Chapter 37: Designing for the Web

The advent of the World Wide Web has been both a boon and a curse for interaction designers. On the one hand, the popularity of the Web has also popularized — even more so than Apple Computer and the Macintosh — the idea that ease of use is important. For perhaps the first time since the invention of graphical user interfaces, corporate decision makers have begun to understand and adopt the language of user-centered design. On the other hand, the limitations of Web interactivity, which are a natural result of its historical evolution, have set interaction design back at least ten years. Designers are only now beginning to take advantage of the many desktop interaction idioms (such as drag and drop) on the Web that were old news years before the first Web sites went online.

This chapter does not attempt to address the many detailed aspects of Web design that have been covered in great detail in many other volumes. Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think! (2000), Louis Rosenfeld's and Peter Morville's Information Architecture (1998), and Jeffrey Veen's The Art and Science of Web Design (2000), in particular, cover the essential elements of Web design in clear, straightforward language. (Jakob Nielsen's useit.com Web site is also an excellent resource.) Instead, this chapter seeks to relate the process discussed in Part I to the world of Web design and to provide some perspectives on Web design from an interaction design standpoint. It focuses, in particular, on the emergence of a new breed of Web applications — transactional, Internet-enabled programs that exhibit complex behaviors and which must, by necessity, break the barriers of the browser.

The Good News and the Bad News

Although the popularity of the Web has obviously been good news for interaction designers and usability practitioners, whose fortunes rose (and then fell) along with the industry hype, it has also proven to be a two-edged sword as far as the evolution of design in the Web medium is concerned. In the early days of the Web boom, the industry was flooded with fresh art school graduates and traditional graphic designers, who saw the Web as an exciting and lucrative opportunity to create compelling communication through new forms of interactive visual expression. Certainly, great opportunity existed in the early days of the Web, when the biggest challenges involved working around the tight constraints of the medium (created originally to share scientific papers and their attached diagrams) to produce documents with even a rudimentary level of visual and typographic organization. Big demand and small supply led to reliance on less-skilled practitioners who designed by guesswork, making it up as they went along.

Even then, graphic designers recognized that a new design issue resulted from the support of hyperlinks in documents: the design, organization, and structuring of content. Findability, a term coined by Louis Rosenfeld (1998), is an apt way to describe the design issue in a nutshell. A new breed of designers, the information architects, built a discipline and practice to address the largely non-visual design problems of logical structure and flow of content. Information architecture, which addresses difficult design problems surrounding content, is still growing and evolving as a discipline.

In the early days of the Web, graphic-design expertise was sufficient to handle obvious Web design issues of the time. As use of the Web increased and simple Web sites transformed into large clearing-houses of information, information architecture emerged to handle the problems of navigating and organizing content on pages. But while technical restrictions have begun to relax with better browser and markup technology, the focus of most Web designers remains on visual expression and problems of content access. Only scant attention has been paid to the third distinguishing element of software that was, by historical accident, a latecomer to the Web world: the interactive behavior that permits people to accomplish complex transactions.

Today's Web technologies blur many of the distinctions between desktop and Web applications, but many old-school Web designers are still living in the world of the mid-1990s, when visual and information design were the most significant elements of the Web experience. With the rise of Web-delivered applications and services for markets (such as B2B e-commerce and CRM supported by technologies such as Microsoft's .NET and Macromedia's Flash MX), the design of Internet-enabled software grows less and less distinct from the design of desktop applications. Although Web browsers and browser-based content are here to stay for the foreseeable future, Web-based applications must increasingly be designed with the primary concern of appropriate behavior both within the browser and outside it. The tyranny of the browser is at an end. Sophisticated, Internet-enabled applications powered by .NET and other new technologies offer people a better, richer, and more productive user experience. Of course, good behavior doesn't come free with better technology: A lot of design work must be done. The first step is to recognize some of the many design myths that have arisen about the Web and put them in context.