Take the Time to Design (Please)

Good design is timeless and just simply so important. When you visit websites like CNN.com or a design blog, you simply don’t realize how important the role of the design is. It is the unspoken warrior, not overtaking your content but rather pushing it forward.

Recently GeoCities shut down, and a portion of the Internet shut down with it. It represents the loss of millions of table-based websites, the final whisper of even more websites with bad graphics and cheesy animations.

So one would think that in this age, for a major company or a major website to not hire a decent designer, not take the time to design, not take the time to think, it would be insanity, would it? Akin to selling Lamborghinis from behind a McDonalds?

So why is it, that as a student, I have to deal with bad design all the time? It’s one thing to see WordArt in a fellow classmate’s PowerPoint (I spoke out on that), but to see this on a major websites?

That’s ridiculous, and it makes me mad.

Our school recently introduced Gaggle.Net, a email service for students that supposedly alleviated all the problems of traditional email for students by having a hyperactive spam blocker which automatically forwards emails to teachers. It costs our school district over $50,000 a year, not to mention teacher training costs.

Words on the FAQ are mispelled (pun intended). The home page looks like something out of the 1980s. Each student gets an amazing 100 megabytes of storage. The logon process redirects you (quite visibly) through four pages before finally settling on a page that takes forever to load.

Lets compare this to Gmail: no ugly design, a brilliant interface, over seven gigabytes of storage, chat, storage, archiving, labels, and it’s free. It’s no surprise all of my friends (me included) have Gmail accounts.

Do you, school administrators, honestly think that students will choose your poorly designed systems over something like Gmail or Facebook? When people were surprised on the amount of under-13s that use social networks, I rolled my eyes.

Then there’s our school library catalog and our county library catalogs. The interface is built on tables, the Back button never works, if you scroll down while it’s loading when it’s done loading it’ll jump you back to the top, and all these other little things that add up to a ridiculous user interface.

Why? Why can’t they take the time to redesign? Now is the time to redesign! It’s the change of the century, and if you leave yourself behind, there’s nothing you’ll do one day. You can complain about the cost it’ll take to update your interface, but if you don’t, the cost is even greater!

 

I took a few minutes to make a quick mockup at what a catalog I design might look like. If a twelve year old can do it, why can’t a dedicated team of 30, all from a design agency, make a mockup and implement it? I wanted to make this into a user-style script for anyone stuck using SirsiDynix catalog systems, but it isn’t worth the time making a table-based layout look better.

Please.

The time and money invested into making a quality design is always worth it. It’s why graphic and web designers still exist. According to WDW, 24.2% of users care about design. 51% care about slow load times, and 25% care about poor text. The catalog systems I use fail at all three.

If one does not place time and effort on design, then in the end, you are doomed to fail. MySpace and countless websites have demonstrated this. So why is it that companies who roll in dough can’t put a little bit of that back and make a nice bread?

5 Comments: