San Francisco itself is an inspiring city. Beautiful, diverse and obviously hilly, everywhere you look you can find something to spark creative juices. The Event Apart Conference, which spanned over 3 days, primarily focused UI/UX design, but had a little bit of pure design thrown in as well. Attendees were a mix of developers (the majority) as well as web designers. We fell into the latter group.
While there were a few sessions that spoke mainly to the developers in the room, and quite honestly flew over our heads in terms of fully understanding the HTML code, there were several sessions that really resonated with us.
First up: Yesenia Perez-Cruz’s Design Decisions through the Lens of Performance. As designers, we always want every experience we have, whether on the web or in real life away from our screens, to be a beautiful one. If it isn’t, we, as designers, hope to solve that problem. Web is a wonderful place to design because, while it has certain limitations (you view it within the limits of your screen, it isn’t 3-dimensional, blah blah blah), it also has great opportunities in that it is able to move and change and allow for interaction. However, this becomes a problem when internet speeds are slow and it doesn’t load. How can your user access all that breathtaking content if they can’t ever see it? Perez-Cruz began the session talking about a site she had designed several years ago. While it was beautiful, the site quickly received poor reviews because the content took too long to load and in the end it wasn’t a usable/useful site for its audience. Learning from that experience, she realized that the performance of the site (and any site) was almost equally as important as how it looked. As internet speeds get faster and faster, people become less patient for elongated site loading times. This becomes increasingly important if you, say, have a site that delivers pizza. You don’t want your customers going to that guy across the street just because they got tired of waiting for your site to load. However, this isn’t to say that all websites should be purely text based, since we still, as I mentioned earlier, want all experiences, on the web or otherwise, to be beautiful. So the way to bridge this gap of beauty vs performance is to first set out the goals of your site with your client. With this in mind, as well as a cue from your developers on what loading times should/could be, you as a designer can set budgets for different buckets of the design (50K for typefaces), (1.5 M for video), etc. If you want to use a lot of fancy typefaces, maybe cut back on the animated images or vice-versa. And if you go over budget in one area, it is better to skim a little from a different budget. If you go over budget everywhere, your web performance (load times) may suffer as a result. If you are clear with the client about what these goals are, and explain why, it makes that conversation a little bit easier.
Next: Jen Simmons, Modern Layouts: Getting Out of Our Ruts. This session BLEW OUR MINDS as designers. Like i mentioned previously, the audience was heavily in the developer boat, so when Jen Simmons showed us a few coding tricks to allow web design have the same flexibility as magazine (print) layouts, our jaws dropped to the floor. She even mentioned, “show some of these things to your designer friends, and their minds will be blown.” You were so right Jen, they definitely were. Not all of these CSS properties are supported in all browsers yet, but when they are, just you wait IE8 users, just you wait. Designing within a rectangle is quickly becoming a thing of the past, and as such the only thing that really limits us is our creativity. When I discussed these tricks with our web developer, he smiled at me in the “aw, look at you getting all excited about something I already knew about” kind of way, but having this information will definitely impact future designs.
Next: Eric Meyer, Designing for Crisis. As a company that primarily deals with healthcare clients, this session rang especially true and was a good reminder of UI design to bring to our clients. Sometimes what seem like good marketing objectives get in the way of actual user goals. Meyer talked about going on a family vacation during which his daughter had a severe allergic reaction was quickly rushed to the hospital. After spending some time at a local hospital, doctors informed Meyer and his wife that his daughter’s illness was beyond what they were capable of handling and she had to be airlifted several hours away to a major hospital in Philadelphia. As such, Meyer and his wife drove the several hours to Philadelphia, worried that their daughter might not be alive when they arrived.
On the journey, he realized that he was not sure where he and his wife were headed, and also who they should talk to upon arrival to find their daughter. So, as a web-savvy person, he decided to try the hospital’s website in hopes to find the information he required. However, this was a failed effort. The top of the screen had a large image of a happy child, with some sort of message like World Health Report rankings, and then a list of all of the hospital’s services. Every avenue he tried to venture was a failure. This was due to unclear, cluttered navigation and no clear user flow. When they finally arrived at the hospital, they found doors locked (it was well after midnight) and dim lights with signs directing them to a door around the corner, a city block away (using the ER entrance). Eventually, they ended up where they needed to be, but it was after a long night of frustration, and dead ends. All of this was to give an example of how someone, in crisis, may actually use a site such as the one described. In crises your user’s thinking isn’t clear, they need VERY clear clues to direct them to the information they are requiring. So, in the case Meyer described, it would have been great if the hospital had a large “contact us” button right in the middle of the screen. Or something that indicated, “not finding what you’re looking for? call this number.” Additionally, the site could have detected the time of day and when showing directions, could have indicated that certain doors are locked due to safety.
Looking at the design he struggled with, I knew how every single design decision was made. Checking off marketing goals, department goals, making sure users know how many awards have been won, all of these had a big check mark next to them. But at the end of the day, user experience design is about making your site easy to use for your USER. If you are designing a site for someone in crisis, whether that be for a hospital, or car-service, or some other related category, make avenues to information easy to find, and also have multiple ways to get there. Think about your audience, and how they may potentially be using the site, as such make information pertinent to them closer to the top, and not hidden. These were great tidbits to keep in mind, both as a designer, trying to create something beautiful and also useful for our clients, but also as a marketing professional - don’t fill the site with extras that aren’t useful to your audience.
~ Chereen Baramki & Grace Viertel
