Artistic Design vs. Usability Design
Today, while working with my favorite UI/design guy, we were nit-picking over subtle navigation elements (in a step-by-step process, is tabbed navigation better? floating buttons labeled, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.?) and your standard “add to cart” buttons. In my ifinite Web 2.0 wisdom (ha!), I said I wanted the global navigation to be larger tabs and the footer navigation (add to cart, save to wishlist, etc.) to be larger and more obvious as well. At one point he said “that’s too Fisher Price.” I laughed. The WordPress software has me a little biased towards big fonts, buttons, and text. However, there’s power in this because it took me all of 2 minutes to setup the blog and figure out the software. Simple and straight forward.
His comment did get me thinking about how much the web is a constant struggle between usability and aesthetics. The theories on both are a bit blurred. Our problem right now is trying to apply brand guidelines for what was previously a 100% print-focused brand on the web. Not good (small serif fonts, limited color palette that doesn’t work well with text, colors that don’t translate well on computer monitors…you know the drill). Fortunately, we’ll be taking closer look into this for ‘07.
Anyway, I don’t have a definitive right way of approaching it, other than I think the struggle between artistic design and usability design is a healthy one to have, regardless of the website’s content. In our line of business (blinds and shades), it’s as much ease-of-use as it is fashion, and the emotional connection. Consumer marketing online is challenging, and I really look forward to the first usability study after we push some of our latest changes to the live site. Heatmaps are what I’m really interested in doing this time to determine the visibility of our navigation and to see if we’re any worse off with “Fisher-Price” buttons vs. smaller, “on brand” buttons. At the end of the day, it’s in your best interest to have both graphic designers who are non-web-savvy and web-savvy UI/designers eye-balling the site. This, combined with information architecture based on natural talent (and some data from web analytics and usability studies, too 
), should always produce a superior website.
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