There are particular design ingredients that we tend to recommend when we are building a new site with our clients. Since the world of the web is changing all of the time, it’s good to have what’s good and bad corroborated by some solid research, or another design consultancy’s ideas. Research carried out by the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC) on behalf of Rackspace, the well known Managed Hosting company, has just been published. It incorporates a YouGov, UK representative online survey of 2,500 adults, as well as in-depth interviews and in-house qualitative research. This involved setting 50 participants a ‘virtual treasure hunt’, requiring them to seek out specific pieces of information from a variety of websites.
The research paper comes up with a rather complex looking formula for the perfect website, but more importantly the research highlighted:
- 83% of respondents reported ease of navigation as being the most important factor in their ‘ideal’ website, with 62% rating high speed and 49% rating functionality as the other key factors
- 80% of people surveyed rated a clean and simple overall design as their most desirable design factor with only 6% wanting innovative use of flash and multimedia options
- Running a faster (61%) and easier to navigate (52%) website were the two most popular improvements people would make to Internet sites today.
This ties in with our findings. Things like flash and multi-media may have their particular place for demos or more detailed presentations, but should be avoided on the home page. I’ve seen so many sites with some designer’s idea of what looks cool and clever, which actually just irritates on the second and subsequent visits to the site. In any case, these flash components are counterproductive from an SEO point of view. It’s great to hear that clean and simple sites work, and that navigation is rated so highly.
It’s a great shame they didn’t include people’s views on boxes with rounded corners rather that square, pastel colours, and cool looking icons - the common ingredients of many of the web 2.0 sites (just kidding). I came across this nice resource from web design consultancy Scratchmedia. They’ve listed a number of good looking sites, and distil their shared design features:
Simple layout
Centered orientation Design the content, not the page
3D effects, used sparingly
Soft, neutral background colours
Strong colour, used sparingly
Cute icons, used sparingly
Plenty of whitespace
Nice big text
They go on to analyse each of these ingredients in more detail - well worth a read. It’s the kind of approach that helped Goodman Jones win the Accountancy Age award.
And if you are interested in logo design, the Scratchmedia article points to this great post from The Font Feed on logos of Web 2.0.
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