Damage in Web Design, by Jeffrey Veen

Damage in Web Design

When something stands between your users and their goals, one of two things typically happens. If they truly wish to accomplish their goal with your site, they will perceive a new feature on your site as damage, they will find a way to route around that damage. If they are ambivalent about you or know of an alternative, they will just leave.

Let me give you a couple recent examples. The New York Times has had a registration system for years now, and now a number of other traditional news outlets are starting to follow suit, including many local newspapers. The reason is simple enough -- the financial model behind advertising-supported content on the Web has continued it's relentless downward slide, spurring these organizations to collect more and more demographic information about its audience. Obviously, it won't work. The only time users will cough up their data is when a site offers to return value, and the only proposition these sites provide is one of increased advertising.

Simon Willison discusses this in more depth and points to how users are routing around the damage of feckless registration with BugMeNot, an repository of shared usernames and passwords. Of course, the newspapers are now threatening legal action, rather than realizing they've done something to piss off their audience. It is apparently easier and more cost effective to pay lawyers rather than develop innovative content and services to enhance the online media experience.

Equally as baffling is the recent redesign of the previously invaluable All Music Guide. I haven't seen the sort of user outcry since, frankly, we used to try to redesign HotWired.com back in the early days of the Web. These days, when large sites unveil redesigns, they consist of standards compliant interfaces, user centered architectures, and dramatic increases in speed and ease of use. AMG did almost the exact opposite, creating a jumbled and plodding site with obfuscated code developed explicitly for Internet Explorer on Windows. Say what you will about browser market share and development costs, but if the opinions of the blog community are any indication, users must be abandoning this resource in droves. Thankfully, AMG licenses it's content widely, and the newly relaunched MP3.com offers a usable, clean, and downright cool interface to the Guide. And, as users avoid damage once again, traffic must be through the roof.

Bad design is based on the arrogant and extremely difficult attempts to modify user behavior. Good design derives innovation from existing user behavior. Guess which one succeeds more often?

Update: How's this for routing around damage? Adrian Holovaty has written a plugin for Mozilla that makes AMG suck less. It's amazing what folks will do to thwart bad marketing and design decisions.

This entry was written by Jeffrey Veen and posted 18 July 2004 at 1:45 PM. It was filed under Technology.

Comments

1. On 18 July 2004 at 11:33 PM Lucian wrote:

The business model, simplistically speaking, is to please the customer and have everything else fall into place. It is commonplace to see many overpaid executives try to push their own agenda on the customer, instead of working their behinds off trying to pander to their every whim.

2. On 19 July 2004 at 10:18 AM Wilson wrote:

Adrian Holovaty also has a good writeup of the news site registration sharp-stick-in-your-user's-eye issue from a news insider's perspective: http://holovaty.com/blog/archive/2004/07/16/0244

3. On 19 July 2004 at 2:03 PM andrew wrote:

"It is apparently easier and more cost effective to pay lawyers rather than develop innovative content and services to enhance the online media experience."

Basically, that's right, and that's the whole idea behind using copyrights as license-fee generating properties, too.

Between lawyers and innovation:

- which is more quantifiable?
- which behaves more predictably?
- which can be repeated easily?
- which can be outsourced easily?
- which has quicker short-term effects?

It's lawyers for each one. Not that these are the right questions to ask, but if you're a sweating marketer for the NYT, who's been called in to some exec's office on this problem, what are you going to say? "Well, we're working on an innovative solution"???

4. On 19 July 2004 at 8:29 PM codeman38 wrote:

Umm... the 'All Music Guide' link is pointing to an old HotWired design...

5. On 20 July 2004 at 10:05 AM What The? wrote:

None of your images in the Comments section come up on my machine (I am running IE6), and there is a weird line running through the body of the text at the top of the page.
For someone who has such complaints about web compliance, there are some mighty big stones around that glass house of yours.

6. On 20 July 2004 at 11:31 AM marc MonGo wrote:

All the gas aside. I can't find the important information on Scott Harding on mp3.com, so it's not a solution. Scott Harding is patient zero for this crisis. If I can't find him on a music reference site like allmusic.com WAS, then the situation is still critical.

7. On 21 July 2004 at 10:30 AM Andrew wrote:

"What The?" is right, Jeff: comments display is messed up. Whatever's setting the vertical space on the line with the tiny word-bubble, comemnt number, commenter name, and "said..." needs to be fixed.

On the other hand, this kind of display problem is totally different than the problems at AMG.

8. On 26 July 2004 at 5:42 PM Hemebond wrote:

What the?:"I am running IE6"

The only problem with this page according to the validator is unencoded entities. The page looks perfect in my standards compliant browser. Ever thought maybe the problem is at your end?

I just checked it in IE, and it most definitely is not a problem with the page.

9. On 27 July 2004 at 1:27 PM BEC wrote:

"but if the opinions of the blog community are any indication, users must be abandoning this resource in droves."

Uh, they aren't.

I love people who tell you their site not working in your browser is your browser's fault. Especially when it's overwhelmingly the dominant browser on the internet.

"I made this movie that is the best ever, but I shot it for IMAX screens only - so if the theatres in your town don't play IMAX format it's not my fault and you should have thought of that before you moved there."

lol

10. On 28 July 2004 at 8:38 AM griff wrote:

Has any one seen anything written about the business/advertising model of Salon.com?

If the user does not want a to pay for a subscription, a day pass is offered if the user is willing to sit through a 10-15 second commercial.

Personally, I like the idea. 10 seconds for a full day pass is very fair. Sometimes I will even click through to the the advetiser's site just to show up in their counters, to encourage them to advertise more with Salon (hopefully in the end, keeping Salon financially vaible).

I wonder if it works.