I keep company with architects and the children of architects, and I love buildings. I often think of my UI design process much the way architects think of the building design process. You design your pages around the content. You design a building around the primary space. You ensure there are enough bathrooms for the number of people likely to be there at any given time. You build in the features your users are likely to want just before, and just after your golden path task. You make it accessible to anyone, regardless of physical ability type.
And I notice, that in much architecture, just as in much design, the back door becomes an afterthought.
Have you ever been amazed at how beautiful a building is, and wandered around it in awe, only to find yourself in a plain white hallway that leads to a mass-produced back door with chips in its paint and dirt pushed up against the doorjam? Did you question it, and did it make you sad, or did you just accept it because it’s not the face of the building?
I got to tour the Pixar campus a while back. It’s gorgeous. And you know what? Their architect even thought about their back doors. Sure, they’re functional and not as beautiful as the rest of the building. But the one I passed out through was Pixar-crisp. A detail that the designers of the interior spaces looked at, thought about, and assigned. It fit.
Why am I going on about architecture? Because I want you to think about your back doors. I want you to think about the alt tags and titles on your images and links. I want you to think through the way your emails look with images off. I want you to think about how your website looks with ads turned off (OKCupid.com does the neatest thing – they have a placeholder behind their ads that suggests you donate to have an ad-free experience). I want you to DESIGN the voice browser experience. I want you to think through your error pages and 404s and make them build your brand and help your customers in some meaningful way. And I especially want you to think about your unsubscribe process.
I have a checklist for QAing and specing and even designing. When I think I’m done, I go down the list and there’s always one thing I missed. It includes things like
- What does it look like in mobile?
- How does it interact for touch?
- What’s the SEO impact?
- Does this affect other areas of the site/app? Should it?
- Are there emails associated and what do they look like?
- What needs to be tracked?
- What are the alt tags?
- How does it share socially?
- What’s it like to print it?
- What does it look like when logged in? Out?
- How do they get help?
- What’s the back-out plan for the user if they’re not happy?
There should be no aspect of your app that’s accidental, or arbitrary, or forgotten. Sure, you can have a perfectly successful website without thinking about these things. I’d say 90% of the successful websites out there do. I once worked at a company that had a net promoter score of 93 (that’s astronomical, in case you don’t know) and they sucked at so many of these things – but the users were perfectly happy.
However, there is no downside to thinking about these things. No one ever said “I liked that building until I saw that it had a beautiful back door and now I hate it.” But maybe, just maybe – one person was on the fence about the building until seeing that beautiful back door gave them just the perfect subconscious feeling of elegance, refinement and conscious design.
Remembering your alt tags is a small investment for gaining one more delighted customer.
Today’s Interesting Link:
Trask Industries – This is the best movie promotional site I’ve ever seen. Even leaving aside my bias to immersive multi-channel entertainment experiences, and just pretending this is only some company’s brochureware site, it’s freakin’ awesome. CSS animations build as you scroll, the page reacts and feels alive. This is good design. And it has Peter Dinklage. You can’t get much more win than that.
Today’s Usability Quote:
“Not having confidence will lead to bad decisions” – Dave Mott
Today’s Music To Design To:
Coco Part 2 by Parov Stelar is, like much of what I recommend, at once exotic, energetic, and ambient enough to not distract you. I love how it makes me sway while I work, and I think you will too.