Consider the monster from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein:
The creature is described as being about eight feet (244 centimeters) in height, with translucent yellowish skin that “barely disguised the workings of the vessels and muscles underneath”, watery, glowing eyes, flowing black hair, black lips, and white teeth. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein%27s_monster#Appearance)
I read that phrase describing the skin of the monster, that it “barely disguised the workings of the vessels and muscles underneath.”
My hands have worked on Web pages that were little more than that yellowish skin.
It’s no wonder customers fled in terror.
By now, most of my nameless monsters have died off, thanks to the hyper-life-cycle of the Web, but recently I gained a new perspective of how ungainly, ill-proportioned Web sites are created.
HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER OF A WEB PAGE
If you want to create a monster of a Web page, the trick is quite simple: Work, work, work at it, one page at a time. Write the code, make it work, make sure the forms submit. Whip up some error text, insert some confirmation screens. Check the boxes on your to-do list of functional requirements. Light it up, and let it out onto the world.
But wait…isn’t that how most of us get our jobs done? These days, we like to call this kind of heads down, busy-work “Agile.”
HOW TO STOP PLAYING DR. FRANKENSTEIN
Step away from the keyboard, Doctor.
Pick up a pencil. Draw out the whole process from the point of view of each actor, be it a person or some agent like a search engine robot. Draw pictures using easy graphics, like Garrett’s visual vocabulary palette, and be sure to include every point of contact with an actor.
Having done this recently, it became clear immediately that there was a series of email messages interspersed amongst Web pages, and that those emails were as important as any single Web page.
Also, the timing of those emails was important. For instance, Jim uses a Web page to send an email message to his friend Bob. Jim then sends an instant message to Bob asking if he signed up yet, assuming that Bob did in fact receive that email message and was able to decipher it. Those are two tough assumptions.
Each piece of a larger process overlaps with its adjacent pieces in a series of feedback and feedforward communications. Once we have these communications, these pages, emails and so forth, laid out with balance, proportion, and clear purpose, a more beautiful creation can take hold.
Nurturing and shaping this flow of interactions between people using a system is a great step in putting an end to the monsters we’ve become so good at creating.
Once we’re into this process, we invariably realize there are many more questions to ask, but the point is this: Design processes, not pages.