Respecting the Site Visitor and the Medium

This week, workshop madness! I just completed a series of four of them for a local client-they had selected four pilot units within the college to go live with new sites for their specific areas at the same time that the main, public site launches later this year. In a three-hour format, we reviewed the principles of visitor-centered design, information architecture, writing for the web, and navigation development and then wrapped up with a chalkboarding exercise in which we started to wireframe the new homepage for that unit, based on principles that we’ve discussed earlier in the day. 

The goal: to help pilot units understand how and why we’ve created the information architecture and navigation for the main college site and to help them flex that model to their specific needs. In one workshop, someone asked me if the goal was to design to the lowest common denominator. In another, one participant asked if the goal was to design for a 20-year-old (the reason he asked was that he, as a seasoned academic, had come to expect text-dense, very long, and formally worded prose). Both questions really caught my attention and made me think. And in both cases, the answer was “no, not really.” I personally think that the goal is to serve your site visitors well by respecting both them and the medium. 

Steve Krug’s book “Don’t Make Me Think” was published in 2005 (eons ago, in the web world), but it remains a touchstone for me in all of the planning and training that we do. Its main premise: that websites should be so intuitive that people don’t need to question “where will I find this” or “how do I accomplish that?” 

Business school taught me to think in threesthe top three principles I cover in our workshops: 1. Sites should be designed with your site visitors in mind. And those site visitors don’t think in terms of organizational charts or industry jargon (in one workshop, someone explained to me that course articulation translated into “will I get credit for this course;” who knew?). 2. Some site visitors self-identify. Some wayfind from topic to topic and link to link. Some search. Some think in terms of tasks or “I want tos…” Most will do all four, depending on the information they’re looking for. 3. People skim pages more often than they read. When you based site design on these principles you inevitably gravitate toward labels that are simple and straightforward and clear. You also offer multiple entry points to accommodate the different mental models that people use for parsing information. And you write with ruthless journalistic discipline-being as compelling and concise as possible. 

I’d argue that sites designed in this way actually broaden your reach and appeal, and that’s a good thing.