Understanding Three Web-Design Philosophies--usability, multimedia, and mortised.

One helpful way of understanding the more than 185 million estimated Web sites in the world today is to divide them into three distinct philosophies: usability, multimedia, and mortised. Depending on the designer, any of the three philosophies can do the best job of satisfying the goal of a Web site, which is to communicate to the user in the most effective manner. While multimedia and usability represent the proverbial argument between form and function, respectively, mortising represents the coming together of these two philosophies.

When considering the pros and cons of each philosophy, a designer should take into account how each philosophy addresses the following three factors of any site:

• Aesthetics: How professional is the look and feel of the site? Is it consistent with the desired branding of the business or individual?
• Usability: How quickly and easily can a user find and process information while being able to perform necessary tasks?
• Functionality: Programming should enable the functional aspects of the site, such as forms and database-driven content.

Because of the vast array of hardware, software, and users on the Internet, no one philosophy is the perfect answer for everyone. However, by understanding each philosophy and its strengths and weaknesses, a designer can have a clear understanding of which one will best address the requirements of a particular site.

Usability Philosophy
Usability is a universal term that can be used when describing any site. It represents the ease with which the user can find and process information, as well as perform certain tasks.

The philosophy of usability takes this term to its most far-reaching scope. It attempts to make sites easily usable for all members of their Internet audience.

One method used to accomplish this goal is to strip down a site to its bare essentials, which includes deleting the majority, if not all, of its images. Some followers of the usability philosophy consider graphics to be a complication rather than a facilitation of the communication process. They also believe in designing sites that all browsers can view.

Pros and Cons
As with any issue in life, there are always people with divergent views. Web design is no exception. The philosophy of usability falls at the most conservative side of the design spectrum, which, obviously, is going to have its detractors. Not all designers agree with this philosophy because of the simplicity of the designs, which resemble sites created in the 1990s. Visual usability is only one area that this philosophy addresses. There are also other technical and non-technical aspects that the usability philosophy takes into account. In accordance with the fourth rule of Web design, there are several practical points designers can and should take into consideration when designing:

• Download time should always be as minimal as possible.
• Navigation should be intuitive.
• Consistent Web terminology and metaphors, such as the shopping cart system, should be used (unless there is a valid reason for an exception).
• Writing should be clear and concise to expedite use.
• Sites should always be tested by a variety of users in a variety of browser environments.
• Accessibility for users with disabilities should be accounted for.

Anyone who has surfed the Internet would agree that finding information should be easy as possible. No one likes to spend valuable time clicking all over a site to find a phone number or waste time with hyperlinks that do not go anywhere. This basis of the usability philosophy cannot be disputed for 99.9 percent of the world’s sites.

One of the perceptions of usability is to appeal to everyone. This is simply not true. The sixth rule of Web design is that it is impossible to please everyone. As the number of users increases, a design quickly becomes “too complicated,” “too simple,” “too colorful,” “too short,” “too long,” “too wild,” or “too conservative,” depending on the user.

This philosophy advocates limiting graphics to increase mass appeal. Graphics, however, often increase the usability of a site in four ways:

1) The impression of a site, thus the identity of a business or individual, is first judged visually. Most people form an immediate opinion when first coming to a site, if nothing more than at the subconscious level. If the site appears to be a five-minute design by an amateur, a user is going to question the professionalism and credibility of the business or individual and will very likely leave the site.

2) The brain processes images quicker than text. Many traffic signs, called ideograms, are designed for quick, initial recognition of motor vehicle warnings, laws, and conditions. The reason is that the brain can process a sign exponentially quicker than if the sign were to read for its meaning. Web images work in the same way; they reduce the frustration of a user who is forced to read when a simple image will do.

3) Graphics, along with color, help lead a person’s eye. Similar to using an image to help a user quickly understand a concept, graphics and colors can be used to help lead a user’s eye to where the designer intended. This is useful when a designer has prioritized content that the user should see first.
Note That:- When designing for accessibility, a designer should not rely solely on color because some users might have color blindness, which will affect their perception of the site.

4) Graphic technology can enhance functionality. Immersive imagery (360-degree photos) is one example of technology that designers can use in certain instances to improve a user’s experience and cognition. If a user were looking to spend $5,000 on a vacation to Mexico and wanted to view the rooms of hotels, would it be better to read about the rooms or look completely around them? If a picture is worth a thousand words, the entire page would come up short when describing one room; the homepage, which stretches considerably farther than the figure depicts, has fewer than 900 words. It should be noted that in this example, immersive photos do require a longer download time. To make the site applicable to users with slow Internet connections, a designer should also provide traditional photographs as an alternative.

Multimedia Philosophy

On the other end of the design spectrum from the usability philosophy is the multimedia philosophy. Multimedia sites use animation, audio, and video to create more interactive sites which changes the image with different breeds of dogs, while the site plays an upbeat tempo in the background. Many use vector-based graphics, which can be compressed smaller than bitmap images and generally resized without much degradation of the images, unlike bitmap images.
Many of these multimedia sites are called Flash sites; they are created with Adobe’s Flash animation software. Depending on the increasing prevalence of broadband and where technology heads in the future, such sites could play a more dominant role on the Internet.

