Sometimes I envy print designers. When it comes down to it, if you ignore what goes on it, a piece of print is never going to change size when your back is turned. If you're designing for a magazine advert you know the space you've got to work within. Everyone who sees that advert is going to see it looking how it looked on your screen when you designed it. *
Designing for digital (and here I'm including more than just websites – TV and film production are facing similar challenges) requires a few more variables to be taken into account. This is not news. Most of our clients aren't surprised when we tell them that we'll design something for an optimum browser view but that if they want something that's truly scalable then that's when we need to start getting clever.
There's a certain amount of received wisdom that has been built up around digital design. The very idea of optimum screen size/resolution is a good example of this. The variation in screen sizes these days is greater than it ever has been. Laptop screens are a completely different shape to the ‘old fashioned' CRT monitors and looking at something on a lightweight notebook is a different kettle of fish to looking at the same thing on a big 20” heavy duty laptop or a 24” iMac. And that's before you even factor in the new generation of wireless enabled media players like Apple's iphone and ipod touch range.
Traditional digital design principles tell us to keep important content ‘above the fold' and to avoid creating pages that force the user to scroll. As an Information Architect, ensuring that pages are well structured and that users can get to information easily is paramount. But is it as simple as that?
There's a wealth of research debunking the idea of the digital fold, much of it focussing around the fact that when you're working with a variable space it's nigh on impossible to pin down a consistent position for the fold anyway. As for scrolling – the idea that users don't/won't scroll pages is just wrong. There's plenty of data out there to disprove this – some of it even goes back a decade - but we are still taking the same old approach to designing for digital content. Perhaps we need to look at the benefits of alternative approaches.
Take the iPhone for example. Using its inbuilt Safari browser to view web pages, the user is presented with a scaled down view of the entire page – no fold. By using the multi-point touch device, the user can zoom in on the bit of the page they want to view. Isn't this the same as scrolling to get to content? The iPhone's users are happy to use their device to access website this way – in fact the iPhone's interface has been lauded as not just cool but also intuitive. Surely this is the holy grail of interface design?
Apple's iPhone and iPod touch also provide another good example of how we need to start thinking about the way we deliver content in other ways than traditional web interfaces. Using the YouTube widget, the iPhone's users can search for, view and rate YouTube video content quickly and easily, just like they can on the YouTube site. The widget puts all of the tools the user needs in the iPhone's screen space to create a custom interface designed specifically to suit YouTube's content. They can do this because they know that they are designing for the iPhone/iPod touch platform and nothing else. It's a specific interface, for delivering content to users via a standardised device. Suddenly the goal posts have stopped moving.
So what does this tell us? For me it's about questioning the received wisdom and taking it further. We should be taking a close look at the landscape we're working in and creating interfaces that suit the people who use them. Content is the constant, the interface should be dictated by the user not the rules.
* Apologies to all print designers
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