Article Idea:
Visual Design Strategy checklist for WebApplications & Websites
suggested by Anirban BasuMallik on 2007/10/16
We come across loads of websites and webapplications. Despite the underlying technology framework we fall in love with a select few. Why? Because it has a unique Visual Design Strategy.
An article on the particular components of creating a Visual Design Strategy for a website or a webapplication.
Want to see this idea turned into a story?
12 people said yes. | 0 people said no.
Jonathan Baker-Bates
17 Reputation points
Posted 2007/11/07 @ 07:19AM with
Can it not just have good content? I’d like to think I appreciate at least some web sites for more than just what they look like.
Ben Tremblay
0 Reputation points
Posted 2007/11/07 @ 19:54PM with
Some HCI study I read 2 or 3 years ago had a section on “user confidence” ... what can matter more than how likely it was that folk would actually click through a series of pages. And the confidence the users felt correlated very well with how many pages they viewed / how long they stayed … and I bet how often they returned. In that study it seemed that folk would spend time with a dull site if they got to the beef in the end. Show me a site with too much sizzle and I start feeling like I’m having my chain jerked. (A triply mangled metaphor?)
Anirban BasuMallik
12 Reputation points
Posted 2007/11/11 @ 06:00AM with
Hi Jonathan,
Yes you are right, good content does matter a lot. I would say it’s something like the packaging of a perfume bottle. Good packaging will draw people to it, but it’s the perfume (in our case, content) which will ultimately influence a purchase. Since I’m from an architecture background, I can draw a parallel with architectural styles. Something like Minimalistic as in craig’s list and Classical style under which most of the sites like Nike and other brand intensive sites fall. Then again the degree of visual richness depends on what the brand wants to express itself as.
Anirban BasuMallik
12 Reputation points
Posted 2007/11/11 @ 06:27AM with
Hi Ben,
That’s an interesting thing you have pointed out.
There has always been a gap between the visual richness of the desktop and the internet. This is primarily beacuse the web experience does not allow the “fast”-ness as that of the desktop. So in one hand, Mac OSX and Vista have wowed people with their richness. But when it was attempted in the web, it failed. It failed beacause all these visual richness came at the cost of speed. In the web, task completion time reigns supreme. Till the time we have blazing fast internet connections, we do have to strike a balance between the degree of visual richness and task completion time.
It would be interesting to watch how products like the iphone and Microsoft Surface influence the web, coupled with an ever increasing internet access speed.