Being a Designer
How can one create beautiful websites, satisfying users in the process? By PLANNING!! It is
important to design keeping the users in mind and not just with an engineers’ instinct.
Information Architecture (IA) is used as a base to build any website. It is the process where one
can break down the content of a site and organize it with a logical relation in mind. The logical
diagram is usually created in the form of a flowchart diagram which can reflect all the
connections between the content. IA also helps in deciding the navigation of the site in the most
efficient way. So it is highly important to chalk out an ideal IA for the site.
IA diagram
The first step is to gather all the possible content that must be there on the site and try to
categorize it into chunks such that all relevant data ends up in the same bucket. Next step is to
chalk out the IA diagram. When working on the overall navigation of the site, one needs to think
carefully about the elements involved like the buttons and nav bars and how effectively can they
adhere to the IA flowchart. Hence it is important to have the top-level navigation sorted before
we enter the coding stage.
There are a multitude of menu types and we need to decide which one to use keeping in mind the
usage of space, language options, animation effects and so on. The main component being
sorted, we can now create some basic sketches depicting this. This saves time as we start with a
foundation of how the website would look and later iterate on it.
Sketches == Functionality
Design gurus often recommend making the first round of sketches on paper with no fancy colors.
This way the stakeholders will be focused on the layout rather than the fancy styling which can
take away the main idea from the website — the content. Once the basic layout for the site is
decided upon, the next step is to work on making a storyboard. Storyboards are a quick and
flexible way to brainstorm ideas and get rid of the ideas in case they don’t turn out to be the way
the users want to go. No time wasted behind code hence more time and energy for the later
stages. Storyboards add all the necessary components of a website like color, the interaction
dynamics, navigation keys. It is basically the entire website on paper 😀
Good Design, Bad Content
The customer just dumped a 500-line paragraph on your head to put up on the site, but is it a
good idea to put it all in word to word? No matter how great the design, layout of the site, if the
content is not smartly worded then the website won’t be able to fulfill its destiny. A smart
designer always puts the content in smartly and for this, it’s good to have some basic writing
skills in place. Most users don’t bother reading every word on sites, all they need to digest the
facts are keywords. Use this to your advantage and put in content as per its level of importance.
Headers attract the most attention and the shorter the paragraph the more chances that someone
will sit through the whole content. Bullet points also help in making people notice the content
along with bold and italics styles.
Finally….
Web design is form of communication and it can be used to its fullest potential by considering
the needs and requirements of its Users. We don’t want to drive away our audience from
something that has potential. This is the whole idea behind User Centered Design. So, design
well and create happy customers 🙂
Source: Image from Google Images.
Blog written by Rithika, a freelance blogger, for USSG India. 26 th Dec2023
Copyrights available- get in touch with USSG.