Anti-Principles of Successful Web Design

Here are top five of them:

• Website as a finished product

A solid site will boost your business only if you know how to use it wisely. In other case, it will not work properly. Unlike the development of a traditional product, website creation is a “never finished” process. A good website is something tending to perfection and constantly changing that should be constantly updated to introduce new features and fix bugs. What we are trying to say is that you should always give designers a chance to improve their work by providing constant feedback, keeping track of flaws, using metrics, and listening to your website visitors.

• Unintuitive design

It is always very easy to become a victim of creativity. To avoid this trap, always keep in mind your audience when creating your site. Minimalism must be linked to making a product easy to use. At the same time, a design simplicity is not the same as intuitiveness. Often, design is difficult to navigate while sleek to use. No customer will solve your extraordinary puzzles just to buy pants. Therefore, you should always seek to reach an intuitiveness. Even if your task is to create an online library for Yale graduates.  

• Unoriginal ideas

Creativity is about finding questions that have never been asked. If you bring up such questions, the answers you give will be unique as well. Any changes fear us as it is a human nature to be afraid of all new. However, changes excite us as well. The difference between an exceptional and good web design is that the later is just well-crafted while the first makes people’s lives better through inspiration, fun, and beauty. Therefore, when it comes to exceptional web design, original ideas can bring extra value to site. Often, this value can transcend its primary purpose. An advanced technology provides more space for maneuvering making it simpler to be creative. So be creative! Avoid being unoriginal.

• Too sophisticated design

Things we use everyday are designed to look a certain way due to the constraints imposed on their creation. A brick is square as it is better to assemble this way. A room is square as it is easier to construct. Art in all its manifestations is on the other side. Art can be considered as a question to a problem while design is a solution to a problem. When it comes to a high-quality web design, it should not belong neither to art nor to a mass production. It is all about an exploration, personal expression, emotion, and use. It helps users in navigating a site or completing a task. Therefore, it is foremost about functioning, and only then – beauty. The best web design starts from a deep understanding of customers. And that is why simplicity values so much. In brief, minimalism is about accenting on the meaning and subtracting the obvious. When a site is too sophisticated, it loses a sense of structure and order and becomes overwhelming and garish. At the same time, an extremely minimalistic site may look too humdrum, monotonous, and plain. It will serve its function, but with no emotional nourishment. As a result, your users will not enjoy it. Minimalism lies somewhere at the intersection of art and standard. Every image, every word, every pixel becomes a king. At the same time, minimalism is the ultimate sophistication. Achieving it may only seem easy. To make design as simple as possible and come up with an elegant solution, a designer should first of all understand these underlying challenges.

• A lack of usability

Often, user experience ends where a wow-effects start. If to begin the web design creation process from the wrong start, a designer will consequently end at the wrong end. But it doesn’t mean that usability and beauty exclude each other. Great design doesn’t simply ease users’ lives, it should be an expression of a life itself. Design should transcend a pure utility and turn into a genuine excitement from using a site. Therefore, in order to create something holistic, long-living, and amazing, you should always have a clear understanding of how to do it, for which purpose, and for whom.