Usability vs Graphic Design

Jarad Spool, usability expert claims: "graphic design is completely unrelated to success at finding information on web sites". Read why we disagree.

Graphic design is getting a bad reputation on the Web. A recent report on Web Site Usability , published by Jared Spool's respected team at User Interface Engineering , won't help the situation.

Among the findings was the alarming conclusion that "graphic design is completely unrelated to success at finding information on web sites." Now although I am a passionate believer in the benefits of usability I was originally trained as a graphic designer and I have to say I strongly disagree with this statement.

In other media, such as print publishing, the role of design in the production process is fairly well understood. Virtually no mass-market trade book or CD-ROM title hits the shelves without first crossing a designer's desk. Oddly, on the Web, this is still not the case and to be frank it shows. I believe if anything the role of the graphic designer has been overlooked and that it should be fundamental in improving the usability of any web site especially when it comes to its information hierarchy.

Information Hierarchies

Information Hierarchies are the cornerstone of good usability. Creating an informational hierarchy for your web site is about organising your content into logical, user-orientated sections. It is also about prioritising content in order of importance. This is an area where graphic designers have been hugely influential in print publishing for years. You only need to pick up any newspaper to see how the size and positioning of headlines indicates to you which stories are of the greatest importance. Using visual queues to establish hierarchies of information can be achieved by considering factors such as:

• Relative Size
• Placement and Position
• Colour
• Animation

Relative size
Relative size tells a user a great deal about the importance of one screen element over another. Larger items generally catch the eye and therefore are seen as more important to the user. Titles are a good example of this. The larger the text in a title the more important it will appear. As I have already mentioned this is an approach which has been used in the newspaper industry for years.

Placement or position
Placement or position of elements is also another important sign post to the user. However, care is needed in this area as the importance associated with position can be altered by cultural factors. What I mean by that is that the majority of western users read from left to right and top to bottom. This means that information on the top and left of the screen is noticed first. However this norm doesn't apply to all cultures some of which read right to left. Nevertheless this holds up well as a general rule of thumb. That is why most sites have their navigation either on the left or at the top of the page.

Another important factor in determining the importance of elements based on position is whether the element is found above or below the fold. The fold is the point on the page where the user has to start scrolling. Obviously this changes depending on the browser and screen resolution but unsurprisingly elements found below the fold do not receive as much attention as those above it.

Colour
Colour is also another powerful way of helping users find their way around a site. Colour can be used as a way of showing relationships between items. It can also establish importance or draw attention. Highlighting elements on the page draws attention to them and high contrast use of colour improves readability. Also colour coding sections of the site helps users identify where they are. However be warned, too many different colours can prove confusing and distracting!

Animation
Animation is a particularly effective way of drawing user's attention to an element on the page. However, as with colour, this can easily be overdone. If everything on the screen is flashing or animating, all vying for your attention it is difficult to make sense of the page. Nevertheless if it is used in a limited way and with a real purpose animation can be an effective way of communicating information.

These visual hierarchies, combined with expressive imagery and readable, appropriate type, are some of the basic building blocks of visual communication design.

A lack of good design
Probably the fundamental problem with the perception of web based graphic design is that there is so little good graphic design out there. More often than not web design is carried out by enthusiastic amateurs or technically orientated web developers. Good graphic design enhances and supports usability rather than undermines it. The problem comes from the fact that few have the knowledge or experience to apply age old graphic design skills to this new environment. I believe that in 2 years time the conclusions of User Interface Engineering's recent report will seem laughable as graphic design for the web comes of age.

Article from http://www.headscape.co.uk/

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