You have to love the end-of-the-fiscal year for your company which coincides nicely with holiday madness. As if trying to score free shipping from all of your favorite online stores was not enough to occupy full-time job status. But then your workplace imposes upon you year-end reviews, objective setting sessions, an endless Microsoft Outlook calendar worth of meeting requests to accept...
and on top of all of that malarkey, your team decides that now is an auspicious time to OVERHAUL THE WEBSITE?!?
Despite my resistance to this ill-timed venture, I am doing my best to draft up my wish list for new site capabilities and aesthetics. But here's my beef: The rest of my team members want to focus on site functionality. We have an e-commerce component to our site and it's stuck in a bygone age - it practically wears pantaloons and carries a credit at the apothecary. It does need to be addressed. But what if the framework of our site is such that customers cannot even FIND their way to the e-commerce part. What then?!
Here is my question to you usability gurus - Have you ever had to wage a battle about the aesthetics versus functionality of site design, and believed that aesthetics should actually be addressed first? I guess this is the old fashion versus function question. Our site is functional, but because it is so ugly and poorly organized, it just cannot function. And somehow, I'm the only one who feels this way....
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3 comments:
Actually this does not really sound like a form over function problem. If people can't find what theya re looking for that is very much a function problem.
To a certain extent, I agree with function over form, because people use websites, not just look at them. They get more frustrated if it doesn't work than if it doesn't look so good. For example, I know people who switched from del.icio.us to mag.nolia.com because the latter is substantially prettier, then switched back because del.icio.us is faster.
However, that does imply function actually being functional. As Debby said, it does sound like the problem you have is the function, if it only works if the user thinks like the engineers who built the application and gives up otherwise.
We have our own web application that I've tried to stick a hand in improving (I'll post about it later). For a while I was convinced that it's frustrating to use because it looks like it's from the 90's (and it is!). But I went through it again recently, and I've now changed my mind. I think that if we focused on changing the wording so that it's helpful/accurate and reordered some steps more logically, that alone would have much more of an impact in making the user experience more pleasant.
In some ways that's easier because editing the text doesn't necessarily involve programming changes (though it does require a web-savvy editor). On the other hand, it can take more thinking and planning time.
But, hey, wait. Isn't form and function just about the same thing in cyberspace? I mean when you're talking about whether or not something is visible, FINDABLE, the two merge.
I am a trog, though, in the whole web design arena so your pain is something I have so far managed to avoid.
And what's up with the rest of the people in your workplace? Aren't they trying to score free shipping too? Sheesh.
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