Part VI - Total Design

Watching the World Cup for the last few weeks I've heard the term Total Football crop up from time to time. For those of you not au fait with the term, it's used by the pundits to describe a style of play that covers all aspects of the Beautiful Game. Some teams are stronger than others in some areas e.g. attacking, defending, passing, etc but a combination of skills is required to get a positive result. No one part of the game can exist without the balanced support of the others. A team that attacks well but cannot defend, or passes well but cannot shoot will find it hard to win.

On the digital design playing field a similar 'Total Design' strategy can be implemented to get the best results. How many factors go into producing a successful product? Once a concept has been formed, the four major players in digital design are:

1. Usability
2. Accessibility
3. Information architecture
4. Visual design

It is hard to imagine any product being successful in today's market without a significant contribution from each of these players. A site with bad information architecture cannot be easily navigated, a site with bad visual design cannot be interpreted, a site with bad usability does not allow users to complete their goals, and a site with bad accessibility is exclusive of some users instead of inclusive of all.

On past occasions, web design has relied on a heavy contribution from visual design to attract users, but today's successful sites cannot be built around aesthetics alone. Usability, accessibility and information architecture are vital to product success, however this does not relegate visual design to a back seat. After all there is no point in constructing flawless information architecture only to make the site unusable by applying an aesthetic that makes it hard to read information.

Sometimes it is a lack of visual information that leads users to miss-interpret instructions. In this example from a transaction screen, dropout was very high. Users filled their shopping baskets but on reaching this screen would not proceed any further. Why? Looking at the design it was impossible to work out. It was a very simple screen, the visual design was clear and no problems were discernable. Usability testing however revealed the users were entering their credit card number including the spaces as shown on the card. This was not acceptable by the system however. These errors could have been avoided if four small fields instead of one long had been used so that the screen input matched the user's card. Of course the system could have automatically have removed the spaces, which in my opinion would be preferable!

Without testing it is highly unlikely this tiny detail would ever have been found and the site would have continued to lose business. However through balancing the four elements of Total Design the problem was identified and the solution implemented, leading to a huge jump in revenue for the client and happy customers.

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