Know the site’s content before designing a website!

Posted 09/09/2009 in: Interface design | 0 Comment | Permalink

I often work in collaboration with graphic designers who will often present a website’s look and feel to their clients without having analyzed what type of content their design is supposed to support. This has always been puzzling to me.

The design of a home page and of one typical text-content page do not really demonstrate to the client how you will solve the user interface of pages and content elements such as news listings, lists of events, blogs, user comments, photo galleries, embedded videos, forms, etc. Those are the areas of a website where the most users will actually interact with the information. Those are where users will best “feel” the company’s ability to communicate with them.

Therefore, even if it may not be realistic to have resolved all user interface issues in an initial design presentation, it is essential to demonstrate how one plans to solve some of them before finalizing a specific look and feel.