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We seek clarity, order, and trustworthiness in information sources,
whether they are traditional paper documents or Web pages. The spatial
organization of graphics and text on the Web page can engage the user with
graphic impact, direct the user's attention, prioritize information, and
make the user's interactions with your Web site more enjoyable and more
efficient.
"Man is the great pattern-maker and pattern perceiver. No matter
how primitive his situation, no matter how tormented, he cannot live in
a world of chaos."
Edmund Carpenter
Design and visual logic
Graphic design creates visual logic, an optimal balance between visual
sensation and graphic or text information. Without the visual impact of
shape, color, and contrast pages are often graphically boring and will not
motivate the viewer to investigate their contents. Dense text documents
without the contrast and visual relief offered by graphics and careful
page layout and typography are also more difficult to read, particularly
on the relatively low-resolution screens of current personal computers.
However, without the depth and complexity of text, highly graphic pages
risk disappointing the user by offering a poor balance between visual
sensation, text information, and interactive hypermedia links. In seeking
this ideal balance, the primary graphic design constraints in Web pages
are the vertical, list-oriented structure of HTML as seen in current Web
browsers like Netscape and Internet Explorer, and the practical bandwidth
limitations on user access rates that may currently range from 14.4 modems
to Ethernet speeds or better.
 Visual
and functional continuity in your Web site organization, graphic design,
and typography is essential to convince your audience that your Web site
offers them timely, accurate, and useful information. A careful,
systematic approach to page design can simplify navigation, reduce errors,
and make it much easier for users to take full advantage of the
information and features of your Web site.
Graphic Design and the Web
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the language of Web page design, is a
hypertext system, emphasizing interactive linkages between graphic, text,
or media documents. The ability to mix graphics or motion media with text
in HTML is much more limited than in other forms of electronic document
authoring, or in paper-based publishing. The graphic design vocabulary
within HTML is constrained by the vertical list structure of HTML and the
uncertainties of designing with device-independent physical and logical
typographic controls. However, the ability to imbed hypertext links text
and graphics that can take full advantage of the Internet offers
unprecedented functional power and flexibility in designing interlinked,
interactive information systems.
Efficient Use of the World Wide Web
Although the prospect of networked multimedia in Web pages is exciting,
the highly graphic interface design now seen in consumer-oriented CD-ROM
multimedia titles is a particularly poor model for current Web page
designs. Such highly graphic designs require far more communications
bandwidth than even Ethernet typically delivers to current personal
computers. Purely graphic menu designs for Web pages that depend on one
large imagemap graphic are fine for corporate or educational Intranet use,
but are likely to try the patience of users accessing the web via modem.
Sites
like FedEx's home page design (below) emulate the graphic menus seen in
multimedia CD-ROMs. Highly graphic menu screens produce visual impact
(eventually), but they also impose long waits on users who do not have
access to high-bandwidth Internet connections like ISDN or Ethernet. FedEx
is betting that most users of their site are repeat viewers who have this
large graphic in stored in their browser's cache, available for fast
loading on return visits:
Graphic
has been reduced from the original size. www.fedex.com
What excites most people about the Web is the promise of graphic
communication, and graphic "splash screens" or home pages can be
very successful as long as you fully understand the convenience trade-offs
and performance compromises and do not alienate your target audience. Our
C/AIM home page design is now a graphic menu that uses JavaScript to
randomly choose one of 12 alternate designs to display each time the page
is loaded. We chose graphic impact over the diversity of text links
because our basic home page menu was short, our focus is multimedia
communication, and our target audience is mostly fellow academics and
physicians with high-bandwidth access to the Web.
Graphic
has been reduced from the original size. www.med.yale.edu/caim/
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Graphics and system responsiveness
As Web systems evolve from informal novelties into widespread
organizational, educational, and corporate use the expectations for system
performance are increasing. For a large organization using a Web intranet
system as a management information tool the aggregate effect of the long
delays caused by inappropriate use of over-large graphics or other
inefficiencies in key menu areas may cripple the cost-effectiveness of the
system. This is especially true when many users are accessing your Web
site via modems, such as home-office telecommuters, distance-learning
students, your sales force, or your field personnel. Most studies on user
response to computing system delays suggest that waiting times longer than
about 10 seconds are intolerable in routine, repetitive computing tasks.
For the past few years the (very slow) Web has gotten a free pass due to
its novelty, but it seems unlikely that users will be any more tolerant of
Web systems than they are of any other networked service or computing
task.
With or without graphics?
If you are currently using a large graphic menu on your site's home page,
you should take a close look at the log of "hits" produced by
your Web server software. (Your Web server administrator should be able to
produce this log for you if you've never seen one.) The server log shows
how many times your home page has been requested, or "hit," by
readers looking at your page. Each GIF or JPEG graphic image used on your
home page should also show a corresponding hit, as the graphics files are
requested and downloaded to the reader. If the number of hits on your home
page HTML file is significantly larger than the number of hits on the
graphic files used on your home page then you know that many users are
accessing your page with the graphics turned off in their Web browsers. If
your readers are turning off the graphics because your site takes so long
to download, then all of the information you have placed into your Web
page graphics never reaches your readers.
References
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