Reviewing your website: examples of good practice
This is the fifth post in a mini-series on website assessment and review.Anthony Haynes writes: This series outlines a model, designed to be used by and with non-techies, to support website review and management. The model employs three criteria: stakeholder management; navigability; and design.
The previous post focused on design. Based on Robin Williams’ book, Non-designers’ design book, it proposed four principles of good design – contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity.
This post reviews a couple of examples of good practice. The cases are drawn from our core market, which comprises membership organisations, awarding bodies, and learning providers.
Reviews
First up, the Institute of Customer Service: https://www.instituteofcustomerservice.com/. I found that as soon as I started using this site I could see that performs well against our model’s criteria. In particular, the use of alignment and the repetition of design elements are very strong.
Taken together, they produce an unmissable sense of consistency and professionalism. For my money, this is an example of the medium becoming the message: the design values mesh with the overall values of the organisation.
One might quibble over one of our criteria, namely use of contrast. The site makes rather little use of this – especially of bold contrast. I am reluctant, though, to be critical here, for two reasons.
First, the relative lack of contrast, particularly in terms of colour, looks very much to be a deliberate choice rather than oversight. And, second, what the site might lose in one way, it gains in another: the muted range of colour itself represents an application of repetition. (Robin Williams does note in her book that, in practice, there may on occasion be tensions between her principles.)
In addition, the liberal use of plain white background makes the content components stand out clearly and, in doing so, represents a form of contrast.
Second, First Intuition: https://www.firstintuition.co.uk/.
This site exhibits many of the same virtues. I started using this site only recently and greatly appreciated the sense of organisation throughout the site.
I suggest that this quality is the product primarily of the application of two principles, namely alignment and proximity. The use of alignment creates a great sense of balance. The application of the principle (using space semantically) enables readily understandable compartmentalisation of content.
There is greater use of contrast on this site, especially in terms of colour. Without ever becoming flashy, I think the contrast does create visual interest. That perhaps explains why, on my first visit, I spent longer on the site than I’d intended: I found myself engaged by the content.
One brief reservation about the use of colour: I’m no expert on colour blindness but I suspect that in a couple of places the use of contrast might be lost on colour blind people (on the home page I noted one example of blue/yellow juxtaposition and one of green/red). So far as I can judge, however, this doesn’t seriously compromise navigability or accessibility of meaning.
Overall, both sites strike me, as a non-designer applying design principles, as markedly effective pieces of design.
Note
I enjoy collecting examples of good design, by the way, so if you work for an organisation whose website embodies the application of such principles, you’re welcome to alert me (via anthony at fjwilson dot com).
Next post: Synopsis – an overall view of the website review model.