Aug 20 2008
Design and Function – Equally Essential
Let me take a little break from analytics for a minute.
I’m currently reading a fantastic book called, A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers will Rule the Future,” by Daniel Pink. When I’m finished with the book I plan to write an entire post about it, but I had to share some thoughts I had now.
Even though I’m only halfway through, I immediately saw an analogy to higher education websites.
First, a little book background. The premise of the book (so far – I’m not done reading it) is that in the last 50 or so years, left-minded thinking, L-Directed Thinking (analytical, logical, sequential) ruled the business world. Right-minded thinking, R-Directed Thinking (creative, holistic, intuitive) although important, were always considered *less* important than L-Directed Thinking. A “nice to have,” if you will.
Not anymore. Left-minded thinking is becoming *essential* to getting ahead. There are many reasons for this that I won’t get into in this post. The author suggests that it’s not that R-Directed Thinking is becoming more important than L-Directed Thinking, it’s becoming *equally* as important. Business, teams, departments need *both* to succeed. If they have one without the other, they will ultimately fail.
It’s my opinion that the same is becoming true for higher education websites. When I say higher education websites, I mean all websites within a college or university, not just the main site.
Sweeping generalization. There are awesome higher education websites out there, but let me tell you about the ones that need work. A lot of higher education websites continue to emphasize either functionality over design or, heaven forbid, design over functionality (hopefully the latter is sub-conscious!).
What doesn’t seem to be emphasized is the importance of both. Equally. Some higher education websites seem to fall into either of these categories:
- A user-friendly, functional website that looks like it never made it to the designers desk.
- A beautifully designed website that leaves you wondering if anybody ever consulted an actual user before launching it.
I want to emphasize the word designer. I mean true designers. R-Directed Thinking designers. There is a difference between someone who can technically design and someone who is an actual designer.
Function and design are equally important, especially now. In the past, function *always* won out over design. This seems logical and was back then. If you had to sacrifice one, logically design would be it. As long as the site is functional and useful, what’s the problem?
Today, as users become more web-savvy, it’s becoming increasingly important to not only be usable, but *as important* to be well designed. Why? For many reasons, but in my opinion it boils down to credibility. If you’re a higher education website (or any business website, really) first impressions are essential. If your website looks like it never met a designer (poor design or no design), the credibility of that website suffers.
A year ago we ran a usability test on a part of our website that needed help. Our first question to the user is always, “what is your first impression?” I’ll never forget what almost all users said first. The conversations, although varying somewhat, went something like this:
Moderator: What is your first impression?
User: It looks homemade.
Moderator: What does that mean?
User: It has no design.
Moderator: How does that make you feel about it?
User: I wouldn’t trust it as much.
I wouldn’t trust it as much. Credibility.
Again, I am definitely, absolutely, certainly, not saying that design is more important than function or usability. I am, however, going out on a limb and saying that today it is *as* important (no more, no less) and we as a higher education web community need to pay more attention to that equality.
Users are getting more savvy and demanding. We need to evolve with them or our websites will suffer.
