The beautiful Vespa is often considered the epithomy of Italian industrial design from the 50’s and 60’s, a period where the genius of some extraordinary designers and entepreneurs brought timeless objects into our households and imagination. The success of their works often relied in the undestanding that the design of an object is a consequence of its practical use in a given context, and that beauty and functionality must come together.
Just like it happens in the nature, “function precedes form“(Jean Baptiste Lamarck).
Stretching this concept a bit and moving it into the realm of website usability, we can see that the need for consumer-centric design is growing stronger and usability is in fact becoming the primary goal of building a website, as opposed to its purely graphic or “esthetic” appeal.
One could even argue that the strictly graphic aspect doesn’t really matter in a sense, meaning that if you base your website design on a consistent navigation structure, a deep undestanding of usability issues (which content goes where and how should the user move throughout the elements), and the offline company’s brand identity, you have all the elements that really matters to the users once they have landed on the site and decide to perform any operation on it.
The design of an effective travel website has entered into a mature stage, just like the industry behind it, resulting in some best-practices beeing now consolidated and unescapable in a way: take any OTA’s website, scrap off the most superficial layer, and you will barely notice any difference in the way the same elements (navigation bar, booking engine, special offers graphic box, special offers text links etc) are presented to the users. There are basic elements that simply have to be there, because users are now expecting them to be there.
On the other hand, we are now witnessing a gradual shift from hyerarchical organized content (the typical website tree as illustrated by any website map) to a number of other ways of accessing contents. The so-called travel 2.0 is heavely characterized by:
> the growing relevance of on-the-site searching tools;
> the use of tags or tag-clouds as a complement to traditional navigation paths;
> the booming of blogs , where elements are arranged in a less-structured, often very personal ways;
In all these cases, it is the user who sorts and organises the contents according to personal preferences.
The likes of Flickr, Meetup or other sharing/social network platforms clearly envise a new goal for web-design, which is the application of usability logics to the individual retrieval, re-use and sharing of data. We could extend the famous Stephen Krug usability motto “Don’t make me think” into “Just let me search” .
All this is not to diminish the importance of a strong graphic in conveying the right brand message and in contributing in a exciting customer experience, but rather to dismiss the graphic-approach to website builiding. Very often, companies would devote excessive resourses and internal debates to the purely graphic aspect of the website, completely forgetting fundamental questions about usability and content organisation. Or they would consider a graphic agency as a viable supplier for fundamentale choices for their online distribution strategy.