Good Design! Bad Design?
Today, we will examine Emory's websites to identify good and bad design examples to introduce the concept of good design.
What is good design?
In the article "Learning to See," the author emphasizes that good design needs to be visually pleasing and highly functional.
However, determining whether a design is functional requires understanding the context in which it will be used, including the nature of the product and the intended users. This can be challenging as it sometimes involves understanding the psychological factors and human nature influencing a user's wants and needs.
Let's take a look at Emory's website:
When first visiting the webpage, the navigation bar prominently displays the label "Emory University," which helps to inform the user that they are on the official Emory website. However, the brand takes up a significant amount of vertical screen real estate and may not be necessary when the user scrolls down to view the actual content of the webpage. This is where dynamic design comes into play, as it considers the actual usage of the label and hides it when it is no longer needed, providing the user with more screen real estate. This is a good design as it improves the user's experience by reducing unnecessary visual clutter.
Although it may seem intuitive that allowing the users to look at more content at once is better, it is essential to understand the user's perspective to provide them with an optimal experience. The reason why users want to view more content could be attributed to the nature of being human. As humans are visual, our ability to see drives us to want to see more. This is evident in our behavior when visiting new places; we naturally want to look around and explore. The same is true when browsing websites; we want to view more content at first glance. For hardware designers, this trend can be seen in the increasing size of computer and phone screens. However, for website developers, the screen estate is fixed, and the website's design needs to be adapted. In this case, they utilize the help of dynamic webpage design to improve the user experience.
And now, let's look at an example of a bad design:
The given example of Emory OPUS calendar is an example of a bad design. When we think about a calendar, we often think of a paper one, where we can view the whole schedule for a week or month at a glance. However, the design of the Emory OPUS calendar fails to meet this expectation, as the upper portion of the calendar takes up a large amount of the website, and the time intervals are displayed in 10-minute increments, making it vertically very long, so it becomes impossible for users to view the whole schedule at once. A redesign could include making the upper portion of the calendar dynamic so that it can be hidden, displaying the time intervals in one-hour increments, allowing users to view the entire schedule at a glance, and making it more functional.
