The Internet In Business

Web Usability – If a website is worth doing, It’s worth doing right!

Whether we call it usability, wireframing, user centered design, heuristic analysis, information architecture, website sketching or story boarding most webdesigner would agree that this step is more than necessary to any successful design.

At first sight clients seems to all agree as well but when it comes to their project and their money what really matters to them is the subjective part of all design … THE LOOK. Oh yes they have heard about the “3 click rule” and the fact that a site needs to be simple and seems to think once they’ve applied a few of those rules everything will be fine and Aesthetic seems to be the only thing in their mind; pictures, colors, fonts overall atmosphere etc…
Every web designer has been asked to replace the call to action with a picture or some text when the main objective of the site was to generate leads!

To me and I believe to most designers the most important stage is the THINK stage. The stage where we all put it all down on paper, create the structure, think the navigation, the flow of pages, organise the content decide on the colors the font and the pictures without “drawing” anything yet. In fact it is in a way setting up the stage like we would do when writing a book or preparing a movie.

If we think of the way movies are created. Filmmaker do not shoot first, they first have a script that they elaborate then they story board every shoot.
When an author prepares his/ her new book he/she researches his/her topics writes a summary, describes all the characters, the places etc… before actually writing anything.

Website design follows exactly the same pattern. The initial stage is to find an objective for a site (we will talk about that in another blog post) then we must enter that stage where we have to put it all on paper first before we actually draw or build anything.

Most people seems to think that this approach is only meant for big expensive project. From my experience (and I have been doing it for quite a while now) the think stage take around 10% to 15% of the overall budget. It does not matter that your website has a budget of 3K – it is worth doing right!

Ah bon entendeur ….