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Copyright 1999 A List Apart (Jeffrey Zeldman and Brian Platz) Permanent bookmark: http://www.alistapart.com/stories/who/
DESIGN YOUR AUDIENCE by Jeffrey Zeldman Emigre and T-26 design contemporary fonts for professional designers and sell them on their sites. Both font houses enjoy deserved reputations as bellwethers of the leading edge. Yet their sites could not be more different. Emigre's site is streamlined for clarity, almost to the point of plainness. You arrive, you view fonts, you order. You can navigate the fast-loading web space even if you've never seen a site before. Any whiz-bang technology employed in its construction stays hidden on the back end, where orders are processed. By contrast, the site of T-26 is an immersive entertainment experience, built largely with Macromedia Shockwave. Porn-like funk music heralds your arrival. Animations highlight each section of the site. Secret navigational elements lurk behind cryptic graphic elements, and even the menu bar reveals hidden layers of navigation the further you delve into the site. Emigre is an idiot-proof sales tool; T-26, an enviably designed entertainment vehicle and branding contrivance which may or may not sell fonts. The difference between the two may be described technologically (HTML versus embedded Shockwave files), visually (simple versus complex), behaviorally (static versus dynamic), or in the language of marketing (direct sales versus branding and "soft sell"). Our purpose is not to criticize either site; each succeeds in its own way. The point is that all these axes of difference derive from a single source. While both sites target the professional design market, their creators have envisioned their audiences differently. In short, Emigre is designed for users, T-26 for viewers.
USERS, VIEWERS, and READERS The web is not software, not print, not television, yet it can function in ways similar to these media, and the way it functions depends largely on who it is for. It's a question of audience, or if you prefer, a question of audience model. Are you designing for users, readers, or viewers? USERS are people who employ tools (software) to accomplish tasks: calculating, comparing, finding, outlining, writing, designing. Yahoo is designed for users: for people who want to find things on the web. It's not designed to entertain, to look pretty, to offer a uniquely webby experience. You use it to go somewhere else. Designing for users obliges you to make certain choices. Your site should load quickly, to accommodate any kind of connection, and it should use the most broadly compatible web technologies, such as basic HTML. If a site intended for users relies on the X-Space plug-in for its navigation, the designer is making a
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Page 2 sur 4 mistake. Any barrier to entry defeats the purpose of foolproof usability. Sites designed for users must be clear in their navigation as well as their text. Users must be able to intuitively find what they seek. Where help is needed, it must be plainly marked and easily understood. Ambiguity is a wonderful thing in fine art, but it has no place in a site like Yahoo. Similarly, the merely decorative has little place in a site designed for users. Nor do users have patience for digressions, or for multi-tiered layers that get between them and the information they seek. Those elements are fine, however, if your site is designed for viewers. VIEWERS are people who seek entertainment. They want to be surprised, seduced, led along a path. Their goal is the journey, not the end result. Sites developed for viewers rely on images, words, and behaviors to intrigue and tantalize. http://www.famewhore.com is such a site. People visit Yahoo when they wish to accomplish a task quickly; they visit a viewer-oriented site like Famewhore when they wish to forget about work for a while. Viewer-oriented sites may be set up like art galleries or like games. Gamers are simply a less passive variety of viewer; entertainment, not work, is the goal for both audiences. Indeed, game play is often a subtle aspect of modern art and literature. If it works for them, it can work for websites, provided those sites are intended for viewers. Somewhere between users and viewers, we come to readers. READERS are that rare (but growing) breed of web user who turn to a website as they might turn to a novel or magazine article. Afterdinner.com is designed for readers. Fray.com and Word.com are designed for a combination audience: the reader who is also a viewer; the person who seeks visual surprise and delight while pursuing the pleasure of a narrative. DESIGNING FOR READERS Designing for readers means giving text room to breathe: today, it means using Style Sheets for leading, and Styles (or tables) to array the text in columns. It means choosing HTML font sizes that will be viewable across platforms, and fonts that are easy to read onscreen. This usually means sans-serif fonts, since serifs guide the reader's eye on the printed page, but render poorly in the 72ppi onscreen environment. Readable sans-serifs include ARIAL, HELVETICA, VERDANA, and GENEVA. You will usually be using some combination of those four to support a cross-platform readership. Text alone does not make for a reader-oriented site. Throwing 50K of text onto a web page is not designing for readers; it is merely throwing text at a screen. When designing for readers, we take care to protect their eyes, and we use page breaks to relieve the monotony of the online reading experience. What fits on a well-designed magazine page may be too long by half for a web page. On the other hand, we don't wantonly break short articles into a dozen web pages, merely for the sake of accommodating more ad banners. We use our best judgement as web readers ourselves, we evaluate feedback
