I was reading an interesting article on one of my favorite Web sites of the moment, Airbag.
The question was posed by Greg Storey, the creative mind behind Airbag. He questions the utility of design without purpose:
"You can style a site six ways to Sunday but unless it does something to improve the metrics for which the design has been made, well it won't amount to a pile of nested tables."
I find the responses almost more interesting that the original question. I've always been a firm believer in form following function (at least 98% of the time).
Having been in the business of building Web sites and Web applications for a living I've always found return on investment (ROI) to be the one baseline metric that should never be ignored. At least in a commercial site.
One worthy recently commented in response to Greg's question:
I also agree that ROI is very important consideration when building any site. However, awards aren't there to congratulate the designer on how much money they have made for their clients. They are there to congratulate them on how well the site has been designed. Good design doesn't always mean high ROI and a high ROI doesn't always mean a good design!
In one sentence he says ROI is a very important consideration and then the next paragraph pretty much dismisses the initial statement. I find it almost impossible to dismiss ROI.
Unfortunately, good design doesn't always yield a good ROI--but it is much likelier to do so than poor design (all other things being equal). And yes, sites can succeed in spite of poor design.
But the original point still pertains--if you don't have some metric for success, and the design you provide doesn't make some progress toward those metrics, it wasn't a good (adequate) design. I don't think you can separate ROI from design if you are designing for a client rather than for yourself.
Maybe this is the difference between art school students and commercial artists? I found that I often had to explain to artists who worked for me that 90-95% of the ideal was good enough--we simply didn't have the time/money to continually reinvent graphical approaches on a fixed budget.
Those who "got it" frequently made good commercial artists. It's a tough job bringing discipline to a creative field.
Posted by artandscience at March 17, 2004 07:46 AM