Simple and utilitarian designs fail badly for sites that need to be experience rich
Sunday, March 2nd, 2008The often interesting robert hoekman, jr:
Our Stories should be an experience rich site. It should offer an engaging environment that compels users to explore and connect emotionally to the storytellers. But it doesn’t offer this at all. Instead, it offers what looks like any other Google design. It’s plain, minimalist, and it’s focused entirely around the information and not the experience.
Google apparently thinks it has hit upon the secret formula to all successful websites - simple, minimalist designs that offer information in a concentrated form. In reality, this formula only works for certain classes of sites, of which the original Google website was the par exemplar. Google fails when it attempts to build a site that needs a philosophically different approach. As Hoekman explains:
If Google’s goal here was to create emotional connections, they should definitely have considered something other than the business-as-usual, sterile design work that has become Google’s signature. Granted, some of the site’s pages are geared towards showing people how to conduct interviews for the site, and those pages are probably best left alone, but the main attraction here is an environment of storytelling, not another Google search results system.
…Design is meant to communicate content. With the right design, you can always meet your goals much more effectively. If you want emotional connections, design something that encourages them. If you want people to take action, design to encourage action. Don’t let your usual design style get in the way of doing something great.
