Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Site Design & Ad Design
Ken Sands kicked off a discussion of site design
about a week ago that has been bouncing back and forth -- as
conversations do in this new blog-powered world -- between The Media
Center's
Morph weblog and
Jay Small's website. Sunday's
New York Times adds an angle that crystallizes the issue for me.
I think the problem is that almost nobody really designs. Almost
everybody builds too quickly, basing decisions on unchallenged
assumptions, and decorates websites with nifty widgets and colors based
on personal preference. That's how we get websites that try to look
like newspapers, complete with hard-to-read columnar displays. That's
how we get ads jammed onto the homepage until it starts looking like it
should be driven by Tony Stewart.
Please don't blame the artists (often called "designers"). It's not
their fault. They're handed an ill-defined problem and abandoned to
solve it, then beaten soundly in design reviews by managers who don't
like the color or typeface choices -- or just have to get three more
ads onto the page.
The problem starts at the top (what's the vision?) and extends
through the organization. A well-designed thing begins with absolute
clarity about function, and adds only the elements that contribute to
that function. How different would a newspaper website be if it were
designed like the iPod?
The NYT story about Google
brings it all together. Notice that there are no ads on Google's
homepage. Notice that Google chose to embed text ads at the tail end of
the user experience, not the head end. There has been ample evidence
for years that clear, legible text ads outperform graphic ads, often by
an order of magnitude.
Ads placed on "leaf node" pages outperform ads on homepages. Ads at the
end of reading matter outperform ads at the beginning of reading
matter. And so forth. The data is all sitting in the ad server systems,
and is simply ignored. But Google is an engineering company, and
engineers don't ignore data. Why do we?
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