Marketing & SEO Discussion List - LED Digest

Designers should bear in mind that User Interface design is a specialized field in its own right.  Most Web site designers, professional or otherwise, are not UI experts and are strongly influenced by other things and their own preferences (myself included).  Those with a printed page background tend to try to translate that experience to the Web, sometimes with good success, sometimes not because some things don't work so well on a variable size computer display area.  Others like the *neat* things that can be done with Javascript, Flash, etc. and want to include that on their pages.  Still others want to make the pages they design really unusual / different / unlike any others.

In software development and systems design, many companies will spend thousands and thousands of dollars trying to get the UI right.  IBM spent $60,000 on one project and ended up saving $6,000,000. Some get it so right that the UI is almost totally intuitive and you can use the program almost without reading the manual.  Others get it so wrong (maybe they didn't spend the dollars on the UI design) that, even with extensive reference to the user manual, the program is almost unusable because it is so hard to figure out how to use many of the features, even for commonly required tasks.  Most software falls somewhere in between but, most of the time, the really successful versions on the market are the ones that are easiest to use because they involve the shortest learning curve (best UI).

When a user visits your site, particularly for the first time, you need the shortest learning curve possible since you may only have seconds to keep the surfer there.  So why would you want to go for the fancy, the different, the really unusual, that takes time to figure out so the learning curve is longer?  Staying within the standard (a link is blue and underlined, a visited link is purple and underlined) means no learning curve at all except for understanding the purpose of the site by reading the clear text. The design challenge is to stay within the basic usability criteria and still be fancy / different / unusual.