Design State: A weblog about government web design

I’m collaborating with GovLoop in my Ask The Design State video series. Here’s the first installment, just a very basic overview of what design is. If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer, head on over here and let me know.

Transcript

Welcome to the first installment of Ask GovLoop. My name is Adam Harvey. I’m a web designer in Cleveland, OH. I’m going to talk about design, if you’ve got a minute.

When I think about design in a broad sense, I think about how well something works and how intuitive it is to use. Aesthetics comes in second to usability. Yet for me, the opposite holds true with websites. The first thing I pay attention to is how pretty the site is, and I think about its usability only after that first impression.

Yet web design isn’t just about how pretty a site looks; the effectiveness of its layout and usefulness of its content are equally important. All three of these pieces are necessary for a top-notch website.

So when you visit a site, or look at your own, ask yourself:

1. Is the site aesthetically pleasing?
2. Is the layout intuitive?
3. Is the content useful?

and you’ll get a better idea of what separates good design from bad. Thanks for listening!

This post is my own personal opinion and is not necessarily the opinion of my employer.

While not explicitly part of my job description, I feel that it is incumbent upon me to keep fairly up to date with the State of the Art in web design. This typically entails reading a bunch of weblogs and testing out new techniques as they show up on my radar. Eventually I hope to even use a few of these in sites I design. For example, I used CSS rounded corners on this site, but you won’t see them if you’re using Internet Explorer.

And that’s exactly where the biggest peril I run into as an in-house designer rears its head. Most of our clients and managers expect websites to look the same in every browser (c.f. Do websites need to look exactly the same in every browser?).

The chatter about design in the freelance (or self-employed) design world (which is where just about all of the web designers who write about web design make their living) doesn’t have much sympathy for the in-house designer. There is much talk about refusing to support or debug a site in IE6 when designing, or forcing IE6 users to pass by a nag-screen, or providing a completely different stylesheet (by far the nicest route) for users of that most-wretched of browsers.

I completely agree with them in spirit. In practice, however, these methods are impracticable. The market share for IE6 is 14.5% as of May 2009, three times that of Google Chrome & IE8, and nearly 5 times that of Safari. Most of the agencies we do work for have employees who are restricted to using IE6, and blocked behind a firewall so they can only access pages on our network. I’m probably the only one at work who cares if a site looks right in Opera or Safari, but I’m definitely not the only one who feels that users of our sites should be able to do just as much in IE6, and have just as nice of a time doing it, as folks who are using Firefox or some other browser. Even if it is a pain in the ass.

So when I read about the newest hotness in HTML5, or CSS3, I long for the chance to try and implement just a few of the options provided. At the same time, I know it isn’t worth my time to try it, because I’m going to have to spend a day or more tweaking a design to look right in IE6. I could probably get twice as much work done as I do now if I constructed a site’s layout using tables, or just sliced it up in Photoshop, and no layman would notice the difference. My work would be half-quality though, not coded to standards, and a nightmare for anyone with accessibility needs.

Having a standard in place gives web designers the benefit of something to strive for. The tug-of-war between keeping my skills bleeding-edge sharp and meeting the needs of our clients means that I will probably never meet those standards or the expectations of my fellow web designers. Sometimes it is tough to read the derision directed at designers who don’t have the choice on what or how to work on a project. For the people like me who’ve been following along, web design weblogs have convinced us that a site can have some flex across browsers. Now it is just preaching to the choir. If anyone has figured out how to convince a non-technical-oriented director of a government agency (who has a lot more important things to take care of than listening to a web designer explain why IE6 is the problem) that a site doesn’t need to look the same in all browsers, I haven’t seen it. Please advise.

Them’s the breaks in my little corner of the web world.

In case you missed it the first time around, like I did, WIRED has a good article about the challenges facing the Obama Administration’s attempt to drag federal government use of the Internet into the present.

A key ‘graph about the systemic challenge of this endeavor:

For starters, the federal government operates more than 24,000 separate sites, many of them years out of date. “Nobody stepped back and asked strategically, how do we do this?” Godwin says. “Whenever there is a new initiative or program, they put up a new Web site.” And the first thing they usually do on that site, she says, is post a bandwidth-hogging picture of the bureaucrat in charge.

Godwin and Campbell have been pushing government agencies to treat citizens more like customers, rebuilding their sites to help visitors do things like find loans or obtain passports—rather than serve as static repositories for press releases and personnel photos. “At Housing and Urban Development, for example, one of the missions is to reduce homelessness,” Godwin says. “If you go to HUD.gov, can you find shelter? The answer is no.” If the government can improve itself in these little ways, they say, great. Don’t worry about trying wild stuff, like setting up federal social networks. Many agencies bar employees from even looking at sites like Facebook at work, much less building their own versions.

The Wired Presidency: Can Obama Really Reboot the White House? – Evan Ratliff – 19 January 2009

The article was put together before Obama’s swearing-in, so it is interesting to see how things have played out in the few months since then. For the most part, everything seems to be consistent. The new design of whitehouse.gov and new sites like recovery.gov remain consistent with change.gov and the Obama campaign website. At the same time they suffer from the same content issues that I noted in my review of change.gov, namely, lack of real content, and ease of access to that content.

That’s a big caveat, but these new sites are still light-years better than the other 24-thousand federal government sites. Since we’re so comfortable with the rapid pace of the Internet communication, it is easy for web geeks like me to expect instantaneous improvement, but patience is definitely necessary with our expectations of turning Uncle Sam into Uncle Sam 2.0.