The Pontiflex Blog

Don’t Let Great Concepts Ruin Your Website

June 2, 2010 at 4:30 pm Nick Herman Leave a comment

The other day Joel Speasmaker, the designer behind the latest rebuild of pontiflex.com, asked my opinion on the user interface concepts used by thinkingforaliving.org – a site of essays and musings on design-related topics. Thinkingforaliving segments its content into page-size chunks which it displays horizontally.  The user must click next and back buttons, or use the arrow keys, to page through each section of the site.

It’s a bit unconventional, and while it still feels like a website, it also feels like a magazine.  The experience is something akin to using an eReader.  It’s odd, and I’m generally wary of anything out of the ordinary, but it works for the type of content being presented.  The site even has an essay that defends the concept. It’s one of the few gimmicky UI’s that I’ve encountered that actually makes the site more useable.

So why did I tell Joel that the site annoyed that heck out of me?

The problem is me. Well, more like the problem is us.  We users have expectations when it comes to user interfaces on the web – expectations that have been reenforced again and again since the first time we saw Mosaic1.0 back in 1995.  Anything that subverts those expectations tends to annoy us.  And anyone who wants to introduce something new must do so very, very carefully.

The problem with the thinkingforaliving UI isn’t that it’s a bad idea, but that it’s not implemented perfectly.  It has minor issues with keystroke capture,   scrollbars, and button animations.  But minor issues become deal-breakers in the context of a new user interface.  Because we’re unaccustomed to the new navigation scheme we identify issues that are merely irritating as fundamental problems with the entire interface.  It’s not that the designers at thinkingforaliving didn’t do a good job; it’s that they fell short of doing a great job.

Does this mean that we should never try anything new? Of course not. It just means that we need to be extra careful when challenging our users expectations.  Good, innovative design ideas keep people coming back to our sites, but the best ideas are often the ones that can do the most damage. The challenge is figuring out how to utilize all our ideas without letting them get the better of us.

Entry filed under: Online Advertising, Technology Team. Tags: design, web design.