Interface is Everything!

During the last few months, I was doing some research on the interface and users’ perception level when observing visualized information. Right after submitting the thesis, I realized that my archive now contains a huge collection of articles, videos and quotations regarding interfaces and data visualization. As I used to be a web designer at some time, I thought these new ideas might be worth being considered and shared. I’m not going to be the beneficiary at this point, but I believe sharing these ideas and suggesting my ideas as a web designer and a full-time internet addict(!) might seem interesting to a some people out there who are (or about to be) part of the huge family of web developers.

Web development is not only bound to making a number of HTML pages and writing some background code to make them look dynamic. Even flash animations or menus might not help. The really important thing is to put ourselves in users’ shoes and realize: What we actually want from a website? What type of websites do we like? How does it feel when we start surfing a particular website? Let me give you an example. I love the New York Times website, especially its Technology section. Interestingly, Steve Jobs once said that he loves that website and of course its Technology page! Their website is simply black-and-white, containing a reasonable number of images as well as a simple menu on the left, the one that helps users jump to a particular section and read the relevant news that they are keen to know. One might think that a black-and-white website might not be an intellectual choice, but in my opinion, a newspaper’s website should represent its origin and this black-and-white template supports such notion. All these years, people got used to black-and-white papers. Even today’s color papers are not really that colorful! Just grab a color paper and browse its pages. How many headings or sub-headings are in color? Do they often use a color other than black for the context? There might be exceptions, but generally speaking, despite their color images, newspapers are still black-and-white. According to that, the best idea to represent a newspaper’s website is to let it look like a newspaper. This is what New York Times’ website did. Even people who have no idea what New York Times is, can guess that such website is the electrical version of a newspaper.

In contrast, have a look at this second website (Le Figaro). Yeah, Le Figaro is a great world-known paper, but their website is awful! To me, it looks like a weblog or a typical web portal containing news and links from all around the world. It doesn’t make me feel like I’m browsing a website that actually represents a real printed newspaper. The key point here is clear: Designing a suitable interface for a website is a challenging and time-consuming job. Unfortunately this is what that is constantly being neglected by the majority of web developers, particularly companies that hire them. They spend a lot of time and effort on designing good working websites with qualitative data and an acceptable level of security and durability, but the interface is usually one of the least prioritized stages of their projects. Many of these companies own a repository of previously designed interfaces and they use them frequently for their clients’ web projects. What I believe is that every single website requires a deep study of its application and architecture which plays an important role in how its interface needs to be designed and implemented.