King Marketing

These six web sites belong to Firms with Heavy Reputations in Architecture and Design — but paradoxically, they break almost every standard of proper web design. And I think, finally, that I’ve figured out why.

Have a gander at these examples. If you have a pen and paper handy, take some notes. Go ahead, I’ll still be here. (whistles)

..dum de dum de dum…All done? Fine. Let’s move along.

The examples above all share something in common: they’re not about the user.

Most of our example sites are Flash-based: four of them launch the Flash site in a pop-up window. (What’s so wrong with the first window? That’s really just poor coding, but I digress.) As I posted earlier, there’s nothing wrong with Flash per se - it’s what they do with it that’s so atrocious.

Coop Himmelblau at least has a definite (if hyperactive) menu bar, but makes you read grey text on a grey background with a tiny, tiny mouse-over scrolling mechanism, which violates the time-honoured standard known as Fitts’ Law.

The Brian Healy Architects site is a prime example of “Mystery Meat Navigation,” as Vincent Flanders wittily named this phenomenon. Fitts would have a fit with those tiny coloured rectangles - not only are they hard to target, we don’t know what they are. Decoration? Mouse over them and tiny 4-point type emerges underneath them. Good luck reading that if you have less than perfect vision or a crappy monitor. The text is graphical, so your browser text size preferences are irrelevant. And a cute little @ sign for the email address. I thought that was a speck of dust on the screen. The inside of the site isn’t any better, for what it’s worth.

AlliedWorks’ site has a poetic paragraph with Big Words that are ostensibly links, but we’re still not quite sure what to do here, or where those links will take us. I don’t want to guess, I want to know.

Enter Charles Rose Architects’ site and you’ll get a pop-up window with menu items that launch other animated menu items; I went back 3 times and couldn’t quite get it to work. Titling the menus with opaque terms like “Core” doesn’t help.

Richard Rogers Partners almost make you miss their HTML site on purpose, like it’s an apologetic afterthought. Launch the Flash site and you have to sit through a 30-second morphing buildings animation which, given the paucity of content there, is rather pointless. And it seems as if the HTML site - which is more usable - isn’t updated as often as the Flash site, either. Not great for searchability. Their little coloured-numbered squares navigation is so unclear, they need to add labels to it - as in stand-up comedy, if you have to explain it, it doesn’t work. The hierarchical menu system forces you to worm your way back up to the top if you want to go somewhere else: I want to be able to jump from any page to any page - that’s the whole point of hyperlinks, innit? Further useless widgetry: fading-in and fading-out pink band of quotes from famous people. The “next page” arrows are so subtle, they might as well not be there; I didn’t even know some pages had additional content.

The overuse of Flash - and useless Flash, to boot - seems symptomatic of the architecture and design community’s obsession with surface appearances. Looking at many of the sites above, there’s very little that couldn’t be done with pure HTML, CSS, Javascript, and DHTML. As they say in the trenches, don’t send in Flash to do HTML’s work.

What About Me?

Almost none of these sites seemed to have any interest in me, the end-user. Almost all of them fall into the category of brochure-ware, the Web equivalent of corporate brochures which sing the praises of the firm, their work, their capabilities, the founders, and the lead designers, but provide almost nothing for me to do except be a passive viewer. They don’t seem to know who their users are or why they are there; they frankly don’t seem to care. Most of them only grudgingly provide an email link which you have to dig deep for.

So…If even staid old corporations like TimeWarner can “get” web usability, and put up user-centric sites with good UI and useful tools, why can’t architects and designers? My theory is that they see themselves as Artists, and they want their sites to be as Creative as possible. Problem is, architects and designers aren’t necessarily artists. True art has no loyalty but to itself, and no purpose except to be art!

No Commerce Here, Please

To be sure, there’s an artistic impulse in what architects and designers do, but there is an even larger obligation to standards and craft. The architecture market rarely rewards trail-blazing to produce Works of Ponderous Meaning, despite what the newspapers say: It rewards developers of suburban tract housing, office parks and luxury condos. The products of architects and designers — buildings, manufactured objects, interfaces, systems — are first and foremost, functional. They exist to meet practical needs and the demands of the market. But their designers apparently don’t want to see themselves as makers of practical, market-driven products.

THe perception of architect-as-Artist has been skewed by a handful of ‘stars’ like Saarinen, Mies, Frank Lloyd Wright, Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava, and Daniel Libeskind. These latter three are known for their really-out-there signature buildings which, in true Corbu tradition, demand to be set in their own little parks, as they have usually nothing to do with the surrounding urban environment. (At best, they are like alien embassies; at worst, they’re like the Visitors’ mothership looming over the city). It is important to note that these buildings are the exception, rather than the rule - thankfully.

There are celebrity Flash designers, too. Joshua Davis also does really-out-there signature works, like Once Upon A Forest - a kind of Flash equivalent to Libeskind’s pointy sea urchin buildings.

But, if you look at Davis’ commercial portfolio, you’ll see his site for the VW Phaeton and the related Die Glaeserne Manufaktur piece, which are models of restrained design, adherence to standards, and are 100% usable, if not particularly user-centric.

He understands who the users of these sites are and what they are looking for. He does wireframes, he does usability testing, he refines, tests again, then launches. It is done in collaboration with Marketing and Research and frustrating meetings with the Client’s Boss who doesn’t Get It. That is all part of the boring craft of good web design, but the result is worth it.

To Know, Know, Know Your Users Is To Serve, Serve, Serve Them

User-centric content requires you to know where your audience comes from, who your visitors are, and why they are at your site. Only then can you start to think like a typical user (or ask questions of your actual users - what a concept!) and organize or create content that addresses their needs.

Beyond that, I believe that for architecture and design firms to craft successful web sites, they’re going to have to view the Web not as a delivery system for electronic brochures, and certainly not as a Statement, but as a platform to enable two-way personal communications directly between themselves, their employees and their customers.

If they want their sites to attract and retain a clientele, then they have to put a human face and voice on everything. Encourage their employees to start weblogs. Put up UBB Forums and make them centers of discussion for the community, tied in to real-world events like conferences and casual networking parties. If they have customer service agents, they should think about using LivePerson chat, or be brave and publish their personal AIM / iChat handles - all the way from the receptionist to the CEO.