Does Design Matter in Comparison to Content?
November 16th, 2008 | Posted in blog 12 Comments »
Last week I made some alterations to my site’s design, but no one seemed to notice. In fact, few people have ever commented about my blog’s design at all. The same goes with the music intros for my podcasts. I can change the music each time, and no one ever responds.
In contrast, if a post has good content, I see a steady stream of comments. My experience leads me to conclude that content is about 90% important, and design is 10% important.
My colleague Ben Minson wrote a post explaining explaining a similar point. He said,
… Designers place more importance on good design than do users, while users do the opposite. I have to side with the users on this one. Outdated information alienates and frustrates users, and no amount of “good design” can make up for that. Would you say to yourself: “I want to kick my computer because the information on this site is so wrong!… But the site looks nice, so it’s not a problem.” If you believe good design is better than up-to-date information, maybe you’d better stick with a cool, soothing color scheme. (“Results of a Study about Online Experience“)
Heavy visual design (left) versus minimalistic design (right). Which do readers prefer?
Despite the irrelevance of a nice-looking site, I still find myself, on the weekends, tinkering with WordPress design. Last week I did all of the following to my theme:
- Changed from two sidebars to one because it looked cleaner and simpler
- Widened the sidebar column to accommodate more content
- Changed the background color of the sidebar to gray
- Customized the Podcast page’s sidebar with sidebar content specific to podcasts
- Reduced the number of subscription icons on the home page (moving the Podcast-Only subscribe buttons to the Podcast page’s sidebar)
- Moved the location of the subscription buttons to the banner area rather than the sidebar
- Added an About section at the top of my sidebar
- Added an Advertising button on my toolbar
- Implemented WordPress’ caption feature for images (by far the coolest thing I did)
- Increased the kerning on the word “Writing” in my banner logo
- Changed my tagline from “technical communication blog” to “a blog about the latest trends in technical communication”
Did you notice any of these changes? Probably not many. In general, do readers care about design? Not unless it gets in the way. Mostly users come to your site for the content. Similarly, in help authoring, your users come to the help to read the help, not to admire the design. Good design promotes the content well, gets out of the way, and is somewhat invisible. (I wrote about this here.) In this sense, good design is less design.
That said, your site’s visual design does, however, have some influence on readers. Design contributes to the split-second judgment that readers make about the authority of the site. If your site looks professional, your content may seem more authoritative.
However, a professional site doesn’t have to be ornate, or full of color and eye-popping graphics. A professional looking site can be minimalistic, white, and fairly plain. I’ve noticed that I tolerate minimalistic themes on my blog much more than others. They’re less likely to be an eyesore; they don’t distract from your content.
For example, look at the themes of these popular blogs:
Design is minimal with each. And of course don’t forget the quintessential example of successful minimalism: Google. Google’s site is almost 75% white space, but few complain because that’s not why they use the site.
Sponsors
Tags: content, design, minimalism, Technical Writing, white space
If you liked this post, keep updated with new content: Subscribe to I'd Rather Be Writing.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
0 Subscribers
Mark Baker (7)
Greg DeVore (4)
Jonatan Lundin (4)
bg (3)
Jim Reardan (2)
Marcia Johnston (2)
mma (2)
Tammy P (2)
A Andrew (1)
Aldergrove drivin... (1)
How funny! Yesterday I just started playing around with my blog design and some plugins. And I took a closer look at your website to gain some information about the cool plugins your are using.
And yes there was a feeling of “Something has changed here. ‘A blog about trends…’.” But I couldn’t tell if these changes were really changes.
Until now
I’m definitely sure I would not have noticed it while just reading your posts.
You touch on a great point when you say “do readers care about design? Not unless it gets in the way.”
Often, design is transparent. If it does it’s job, it allows the user to find that content, interact with it in a meaningful way, and achieve their goals for visiting the site. If it doesn’t work, people may not even be able to find that great content of yours.
Yes, it also contributes to that snap judgement: where am I? Is this where I expected to be? Is this a brand that is professional/trusted/suited to my taste? But it’s not just window dressing.
If design is neglected, it can indeed get in the way. For example, so many sites are hard to read.
I find this blog easy on the eyes and fairly easy to read. Your typography choices–font, font size, line height, a light background, and the width of the content column–all make it that way.
Yes, you need good content or no design can save you, it’s no different than with physical products. Design should enhance, not distract or interfere. But, it can distinguish you from the masses. It doesn’t have to be blatant, a lot of design is subtle.