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Page 3 sur 4 from our site's readers, and as time goes on, we modify our designs. Along with page breaks, we take care to use more frequent paragraph breaks than we would if the same text were used on a printed page. We can read long paragraphs on a printed page because printing and paper are highly evolved technologies; besides, as we read a book, we can change physical positions, put the book down for a moment, and so on. The web imposes physical limitations on the reader: she has to stay in one place, staring at a screen, whose light-emitting background is tough on the eyes. So we break long paragraphs into shorter ones, and by the same reasoning, we limit ourselves to shorter articles and stories than might comfortably appear in a magazine. Finally, we take a lesson from children's books, and break up even the most serious articles with illustrations and examples. READERS AND ALA Alistapart.com is designed for readers, and consequently follows many of the principles sketched above. Our first version of the site was less successful in this regard, chiefly because of the colors used. Our two shades of orange (or yellow and red, depending on your monitor and operating system) made for arresting poster design -in fact we've seen this very color combination in recent poster ads for The Gap and Tide Detergent; but the combination grew wearying for prolonged reading. The colors were too vibrant, and too close to one another in intensity, to provide a sense of foreground and background; they were too "angry," in the words of one early critic of the site, to allow for the calm digestion of ideas. We think the current color scheme is better, and to judge from our mail, readers agree. It's a related (harmonious) scheme, providing connectedness with the site's original identity, and with the NEWS section, which retains the original color scheme. USERS VS. VIEWERS And what of the first two sites we looked at? What audience were they designing for? What assumptions did they make, and what decisions were determined by these assumptions? Emigre is built for users, or, even more to the point, for customers. The creators of Emigre assume you are shopping for fonts, and they make the process as fast and seamless as possible. You will not be visually blown away by their site, but you will never be frustrated by it, and that's the first priority when designing for users. The creators of T-26 assume that you are a cutting-edge designer (or if not, that you're looking for products that can help you fake it). They want you to know you've come to the right place, so they dazzle you instantly, with pure design as well as technical acumen. In theory, you'll be so entertained, and so visually inspired, you'll bookmark the site and tell your colleagues about it. If you don't buy a font today, that's all right; you'll be back again, if only to soak up visual pleasure and inspiration, and eventually you'll buy. And whether you buy today or not, you are essentially buying into the brand image of
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Page 4 sur 4 T-26 as a house of advanced design. T-26 is first and foremost a branding tool: an extension of the company's "brand image" as a leading-edge design powerhouse. In a sense, the site's creators cast their audience in the mould of the company's own brand image. You are assumed to be a visually-oriented creative person who can handle any technology the site throws at you, and who seeks above all to be overwhelmed by something edgy and cool. All of these assumptions are based on the premise that viewers, not users, are the T-26 site's chief visitors. The assumption that you seek visual beauty is fairly safe, given the nature of the product. Some of the other assumptions -- such as your ability to deal with the latest web technology -- are less than inviolable. We know a number of print designers who produce award-winning work on ancient workhorse computers with syrup-slow processors, and who surf the web with poky dial-up modems and 1996 browsers (or even AOL). These designers might well be willing buyers of T-26 fonts, but if the technology creates a barrier to entry, they'll likely buy elsewhere. That may be all right with T-26, or it may not be. We're not here to judge their marketing plan; we're not even here to commend their outstanding visual skill. We're simply pointing out what we hope this little article has begun to make clear: Before you can puzzle out the problem of how to design a web project, you must resolve the riddle of who you are designing it for.
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