SCN: Web design

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes

====================

A Message to Web Designers: If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It

by Jeffrey Selingo

(NY Times)---When Salon.com revamped its Web site in May, 
readers greeted it with hundreds of e-mail complaints. They 
criticized the horizontal scrolling, the small type and the headlines 
that no longer linked directly to articles. Within days, Salon's editor, 
David Talbot, posted a note to readers saying, "You win!" and the 
site reverted to some of its old design.   

The Salon revolt speaks volumes about the growing impatience that 
Web users are having with constant face lifts of their favorite sites 
or with sites that are difficult to navigate.   

In the early days of the Internet, users flocked to Web sites with the 
latest gee-whiz technology, and other sites soon replicated it. Some 
sites posted Web cameras even if they had nothing to show; others 
experimented with animation, even if it was of a construction worker, 
to alert users that a page was not quite ready.   

Today, the Web "is much less fashion driven," said Jakob Nielsen, 
a Web-usability consultant at the Nielsen Norman Group, a 
consulting firm in Mountain View, Calif.   

"In the early days, users embraced change because the Internet 
wasn't useful," Mr. Nielsen said. "Now they punish change because 
they need the Web. It's a useful tool."   

As a result, users expect more of the Internet than simply 
entertainment. And they easily become frustrated with sites that 
don't deliver the goods.   

Alycia Eck is using the Internet to look for a used car. Unable to 
browse the car lots on her own, Ms. Eck searches for pictures on the 
Web but has found that most Web sites warn that the picture she 
sees may not be of the actual car. And her e-mail to lenders goes 
unanswered.   

"I thought it would be like that Saturn commercial where the kid 
orders a pizza one day from his dorm room and the next day he 
orders a car," Ms. Eck said. "They haven't taken the time on their 
Web sites to get me to come in and see the car."   

Indeed, for the most part, consumers don't trust Web sites to give 
them the information they need. A common debate among site 
designers is how much information to put on the home page. Is it 
easier to scroll down a front page with possibly hundreds of links or 
to click through several pages?   

Popular home pages are now a mix of a directory and a search 
engine. The growing consensus is that users want "the broad and 
shallow," said Louis Rosenfeld, president of Argus Associates, an 
Ann Arbor, Mich., consulting firm that specializes in organizing Web 
sites, a field known as information architecture.   

"People don't trust that if the site makes choices for them on the 
main page, that those would be the ones they would go by if they 
were clicking through," Mr. Rosenfeld said. "We're finding, rather 
surprisingly, that they would rather a front page of 100 links."   

As they did during the early days of the Internet, users still demand 
speed. That will become more important, Web designers say, as 
more users connect to the Internet through their mobile phones, with 
their small screens and sometimes unreliable service.   

At the same time, the needs of users are becoming more 
sophisticated. Designers say that customization and anonymity are 
the two things users want most right now. For example, consumers 
favor features like My Yahoo and Amazon.com's Recommended 
lists. So companies are looking for ways to customize their sites for 
users, but without the usual annoyances, like passwords. 
Consumers are reluctant to register for sites until the site proves 
useful, Mr. Nielsen said.   

"People don't want to buy into something unless they know they're 
going to use it often," he said.   

The biggest complaint on message boards about Web designs is 
information overload. Users on the message boards say that 
companies have concentrated too much on design and content and 
not enough on how the information is structured.   

For the most part, users say, search engines on sites are 
unreliable. Either the search results yield too many choices, with 
useless ones at top, or some sites have employed broad-based 
search engines, like Google, that traverse the whole Web instead of 
just the particular site.   

In the end, Mr. Nielsen said, users want a site that is designed to 
help them find what they want, not what the marketing department 
wants to promote.   

A few weeks ago, a woman was trying to describe to a friend 
bedding she had seen in a Garnet Hill catalog. So the woman, 
Denise Russo, decided to try the company's Web site. She had 
even planned to place an order, but she said she had to "click 
through what seemed like 700 pages to get the picture I was looking 
for, and then it was too small and I couldn't enlarge it."   

"The whole experience was way too annoying," Ms. Russo added. 
"I'm never going back there."   

Unlike magazine or book editors, site designers are hampered by a 
lack of commonly agreed upon conventions on the Web. Some 
similarities in Web designs are emerging. For example, nearly 
every publicly held company has an investor-relations area on its 
Web site where users can quickly find the latest press releases, 
annual report and stock information.   

But Mr. Rosenfeld said he doubted that Web users would ever see 
similarities on the Web like the chapters and indexes they find in 
books.   

"A book is a self-contained information space, and it's finite," Mr. 
Rosenfeld said. "A Web site could be designed in any way the 
human mind could imagine."   

At least 90 percent of Web sites need to be redesigned in some 
way, said Mr. Nielsen, the Web usability consultant. But most Web 
sites, he added, are not redesigned for the right reasons. In the 
early days of the Internet, sites were redesigned every few months 
to take advantage of the latest technology. Now a site may be 
changed simply because a designer is bored with it or because a 
company executive had a problem with it. Few companies test their 
sites with users, Mr. Nielsen said, or if they do, they ignore the 
advice.   

Mr. Nielsen suggests subtle redesigns and encourages companies 
to explain how to perform old functions on the new site. For 
example, when eBay revamped its auto auction site in April, 
canceling some of its previous auction categories, it touched off a 
spate of complaints from users who had listed their items during the 
switch.   

"This is the worst mistake that eBay has made," a customer wrote 
on the site's message board. "I hope that someone at eBay has the 
foresight to listen to its sellers and buyers and change it back." The 
company later made changes.   

At Salon, the editors say that 90 percent of the redesigned site is 
still intact, including a new color scheme, a navigation bar across 
the top of the page, a switch to four columns from three and a search 
box on every page. And Salon editors say the negative reaction to 
the redesign will not discourage them from redesigning again in a 
year or two.   

"People have an understandable and justifiable preference for what 
they're accustomed to," said Scott Rosenberg, vice president of site 
development and managing editor of Salon. "They don't want to be 
bothered to learn new ways of doing things -- and unless you can 
make clear to them that a new way is superior to the old, familiar 
way, why should they?"   

Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company  





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