more widgets. I’m tired. And lazy. I want a site like Aaron Swartz, or, my all-time favorite, biggerhand (warning: “spicy” content). I mean, look at that thing. Awesome. Kottke has “undesign”, I’ll have “lazydesign”. It’s not easy–Jeffrey Veen has said that clients respond to his simple designs by saying “Why, I could have done that!” To which he replies, “So why didn’t you?”

And the less you force buttons and widgets and menus on your visitors, the most their experience is influenced by the content you’ve created. It’s time to stop imagining that people want to see every single part of your site at once, and time to let them make their own experience. Maybe this is different for ecommerce; but for my sites the experience is the message–show people a good time and they’ll be happy to spend a few seconds more to find something specific.