Pros and Cons

While many multimedia designers are still learning how to design effectively using this type of functionality, it is certainly an effective way to communicate via the Web. Some of the advantages of multimedia design include the following:

• Much of the technology is vector- and mathematics-based image technology, which allows for higher compression and the ability to resize images without much loss of image quality.
• It has a similar learning curve to XHTML and CSS. Most of the basic layout of simple content on a page can be easy to learn with programs like Flash. However, advanced capabilities of these programs can be a challenge.
• It communicates multidimensionally with graphics, animation, and audio.

Unfortunately, the technology for multimedia sites is not only a strength but also a weakness. Multimedia sites are still not practical for the majority of Internet users for several reasons:

1) Browsers must have a plug-in for the user to view the graphics or site. Over the past several years, this issue has become increasingly unimportant to almost non-existent with the ease of adding and updating such plug-ins. It still should be at least a consideration whether the user will have the necessary plug-in or none at all.

2) Multimedia software still does not integrate with databases as easily as existing Web technology, such as .NET, PHP, ColdFusion, and JavaServer Pages.

3) Multimedia sites work well with vector-based images, but they sometimes do not add many compression benefits for bitmap images, such as GIFs.

4) Multimedia sites are usually more cost-prohibitive to the designer and to the client. In addition to graphics software, a designer needs animation and possibly audio-editing software to create a multimedia site, depending on the site’s requirements. Because Flash sites generally aren’t as easy to update as XHTML sites, it usually takes more time and costs more to do so.

5) Many designers have yet to learn discretion when using the power of multimedia software. Although vector-based images compress well, the file sizes found on many multimedia sites are still considerably larger compared to traditional Web sites. This is because designers often use too much animation, graphics, and audio, which increases the download time of a page and which isn’t always apparent when a user has broadband access. This goes back to Rule 1: Just because you can does not mean you should. The issue is not just with the download time of a page. It is also frustrating, for example, for users to go to a site where they have to see the same intro animation every time they visit. It should not be required to have to click past an intro to get into the site.

note:- Because users may view a site at work, it is usually prudent to create the default setting with the sound off in an animation.

Mortised Philosophy

David Siegel, in his best-selling book Creating Killer Web Sites (Hayden Books, 1997), described mortising as piecing two images together using a table. Mortising, however, can be a much broader term, which represents the philosophy of piecing together graphics, text, and functionality, such as forms, to build striking, graphically appealing sites that are fast, highly usable, and flexible.

Such sites bring together the best of both usability and multimedia worlds, combining them into professional designs that can be viewed by nearly all of today’s Web users Mortising not only complements the functionality of a site, but it also enables designers to use techniques that the graphic design industry has spent decades perfecting without sacrificing download time.

Just because a site looks appealing does not necessarily make it a mortised site. Mortised sites are about more than aesthetics. Many WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editors, such as Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Designer and Adobe’s Dreamweaver, allow a novice to create very appealing sites. Mortised sites are knowledge-driven rather than purely software-driven. This difference enables a designer to use XHTML, CSS, and images in creative ways that often produce faster, more customized designs with less code.

Pros and Cons

While there is no “perfect” type of Web design, for many designers, mortised sites are the best current solution for communicating effectively to the largest possible audience on the Web. Following are some of the pros of this philosophy:

1) Per Andre Agassi, “Image is everything.” Mortised sites can be striking, fast, and highly usable, allowing clients to create powerful and lasting first impressions on their users.

2) Because the designer can use more graphics and less text, the user can more quickly understand concepts, ideas, and emotions used in designs. The use of graphics also allows designers to take better advantage of traditional, time-tested graphic design aspects, including layout, color theory, and typography.

3) Mortised sites not only work with static Web pages but also with dynamic database-driven sites. Because they use existing XHTML and CSS technology, such sites can be easily customized to work with Microsoft.NET, PHP technology, Adobe ColdFusion technology, or Java technology, specifically JavaServer Pages.

4) The learning curve to build such sites is extremely low for experienced Web designers because the technology is not new. Methods used in this book employ simple, creative, and practical ways to use XHTML and CSS in exciting, useful ways.

5) While they do not have to be, mortised sites can be easily designed to be scalable, database-driven sites. If a client or business wants to add three sections to a Web site, a well-designed mortised site can be expanded easily.

6) Mortised sites are modular. This enables a designer to take advantage of various design options, such as Flash, in selected portions of a page. For example, a designer may not want to create an entire site in Flash but only want an advertisement of a new product in the center of the page. With a mortised site, adding such an element is easy when the site is designed with such flexibility in mind.

While mortised sites satisfy the site requirements of the majority of the world’s Web sites, they are not the complete answer. They still face the same issues that usability and multimedia sites must contend with:

1) Similar to multimedia sites, mortised sites require plug-ins to use some of their elements, such as animation and audio.

2) Mortised sites are limited by the knowledge of the designer. A designer can create a similar-looking site in a WYSIWYG editor, but such software is always going to limit the designer’s work in one way or the other if he doesn’t fully understand what goes on “under the hood.”