I’d quibble with your examples…obviously the design in the image to the left is cluttered, overly designed, distracts, and makes the content hard to read. It’s a good example of what not to do. The one on the right is minimalist and clean but gives no sense of personality or brand, and yes, when blogging, you are a brand so I wouldn’t necessarily hold that up as good. The best is probably somewhere in between.
As far as using “major” blogger/personalities as design examples, they have an audience no matter what they might do design wise and it says nothing about site design in general.
I agree that content is the most important, but this doesn’t give design enough credit. To compare it with the print world, I think about a writer I worked with 15 years ago. She was always miffed that other people in our group pushed “design over content,” at least in her opinion. She took great pride in her content, and she chided others for wasting time worrying about formatting issues.
To her shock, users often complained about her documentation. I remember her coming into my office one day. She’d gotten a report about some missing information, and she had steam shooting out of her ears. She showed me the document and pointed to a sentence about 2/3 of the way down the page. “Right there,” she bellowed. “The illiterate users can’t see what they’re looking for when it’s right in front of them.”
She was correct. It was right there, buried in a page that had three gigantic paragraphs. Short paragraphs, bullets, and subheads were just a few of the things she considered as wasteful formatting.
Even though the information was there, who in their right mind would want to wade through all the mind-numbing stuff on that page to find it.
So design does play a significant role, particularly when we’re not seeking information for our own personal interest/enjoyment. (For example, I go certain web sites specifically because I want the content, not begrudgingly because I have to. So I’m willing to accept a less-than-artistic format.) In general, though, I can absolutely see the point of “good” design. If there’s nothing about the visual appearance of the page that makes me want to look at it, it may not matter one wit how great the content is. Odds are I’ll never read it.
Of course, we can always argue how much design is “good” design. There are any number of examples where designers have gone overboard or in the wrong direction.
Tom, your followers may not notice your changes because I’d guess most of them don’t often physically visit due to RSS.
Chris, I think there’s a difference between formatting and design, or perhaps formatting is an aspect of design. Designers are often concerned with things like sizes, shapes, colors, and behaviors of onscreen elements. Formatting, as your comment highlights, has more to do with how you arrange the text itself. I agree with you that formatting has a huge impact on how well users can locate and digest information.
I don’t mean to minimize the importance design. I like to see a well-designed site. As several of you pointed out, a well-designed site is usually minimalist, transparent, makes it easy for users to find and interact with information, and so on.
I’m just saying that so few people ever comment on my design, it seems a low priority compared to the site’s content. But of course, this is coming from a writer, not a designer. I heard a database engineer the other week explain that the data — its structure, integrity, and security — were the most important aspect of a project because the data would well outlive any design. So we all have our biases.
Many sites that are design-heavy often look terrible. If you’ve ever looked for a new WordPress theme, you know what I’m talking about. I don’t know why, but about 95% of the themes out there get a D+ for design. Most of the appealing themes are fairly minimalist. As you say, they put the focus on the content.
Thanks for all your comments.
Tom…
—–
A well designed site doesn’t necessarily need to be minimalist and in the whole web world maybe isn’t. A good design (complex or minimal) should communicate something and enhance, not distract, but isn’t necessarily transparent. It’s very hard to generalize.
—–
You seem to favor minimalism (a bias, we all have them) so you naturally will like the themes that are.
—–
I’m not surprised that you’ve gotten very few comments on the design or any changes you made. People don’t visit your site every day like you and will be less familiar with the exact design/layout. Unless the redesign is radical, most won’t notice. And even if they do, most won’t comment.
—–
And of course, as you mention, you are a writer
I’ve seen the previous design of your blog and this new one. It seems to me the design relies on what is available in the WP theme you chose to use. I don’t think blogs really need high design. They’re almost always 90% content. How much goes into design really depends on the type of website and functionalities it’s supposed to serve. Blogs don’t require really anything in terms of design except good navigation.
Hello…Often, design is transparent. If it does it’s job, it allows the user to find that content, interact with it in a meaningful way, and achieve their goals for visiting the site. If it doesn’t work, people may not even be able to find that great content of yours.And of course, as you mention, you are a writer
A lot of people notice a lot of things. I know I do. But so many things compete vigorously for our attention every minute of every day, that only the BIG items get our attention. I would love to comment on every theme and blog design that I enjoy, but I confess I simply don’t have the time or the energy to do so. I would spend all day every day simply responding to stimuli — reacting. Sad but true. Keep up the great work. In my hectic day, yours is one of the very few sites I bother to keep up with.
I read your blog with an RSS reader, set to Courier New. I don’t notice when you, or most websites, update your design.
I think that this is the case for a lot of other consumers of web content (not all mind you, maybe 20-40% depending on the site).
So please don’t take it personally if some of us don’t notice, we just don’t know.