Duct Tape Design Philosophy

Alright, it appears that I do not have to rant about my "eye-opening" experience at NYP's PPP program. So for today I will talk about websites and a philosophy I designed by myself, hehe. When anyone wants to build a website, one must consider 4 factors, I like to call it DUCT. Duct tape! Who doesn't love duct tape.

D in DUCT stands for Design, the graphics and the organisation. U stands for Usability, how easy is it to navigate the website or find what the user wanted. C stands for Content, what is on the website and finally, T stands for Technology, like the scripts used etcetera. Usually, when developers talk about user experience and users themselves, they tend to care only about D and U, which is bad.

It is important to care about the graphics and looks of the website but it is not critical. Take Craiglist for example, virtually no graphics and hardly any design elements and yet it is a very famous and widely visited site. Although poor design can turn off visitors, if there is a pressing need to use the site, they will still remain and explore. A great and often used example of design over ease of navigation would be Microsoft's website, the site looks cool, I agree but try finding something there without the search. Even with search, the site is horrible when you want to find something you need. Many argue that Microsoft's website has too many things to put up, well tell that to Wikipedia.

Ease of use or usability is a very tough area to measure or implement. A few sites I would consider "easy to use" would be YouTube, Google and Amazon.com. One of the most important factor in making a easy to use website seems to be matching the superficial purpose and intended purpose, in simpler terms: "What the heck the website is about". Google is more usable than Yahoo because when someone sees the Google homepage, they know that google is meant for searching. Yahoo on the other hand has all the news and information cluttering up the page, to someone who have never heard of yahoo, they would not know what Yahoo's main feature is. This is why Google is more used than yahoo in the Search Business. Google was designed for searching, plain and simple, it serves its purpose and that's it. You don't have to locate the search box with the Google homepage and it loads fast, unlike Yahoo. So the presentation of the PURPOSE> is the no.1 factor to usability. Having too many "purposes" smack right in the face of the users will create a sense of crowds and chaos, perhaps even headache inducing.

Content or C in DUCT was often touted as the single most important factor in pulling in visitors. youTube is a testimony to the idea of content over anything else, although there are better video sites out there, youtube is often the choice of video viewers simply due to their large database. Wikipedia is also another great example, no one would visit Wikipedia for the WikiMedia software, Wikipedia is only useful and visited because of the site's articles. However, let's compare Apples to Apples, same content, different access method. Google Earth and Google Maps, Google Maps runs the same map database as Google Earth and Google Earth is far more easier to navigate, has all the nifty features and much smoother zooming. But more people tend to visit Google Maps than running Google Earth, this is because Google Earth requires an installation whereas Google Maps can be viewed instantly at anytime, anywhere. So this tells us that if two applications has the same content, the one that's easier to access will get the visits. And if content was the so-called "single most important factor", then my my daughter would be more visited than any other School's ICC website.

The last factor is the Technology, which I think is the least important factor in getting visits but however is the critical. Technology enables the use of better design, facilitates usability and enables a new type of content. Examples of technology being applied would be CSS for blog skins, PHP for forums and AJAX for search suggestion. However, technology DO get in the way, take Flash banner ADs, flashy javascripts that block your vision etc. I was asked by a friend once, he wants to build a forum but with zero users, he was worried that he could not get his chat box to run. My suggestion is to use only what you need, its good to experiment but do not think that one needs cool flashy intro screens to make a cool website.

That would sum up my DUCT tape philosophy for website design and analysis. I do put them into practice just have trouble implementing them. :P