Reporter's Notebook: The audience for Web content has grown beyond early adopters and these days you have to attract people not through just features, but also design.Mark Boulton is a brit, and he has a funny accent.
Not funny ha-ha, but funny ah-ha, because when he speaks about applying traditional design principles to the Web, you sort of cock your head to the side, chuckle, and say, "Oh yeah. He's right." [1]
Exhibit A: During the Traditional Design and New Technology panel here at SXSW, the panelists were discussing why well-designed Web sites are less emotionally engaging than almost every other form of design.
"When's the last you time you felt a sense of attachment to something online, in the way you felt about your car? Or a book," Boulton asked. "You just don't, do you?"
Oh yeah. He's right.
Let's face it: There aren't many sites that foster any attachment beyond their functional appeal. Craigslist, for example, is appealing because it just works well. The New York Times online is appealing because of its content. Almost every online resource is valuable because it's convenient.
It's the design, stupid. Click here to read more.
But, Mark said, we're at a point in the evolution of online content that we need to start designing to create "some kind of attachment on a very subconscious level. I mean, it's why we buy Macs, right?"
To some, the idea of design online may seem superfluous. Google search, after all, just works. eBay is successful despite (or perhaps because of) what some would call its hokey, populist design. And the New York Times and Craigslist, well, they're not exactly hurting for repeat visitors.
But what about the rest of the online marketplace, the so-called Long Tail of smaller Web sites that can't rely on the ubiquity of their brand to draw visitors?
Here we're talking about everything from corporate sites to online magazines to publishing's current medium du jour, the blog. Should we all just blithely go about placing our navigation in the right sidebar, placing drop shadows on rectangular pictures, and trust in the power of our del.icio.us chicklet or RSS feed to keep readers coming back?
There has to be more to more to design online than microformats. But is there any business value in design?
If the success of the aforementioned blogs is any indication, the answer right now is no. As panelist Jason Santa Maria noted, "Art direction has been falling away in recent years because of the immediacy of being able to just put something up online."
The maxim "content is king" has unfortunately drawn attention away from the idea that "design makes it enjoyable, and creates an emotional connection," said Santa Maria.
"An emotional connection can be based on a level of satisfaction," said panelist Khoi Vinh, design director of the New York Times online. "But there's also room for emotional connection based on presentation of content."
Khoi said that it's common practice for the New York Times' page layout team to sit with editors and copy editors as they prepare the paper for press.
"Soon I think we will have web designers sitting with editors and laying out pages on an hourly basis, and not just setting up templates," he said.
Click here to read about the highs and lows of Web design in 2005.
All of this is just to say that the Web is evolving from simple publishing mechanism to a robust publishing experience. Eventually, so much of our lives will be lived online that emotional attachment to and resonation with an online experience will be a great differentiator.
We can already see the problem of shallow attachment to an online experience in the failings of sites like Friendster. The coin of the realm in the social network space is hipness; as soon as a site becomes less hip, the audience moves on.
And yet one can't help but wonder: if the users identified with the design of the site, would they stay? Is that why MySpace is so popular, because the users can design their pages however they see fit? For that matter, do we want design to be solely a populist exercise, or is there room for art direction on the Web?
Right now, I think we're all a little too busy patting ourselves on the back for getting rich of our blogs.
Instead, we should be looking at new and better ways to engage our audiences online. And not just through interaction, but through design.
[1] Personally, I think the reason we're attracted to foreign accents, and the reason we're willing to ascribe a greater-than-average amount of erudition to the people behind those accents, is that we can't put those people in a familiar social context. We can't make a priori judgements about them, and thus we listen to what they're actually saying. Mark is however, regardless of my pseudo-sociological linguistic theories and his accent, a very smart guy.
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