Information Overlord thinks the look and feel of the redesigned Lawyer website is “just nasty“. That’s harsh, but it is certainly a brutal assault on the senses: hundreds of info fragments dressed up with red and blue all over and replete with the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes (and token green and orange for our friends westwards). Why do so many sites – news sites in particular – feel they have to cram as much as possible onto one page and tart themselves up?
This is a question Nick Carr also asks and he doesn’t really have an answer:
Head to any online magazine or newspaper, and you’ll almost certainly be confronted with a page full of dense-packed info-fragments. On a recent visit to the home page of this newspaper, the well-named Guardian Unlimited, I counted 204 links and 30 photographs. The New York Times home page had 316 links, 18 photos, and a dozen banner ads. The pages of technology publications are the worst. …
There’s more than a hint of desperation in all these chockablock sites. “Please don’t go away,” they seem to shout at us. “Look at all our wonderful data-baubles. There must be something here to hold your attention.”
But the shouting’s usually in vain. We may start out looking for some particular piece of information, but as often as not we end up miles away, our neurons frazzled, our original purpose forgotten.
Who’s to blame here? Is it the cluttered sites that are driving us to distraction? Or are the site designers just catering to our scatter-brained capriciousness? That’s hard to say. My guess is that we’re caught in a vicious cycle that speeds up with every mouse click.
What we hanker for is “a small, quiet clearing amid the digital brambles”. That’s why I’ll go for simple, understated design every time. Sure, colour and images liven things up and have their place, but when they take over and actually get in the way of our task at hand, they are counter-productive. We can’t get away from ads, as on many sites they support the free access we enjoy, but we can ask for less other visual clutter. Good web design is not what pleases the execs on a big screen in the boardroom; it is what works for users.
