Design Conundrum - And Other Big Words
February 29th, 2008 | by Brad King |My program, Media Informatics, is getting ready to add Web Design to the curriculum, which will compliment the design side - Dreamweaver, Flash and Maya (these are the programs, for now).
We’re having a problem, though. The Art department has what they refer to as Web design in their curriculum already. The issue: they design Web pages, not websites. They can create a series of static pages linked together by hypertext, that I assume look very nice. They can’t however, create interactive (re: linked to a database) UI-focused sites.
We know this because they don’t teach code. They don’t focus on usability. They don’t focus on accessibility. They don’t focus on standards and specifications for operating systems. They focus on their vision, which inherently makes the Web page limited in its use (and functionally useless for a site).
Our fundamental difference in the terms represents the very issue that those in the technology field continually battle again. They want to argue design (they can have that), while we are talking about Web. Just because something appears on a website doesn’t mean that it’s been created with Web design principles.
That’s a real problem in the world we live. At my last two jobs, I’ve made sure that the person in charge of designing our site didn’t have an art background for precisely that reason. The designs I’ve seen from artists oftentimes look very nice, but the logical progression of the tiered information (along with the architecture of the information — and the architecture I know we wanted to create) didn’t visually flow.
At Technology Review, the new media side won out in the end and our site’s functionality was vindicated by an extensive usability test done by Ball State. We had to make some tweaks for sure (and frankly, they’ve overhauled the whole everything since I left), but the navigation and functionality was there. People could find all of our information (and everything loaded in less than a second, a fact of which I’m still proud).
The long and short is this: graphic and traditional design majors are still useful in the modern world; however, they aren’t Web designers. Not by any definition.
If you’re looking to create a great, usable interface, find someone who understands Human-Computer Interaction, someone who knows how to conduct a basic usability test and someone who understands basic standards and principles of Web design.
Here’s some starting points:
