Web designers naturally have a distorted view of web pages, which is different to how real users interact with web pages.
The way we look at pages as we design them is quite different from how they're used in the real world.
To create designs that work in the real world, we must appreciate the way they'll really be used.
The way that we, as designers, even approach web pages is almost alien, compared to what goes on in the real world. That’s probably the main reason why so many web sites are badly designed.
Whenever you or I look at a design (or anything), our perception changes. Most importantly, we really look, as though we’re looking at a work of art.
We start to notice subtle differences that we wouldn’t have seen at first. We start to appreciate the play between different colours, textures and layers. If we look long enough, we’ll stop seeing. As the cliché goes, we “Can’t see the wood for the trees”.
In order to create effective web designs, we have to be sympathetic to web users. That involves getting smart in three key areas:
These three things pretty well sum up ‘Web design from Scratch’. The rest of the Basics section deals with the first two areas: the web browsing environment, and the habits of web users.
Once we fully acknowledge the way people really browse the web, we can get smart and positively design our sites to help real-life users, and avoid all the common mistakes that make life difficult for them.
Do you love our approach to crafting simple & effective web sites that just work for people?
We'd love to hear about your web strategy.
Contact one of our team today!
Sign up for my regular newsletter to keep updated on everything I'm doing and thinking about in web design.
I find it funny that a web site that talks about website design has a ton of broken links.
Thanks Shiv, we recently moved the whole site onto WordPress on a new server, but we are working on fixing all broken links.