A few interesting conversations this week regarding web projects we're working on at the moment that illustrate some of the issues in providing a user experience that meets the client's needs.
We have been working on a website for a local company and the draft design has turned out to be fine but requiring a few small design tweaks which is the norm. But this is often the point where translating the customer requests into design becomes problematic and in this particular instance two requests are problematic for different reasons.
One request was for a particularly tacky and annoying effect with some text. Technically it's straight forward to do but NOBODY should have that on a website unless it is a website showing some effects that you really shouldn't have. Ultimately the client gets what they want and we can only advise but the jury is still out on this one. There are websites we have created that clients are very happy with but our credit says "hosted by" not "created by" as we're not very keen to have people thinking that's what our websites look like!
The second request for an alteration shows the misunderstanding many have of how websites are displayed and the request was along the lines of can you make that section 5 centimetres high. Those of you who are tech-savvy can chortle now. The height in cm is dependent upon your screen size, screen resolution, etc and will be different on different devices. A similar point comes in more commonly as something like "my logo is a different colour on my PC and my friend's laptop, can you make sure it's the same on all screens as I'm not happy with that." Unfortunately our quest to ensure that there is only one screen type with fixed settings available for every web enabled device has failed, sorry folks.
Another website we have worked on has a very wide range of users adding details via the user interface which means users with very different levels of expertise. There needs to be a level of very basic IT skills to use any website, and we've just change the UI this week to make it more basic, but there are also people wanting more complex functions. There's a difficult balance to be had but due to the nature of the site we're going for simplest interface we can to capture the information required. It's a massive compromise with a site like that and essentially we're trying to make everyone "sufficiently satisfied" as it's impossible to make everyone happy, certainly at this stage in the project. Given more time and a bigger chunk of development cash there would be more opportunity to develop alternatives for different user levels, if all goes well that may happen in the future.
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