“companies are losing out on a massive amount of potential business simply because their current web design agency has either focused too much on what looks great, or too much on non-essential technical features…”

This quote paints a misleading picture of web agencies working in isolation, free of input or direction from clients, who are in turn innocent victims who have unusable and design-heavy sites inflicted upon them. In practise, however, this very rarely happens. Clients tend to be deeply involved with the design process and must therefore assume ultimate responsibility for the successes and failures of their websites.

Why is this? Well, firstly, responsibility lies with the client because the client decides which agency to commission. The client decides scope, budget and timescales, and goes on to exercise power of sign-off on all major deliverables. And rightly so.

Why rightly so? Well, it’s not just due to the fact that they know their business and their customers more than the agency does. It’s also because it’s their business that will ultimately be impacted by the quality of the delivered site. If it’s successful, it will contribute to the growth of their business. If it fails, their business will suffer and customers will not express their dissatisfaction with the agency but instead with the company itself. So the fact that the client’s bottom line is at stake is a very compelling motivator for their wanting to be involved.

In my experience (although not on every project), agencies tend to put forward ideas for sites which are informed by an understanding of things like usability and accessibility. Clients approach web projects from various perspectives but chiefly from those of marketing and branding.

Most successful web projects result from a productive synthesis of these two sets of interests, and any implication that clients aren’t involved in the process—and therefore aren’t responsible when things go wrong—is highly inaccurate.

My company was initially hired to help flesh out the information architecture and design concepts. The central aim of the project was to build something that functioned more like a software application than a straightforward website, but without using Flash or Java. We went on to produce detailed specifications, site maps, activity flows and the full visual design for the site.

One of the design principles was that “image is king” – the interface design needed to be clean and minimal so as not to stand between the user and the site’s images. The above homepage screenshot gives a sense of how we achieved this.

The new site also makes use of horizontal scrolling, which is quite a radical departure from convention.

We were engaged to carry out over forty user testing sessions in Cologne and London to validate this concept and ensure that users wouldn’t find it too baffling. I conducted these sessions myself and went on to produce the analysis document that led to a series of final refinements being made.

From a technical point of view the project has been really ambitious. If you work in web presentation technologies, I urge you to go and have a play – I think you’ll be impressed with the quality of the coding and the adaptibility of the interface. The company that built the site, Orange Logic, did an amazing job. When we were handing over the functional specification back in November 2007, I was worried that the site was just too complex to be delivered without resorting to Flash. I’m glad to have been proved wrong!

Jill looks at the New York Times website

In the video Jill, the principal user, makes use of a number of futuristic interface devices to:

• Interact with a friend while browsing
• Extract and manipulate data sets from within websites
• Navigate through a vast collection of bookmarks using a 3D interface
• Migrate her browsing experience seamlessly from desktop to mobile devices

It’s a bit like MacOS X

I initially found myself wondering, is the future really going to look so much like Mac OS X? But looking past the visual treatment, there are some strong concepts here. I particularly like the ability to extract and manipulate data from web pages, the near-removal of the browser interface, and the utilisation of the 3D interface to convey the age of bookmarks.

That said, not everyone agrees with me – I’ve had a few conversations today about these ideas and there isn’t really a consensus among the people I’ve been talking to.

The Z-axis is used to convey the age of a bookmark

Is 3D ever really going to enter the mainstream as a means of web navigation? I’ve always been quite sceptical, to be honest. It comes down to incentive – if there’s a serious benefit to be had from learning unfamiliar and complex interfaces, then people will do it. People learnt how to use Myspace, after all!

So, what would have to happen to make us want to learn new, complicated, 3D web interfaces?

Well, the web (along with our own slice of it; our bookmarks, our browsing histories, our social networks etc) is on its way to becoming unmanageably large. Past a certain point, there may be a real benefit in migrating to more sophisticated – but more complex – interfaces.

The standard methods of searching and browsing may still be usable, but woefully inefficient; like running a modern computer with only a command line interface and no GUI. Achievable, but insane.

The web is growing exponentially – its size in five or ten years’ time could present us with unique problems and challenges. Some of the ideas in this concept video shed some light on how we might solve them. But what are those problems and challenges going to be? I’m probably more interested in them than I am in the solutions.

As the week of testing came to a close, it was possible to flick through the responses and get a sense of what adjectives were the most popular. However, it was less easy to convey this to the client in summary form.

Of the 100 options available, just over 30 had been chosen by at least one participant, meaning that rendering the results of the survey as a bar or pie chart would be at best inelegant and at worst unintelligible. And I couldn’t chop the least popular choices just to present a simple overview, as this would skew the data and paint an artificially positive picture of how the participants had responded to the site.

In the end I drew the results of the survey using a “word cloud” model. If you’ve used, well, the internet in the last couple of years you’ll have seen these (although the term itself may not be so familiar!). Each adjective that had been chosen at least once was displayed in the ‘cloud’, and its text size was determined by how many participants had chosen it. This meant that the most popular options stood out clearly and the less popular options, although less visible, were still legible if the diagram was studied closely.

The resulting cloud met with a positive reception when presented to the client and helped to provide a quick and effective summary of the test sessions, especially useful for people in senior management who didn’t have time to go through the detailed analysis of the tests.

Although I used Visio to create the cloud, there are a number of tools online that can be used to quickly generate word clouds of your own. Wordle, at http://www.wordle.com, is the one I’d most recommend.

I’m not convinced that they’re always useful but you never know when you’ll end up in a situation where a word cloud might come in handy.