So I didn’t sleep over the last weekend. I threw together about 40% of Highfiber’s 6th version, uploaded it, and got the first round of feedback from the community and my peers.
It’s interesting how the people who don’t really like it much are designers themselves, whereas the people who do are average users. It’s interesting because it illustrates this funny schism in modern web design, i.e., designers have no idea what makes the average user happy.
I think the main reason for this is that most designers (at least in this country) weren’t "born into" web design, i.e., they crossed over from other media. Mostly that means print, because if you were a motion graphics designer, web design would arguably be a step down … at least in terms of hardware investment.
Anyway, you can always tell if a designer comes from a print background because the first thing they want to do when they’re given a website layout to fiddle with is to clean everything up. Pick out the main sections and hide everything else by pushing them into subpages or floating DHTML menus, or cramming them into iframes. Why? Because that’s the one thing you can’t do with print. You can jump-page all you want, but in the end, you’re still stuck with a very specific amount of space to work with, and your copy only expands and shrinks as much as your letter-spacing rules will allow.
So your first impulse is to clean up. It’s probably also because the single most successful website to date is made up of little more than a logo and a textfield. The thing is, that approach actually only works if you’re building the next Google. Otherwise, you’re just hassling the crap out of your users. Nobody wants to have to mouse-over a button just to see the rest of the site’s sections, and nobody wants to have to scroll a tiny-ass iframe to view your news. And certainly no one wants to have to click twice when they could’ve clicked just once to get to where they wanted to go … especially if they’re visiting your site every day to get to that one particular section.
At the heart of all this is the fact that designers don’t think like users. They put in icons without titles and expect users to understand what they are, or color-code sections and assume that people will remember what each color represents. They remove the underline from linked text, change the color to dark gray, and wonder why no one seems to click. Or they come up with kooky horizontal layouts, because it just "looks different."
I built the first 5 versions of highfiber with this kind of wankery, so I can honestly say that I know what I’m talking about here.
I’m hoping to end that line of thinking with version 6, by building something that hopefully makes sense to the people who use it, instead of pandering to the critics, so to speak. I know I’ve still got a long way to go, but I think that if I listen closely enough to the users I’ll end up with something really, really worthwhile. I’m already getting lots of good feedback.
Clickety-click. (Version 6 is in the early stages of development, so be kind.)