Website Design and Usability
Website design philosophy
Robert Maxim's website design philosophy is 'usability before design'.
Website design priorities
We believe the priority of a business website is to benefit and satisfy the user's practical needs above all else. Visual 'look', while still important, is a subjective opinion that has no business basis. It is a personal opinion based on emotion.
Why such a simple design?
Some people have questioned the simple, basic layout and design of our websites. We take the perspective that our customers choose tools based on function and performance rather than “looks”. Choosing Robert Maxim's 'Website as a Service' should be a sound business decision – not one based emotion. Our websites are built from research and sound design principles for ease of use and optimum performance. Simplicity, clarity, functionality lead to results.
How to judge good design
When building a business website, business owners commonly experience frustration trying to judge the quality of website design. Everyone wants to have the best looking website, but opinions of what a great site looks like vary greatly. Fortunately, good websites aren't based on emotional opinion. Well designed websites are based on research evidence.
What to look for
The look and feel of well-conceived websites does vary greatly. However, great websites tend to share a number of common key characteristics. Web designers and architects use guidelines to provide them with a deep understanding of these characteristics. For example, the three guidelines that score highest in both relevance and supporting evidence include1:
- Provide useful content -- While it seems like common sense, it's not uncommon for sites to contain a company's sales pitch instead of the information that site visitors want. Studies have found that content is more important than visual design, navigation, functionality and interactivity.
- Ensure visual consistency -- Design creativity must be balanced with consistency. Studies have shown that tasks performed on more consistent website design resulted in quicker user ask completion, fewer errors, greater user satisfaction and a shorter user learning curve.
- Use dark text on plain, light colored backgrounds -- People read dark text on a white background up to 32 percent faster than white text on dark background.
1 A number of design and usability guidelines and their characteristics are explained in the "Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines" developed by the USA federal government as part of its usability.gov initiative.
Next -> Making connections
