Web design trends in this century so far
15 May 2009Is good web design ephemeral and led by fashion, or does what is considered good design evolve and change, mature even, over time? In an attempt to answer to this question, I'd like to contribute the results of a small potted survey I did on this recently, which asked "is web design really changing over time?" from a user-centered point-of-view.
Recently we moved our home office to a new, smaller space and I had to purge some of my books. In the process I re-discovered two old books showcasing commercial web design, and found myself examining the contents, thinking "keeper or sleeper?" Both books were from the beginning of the century, with a strong bias towards the sites of commercial companies, rather than the social-networking and Web 2.0 type of sites we have now. Both tended to rave about designs that at the time the books' authors obviously considered innovative and creative.This is fair enough when celebrating something from a graphic design point-of-view, but web sites today are about more than the presentation, or rather they should be. As Gerry McGovern is prone to say, these days generally,
when people come to your website they are on a missionand if you make it hard for people to use your site by using a purely visual approach to the design, they'll not come back.
Looking through the books, I was curious to know how many of the sites were still operating and what they looked like now. Nine years is a very long time on the web, so I was expecting to see some changes.
The two books were
- Web Design that Works, by Lisa Baggerman, published by Rockport in 2001, and
- Cyber Shops, by Claudia Gerdes and Jutta Nachtwey, published by Thames & Hudson in 2000.
I followed the URL for each web site featured in the books, noting the site's current status, and what, if anything, had happened to the design. It wasn't a very scientific survey (see notes about this below) but the results were interesting nevertheless.
Of the 72 sites featured in both books, 68% were still operating, with around a third no longer in existence. This is surprising. Considering the economic and social events of this century so far, I expected to find more dead sites than this. Maybe the good designs from the beginning of the century had stood the test of time? In fact, not. Further examination revealed a significant trend.
Of those still operating, the majority had new designs, and many of them had moved away from the design ideas so lauded and featured in the books. Several of the sites (7%) that previously used radical navigation and quirky presentation, had morphed into the now standard E-commerce site model, using the familiar product catalogue, product details, shopping cart structure.
It was disappointing to see some of the sites still using Flash only (10%), although this design-ethic is still very common today, sometimes appropriately, sometimes not. On the other hand, it was was good to see many (20%) were now using a web standards approach, with valid HTML/XHTML and CSS for layout and presentation.
A significant design trend
The overall design trend of the web sites in these books indicates a normalising of web design, using elements and layouts most likely considered "standard characteristics" for a web site now. These characteristics include:- a clean, less cluttered look,
- a centered, fixed width layout,
- consistent layout and placement of site components like search and navigation,
- more accessible use of colour across the content body of the page (as opposed to that around the content, where visual design has become spectacular in some areas thanks to creative use of CSS),
- invariably white or pale backgrounds for the main content,
- more common use of standard or uniformly installed web fonts
- type size generally set larger and easier to read.
So can the design trends seen in the web sites featured in these books, be extrapolated to other web site types, like those found now in these "Web 2.0" times? I think so. Obviously the purpose of a commercial site can be quite different to that of a social networking site, but people do use both, so the design metaphors or elements that people recognise, and are familiar with using, are likely to be common for both types of site to succeed.
A problem with these graphic design books is that mostly the sites were being judged purely on their visual appeal not the usability or user-friendliness criteria considered good practice today. In doing so, these books illustrate nicely the warning that Jakob Nielsen and others give about departing from the norm in terms of web design – be very sure your audience can cope with this or you site will be doomed. On reflection, I think we've come a long way since the beginning of the century.
Greg ----------------------
Some worthwhile articles about good web design:
- Robin William's advice
- Advice from Smashing Magazine
- Excellent survey of modern good practice by Web Design from Scratch with fine examples.
Footnote: Why this survey might not be very scientific.
- I based it only on two random books, which may or may not have been good judges or relevant indicators of the web design industry – fair call, but the books were from reputable publishers, written by leading web design experts of the time, so unlikely.
- Maybe the books picked rubbish sites – not really, most were from highly successful retail brands and businesses, which would be expected to have commissioned leading designers of the time.
- There was a bias in the sites featured, in that most were commercial sites, not the more modern Web 2.0 sites we have now, where people expect to interact more – indeed, it's been my observation that the business world in general doesn't understand the web at all.
- My categories are completely arbitrary, and not based on any scoring system – actually the categories more or less created themselves based on what had happened to the sites.
- I didn't use any specific design criteria – true, but maybe I used experience and a trained eye.
Labels: web design
posted by Greg on Friday, May 15, 2009,
