Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

it's gotta scream "awesome"

It’s a constant challenge on content-heavy sites to balance the twin goals of promoting new content and offering a clean user experience, devoid of extraneous clutter.

If someone has put a ton of work into a new feature that users might find interesting, of course they want to make sure people see it. And they want it to be eye-catching and “totally different” from everything else. This project is their baby — it deserves it.

(I made the above graphic yesterday as a joke — an attempt at a “tastefully tacky” over-the-top faux promotion. A coworker pointed out that, while I did have the cheesy blinking animation, I should have been even more tacky and used, say, hot pink and drop shadows. Anyone want to take that on?)

The challenge the designer faces in this situation is two-fold:

1. The design for this new feature can’t be “totally different.” It’s a disruptive user experience for every new thing to have its own unique look and feel, with little-to-no commonalities between features. A site’s design should be coherent and predictable, not fragmented and reinvented at every turn.
2. Promotions for features — whether they live across the top of a page, in the sidebar, or at the bottom of the page — should gently let users know that other interesting content is available — complementing, rather than distracting from the dominant content of a given page. (And by no means should they look like an advertisement.) They should respect that if a user came to a page to, say, read a story, that user would probably appreciate being able to actually read that story, rather than be overwhelmed by a promo for something related but completely separate.

In the end, depending on the project and people involved, the final design falls somewhere on the continuum between “hewing exactly to site design standards” and “possessing some unique qualities, but staying consistent with enough key standards (e.g., type treatments) that it doesn’t look like you’ve gone to a completely different site.”

It can be a challenge to get to that point. The designer has to convince a stakeholder who is convinced of their product’s uniqueness that there is virtue in some degree of conformity, and the designer has to reassure the stakeholder that a smaller or toned-down promotion for their awesome new product doesn’t mean that it will seem invisible or unimportant. And some degree of trust / respect has to be built for that to be possible: The designer has to understand the stakeholder’s particular goals and concerns, while, at some point, the stakeholder has to let go and trust the designer’s judgment.