Design Vs. Function: An Online Balancing Act

In Les Miserables Victor Hugo wrote, “The beautiful is as useful as the useful. Perhaps more so.” As a lover of art and design, this has long been one of my favorite quotations to cite, however in the realm of web site design, I often ponder the extent to which this statement would apply. I am always on the lookout for great web sites and every so often there comes a time when I see a beautiful site design with an expensive flash introduction that then falls apart when I try to use the site. It may look pretty, but I can’t find the shopping cart or I can’t figure out whether they sell what I need, or where they are located. After usually 2-5 seconds of trying to figure out a website’s purpose, I hit the back button to go to go back to Google and check out the next listing.

Experiences such as that described above make me look more closely at how we design web sites for eCommerce businesses. We can pull out all the bells and whistles and make a pretty sight, but if no one uses it and our clients business doesn’t improve as a result of our efforts then we are not serving their needs. I am not a strict proponent of boring basic sites by any means, but I do think that at every step of a design, both the client and the designer should be focused on answering the question, “Does this page tell my visitor what they need to know?” If at any point there are gaps then a reevaluation is called for and once it meets that criteria we can move on.

In opening my daily deals today I came across a web site called wag.com (not one of our designs unfortunately), which I found to be amazing and a great example of a site that is fun, friendly and super easy-to-use, albeit probably very expensive to build and design. Overall, the design was cute and made me smile, while I was able to quickly locate the cat food that I needed to buy and then narrow down the search to kitten food. The related items that appeared were helpful since it reminded me that I also needed to pick up litter. To top it all off, the banner addition at the top of the page, mentioning free shipping on orders over $49, encouraged me to buy more kitten chow and also throw in a toy for the furry love of my life.  

While the wag.com site may not be universally-considered one of the most beautiful sites ever (I mean...the turtle on Wag could have been cuter...), it gets an A in my book today because it makes me easy for me to buy things I need, which is what an eCommerce site is supposed to do.