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Thoughts on Web Design
By Larry Hendrick | January 31, 2006
First, I am not a web designer nor do I play one on a blog, but I do have one overriding thought when I am designing a blog or website … can my Mom figure it out?
How is this relevant to designing a tool? My Mom is an active and intelligent woman that has a fifty-four old son … and she is online. She is the reason I started the Letters to Mom blog, that is going through a re-think, as a way to instruct her with her computer.
Several years ago, she was visiting and proclaimed, “I want a laptop so I can do email and check websites as we travel” and I thought … cool. We looked at different brands and models deciding on Dell because of the first year’s support. It arrived and I got her set up and quickly learned that someone who hadn’t grown up or dealt with these things had a large learning curve.
The mouse touchpad and buttons were the first obstacle to overcome, and she was a trooper in learning. She took copious notes and wrote down everything I said for a week, then they left to go home and it became a long distance relationship. I’m sure some of you have the same issues, and understand why I started the aforementioned Letters to Mom (soon to be reborn).
Watching her follow my instructions was painful as I realized the design engineers had dropped the ball in many ways. Menu structures that don’t follow certain orders; buttons that aren’t explicit about what they do; links in pictures; right click menus that aren’t intuitive; well, you get the picture.
Now two years later, she couldn’t get the printer to work and the culprit was plugging the USB cable into an Ethernet port (you didn’t know it would fit, did you?). Small things that I take for granted, she struggles with, solely from the lack of thought that went into the design.
This past weekend, I was working on a new website design and implementation, and I kept asking myself, can my Mom figure this out? Does this link explain where it goes? Is a drop-down menu the best alternative, or is a list better?
Does this mean we need to dumb down or products to meet the lowest common denominator? Not at all. Look at the Apple iPod and you see simplicity in design and elegance in implementation. It does what it does extremely well, yet carries it off in a manner that my Mom can comprehend.
The message is to think about your Mom when you lay out a new product or design for market. Can she figure it out?
This could expand to things outside the Internet also, with the design of gadgets
Topics: Blogs, Life, Technology |