Keeping the online toilet seat down

By Lynda Rathbone

Since the early days of website design, a number of trends have come and (thankfully) gone. Once the grey background was behind us, for example, designers started applying new tags like <BLINK> with great enthusiasm, often making the web page a living nightmare.

Then everyone seemed to use buttons across the top with single pixel line bevels around them. Then came the age of image-mapping. It was like hide and seek for your mouse – where to click? If you are reading this and thinking, “What?”, then just consider yourself lucky. It was fun but you did have to be there.

Many of you will also remember about six or seven years back, when brand and marketing agencies cranked up their web design operations and started to do what initially looked really good but actually didn’t function well at all. And forget about accessibility.

Yes, it was the age of Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash and JavaScript and an entirely new user experience. It went something like this: “Wait for it… I know it’s loading. Is it loading? It says it’s loading. Just a minute. Okay. Oh.”

Well, happily we have now arrived at an information-led design phase where we’ve learned the hard way that what looks great often doesn’t meet the needs of the users. So when are we going to put the lessons of recent years together? Can we achieve a balanced design approach to have a site that looks great and is information-led?

I read an interesting article in the November issue of Wired magazine that talked about web designers in India taking principles from ancient design practices online, such as incorporating the elements of fire, water, air and earth into a web page. Others are using Feng Shui principles.

At first I thought, “Wow, sounds good!” But then I gave it more thought. Is this actually possible? Could it be the next big thing – the design nirvana we’ve all been trying to reach? And how can ancient philosophies apply to businesses looking to increase the usability of their site?

We can all probably agree that humans from an environment that is more balanced with nature. There’s also no question that doing things like sitting with your back to the door is a bit unnerving, but how does this translate to the online experience?

Can you liken setting up a room correctly to correctly setting up a web page? Is there a definite way to set up a room or a web page anyway? And what about the Feng Shui rules like keeping the toilet seat closed so you don’t lose money, or putting a plant in the south-east corner to increase wealth and prosperity? Perhaps good web design has a picture of a plant in the south-east corner to get more hits or sell more products? And where is the south-east corner of a website?

Seems ridiculous, right?

Well, maybe for things like plants and keeping the toilet seat shut. But other elements like colour and the feel of the environment have a big impact online. Cooling colours are more soothing and encourage browsing. Bright colours encourage people to leave quickly but used cleverly, can draw the eye to certain areas over others. Encouraging consistency in design throughout is generally regarded as good practice and the use of clean, uncluttered space on your site is helpful in enabling users to find what they are looking for without being bombarded by tons of information.

And if you think about it, perhaps the elements should play a part. Fire would be the ‘call to action’ area of your site, such as a file download or checkout button. Water would be the fluid area of your site – perhaps consistent navigation to keep you moving smoothly through the site. And I’d imagine earth to be the core of your site – your content. And air? Well, just my opinion, but I’d make air the graphic design elements all around the site. All of these elements need to work together to achieve a good balance on the site.

The article I read said designers analyse the site and determine what’s not working by interpreting different parts of the site as the elements. From there, they are in a position to work out if there’s an too many water elements and not enough earth, for example.

This makes sense to me – if you have a lot of content and it’s not optimised for the web, for instance, there probably aren’t enough fire elements and your users are getting bogged down in page after page of text, without enough calls to action or ways to get around the site. Or perhaps there is too much air, meaning the site’s a bit design-heavy, and users have insufficient information to show them how to navigate and complete tasks on the site.

No matter what your opinion, I think the key take-aways are balance and space. Balance, because too much of anything is usually a negative, whether it be too much content, too many graphics, too many choices and so on. Keep it simple. Users want to be told what to do and where to go. They have come to your site with a task in mind – whether that’s ordering a product, downloading a policy paper or finding your contact information. There should be clear paths laid out for them and they should have an ‘environmentally friendly’ journey along the way.

And the look of the site does have an enormous impact on how they feel about you and your organisation. I feel Feng Shui principles do apply a bit here. You should feel comfortable in your environment – be that online or off. If you have a very short visit-time from your users, try playing around with colour and space and see if this encourages browsing or lengthens the user journey in your site. Off-set brightly coloured ads (if you have them) with soothing background colours or pages and see what happens. Play around with the white space in very busy areas of the site or break up text-heavy pages and see if that makes a difference.

Are you practicing Feng Shui usability at this point? If you are, or know of anyone who is, drop me an e-mail – I’d love to know where the south-east corner of my site is! As usual, I’m on lynda@foursquaremedia.net. I’ll be spending the holidays trying to rebalance my own site.