1. Web Site Design Nico Macdonald / Spy BCS North London Branch, 5/12/01
Nico Macdonald is principal of Spy, a consultancy focusing on design and publishing strategy for networked products, with clients including Euromoney Publications, Haymarket and USA Networks. He writes on business, design and technology for a number of publications in the UK and the US. He is also on the Exec of the British HCI Group and is on the organising committee for ACM SIGCHI’s Designing Interactive Systems 2002 conference.
Version 1.1 © Spy 2001

2. What is good design? Good design comes from mapping your project goals and constraints to your audience needs and characteristics, and marrying creativity to effective process
Good design comes from mapping your project goals and constraints (people, skills, time, resources) to the needs of your audience (which may not be explicitly expressed) and characteristics (context of use of the Web, level of skill, access platform), and marrying creativity to effective process (for instance usability is a process for evaluating a proposed design solution). Design for the Web is focused on creating an interface between technology and people

3. Experience design is the thing that knits technology and strategy together Terry Swack, ex-VP of Experience Design at Razorfish
Design also bridges business goals, technology, and organisational implementation. It can do this because designers are trained to put themselves in the position of others so they can understand their situation, perception and needs, and find the best way to mediate constraints. Designers are also skilled at facilitating communication between people.

4. Design can and should be used to investigate and determine the scope of a project before an RFP is issued, or a single line of code is written. This can be facilitated by sketching and other techniques that can help participants in a project to better understand its scope, and can be used with potential audiences to better understand their needs and the ways in which they might use your product.

5. These techniques are quick and cheap, and much cheaper than re-doing an ill-conceived Web implementation (which also takes more time and is demoralising for everyone involved in your project).

6. Users should be involved as early as possible in a project, and regularly re-involved in rounds of interface evaluation and usability testing. They should also be considered in the context in which they will use your product…

7. … and as the Web moves to other platforms and audiences become more varied their contexts of use will be more varied and challenging to address.

8. [Concept © IDEO http://www. ideo. com/what
[Concept © IDEO Learning from users, finding effective ways to present a design solution, and evaluating and refining its success in an iterative fashion is key to understanding the design problem and implementing the overall solution.

9. There are many ways to communicate design ideas, from pencil sketches, to wireframes, to ‘blueprint’ Web pages. This example is an examination of type readability and use of colour, the semantics of links, and screen layouts for particular types of information.

10. Combined with iteration these techniques are key to low cost, effective Web site development.

11. Design treatments should emphasise quick evolution and iteration of particular aspects of design concepts that together will make up a working design solution – which itself will need to be tested. How many times has your designer presented you with ‘finished’ Photoshop sketches that appear to be a fait accompli?

12. Effective collaboration and communication between the client, design and engineering is critical to the success of a project. The Web is an ephemeral medium and new ways need to be found to share documents and specifications, research, tasks, project planning, and comments on design work in progress. This example is taken from the process flow diagram that is part of the Design Council’s ‘Web Design for Business’ project (

13. Web Pages That Suck: Learn Good Design by Looking at Bad Design Vincent Flanders, Michael Willis (Sybex)
Teaching your organisation about design principles is more important than implementing the initial design solution. Make sure your designers explain their thinking to the key people involved in your project, and to those who will be involved in maintaining and updating the site. Documentation of the design solution is also important. Your employees can also learn about design by being constructively critical of the design of sites they use. ‘Web Pages That Suck’ exemplifies this method of learning.

14. References www. WebDesignForBusiness. org. uk www. spy. co
References