Where are we going wrong?

The world's first website was launched almost 20 years ago, and there are more than 250 million of them today, but why are so many of them so painfully difficult to use? As an internet user I am driven to distraction by lazy interface design, poor visual communication and ill-designed websites; it seems that here in Hong Kong things are particularly bad.

I imagine that you, like me, are familiar with the following miserable scenario. You are online and trying to book tickets or buy flowers or find someone's phone number. Your time, like mine and everyone else's, is extremely precious. You have found a website which seems to offer what you need, but after a quick click around your hopes are dashed. You can't find the information you need. You can't work out how to place your order. You can't even find your way back to the homepage. So you give up. You pick up the phone, fill in and fax an order form, dispatch a carrier pigeon or a camel train or do whatever else it is that people did before everything became so horribly difficult, sometime in the nineties.

It really doesn't need to be this difficult. The web as a medium has dizzying potential for making our lives better. The internet brings us, as a species, actually quite close to having collective intelligence. Our ability to communicate, collaborate, trade and socialise with people all over the globe has never been greater - we just need to learn how to use these new tools.

Business people spend huge sums of money on their shop signage, their printed advertising, their company cars and even their hairdressers; companies go to great lengths to choose a logo which adequately communicates the personality of their brand, and leather reception furniture worthy of their valued clients' bottoms. A website often represents the first or second impression a potential customer has of a company, and in the case of an online business, the website represents the only customer-facing part of that company. It's amazing that more effort is not spent making sure they work well.

So what should a website be like?

As I explained recently in my rant about Flash, a website is a machine for the distribution of information. (Within this definition, an online store is a machine for taking people's orders and web applications are machines for performing other tasks, all related to information.) Machines should work well and be easily operated. Their workings and complexities should normally be concealed from their users, whose limited time should be respected and whose experience of using the machine should be made as easy and comfortable as possible.

You might argue that often, websites need to be promotional tools, devices used to influence opinion and portray 'brand values', not just to publish information. You would be entirely correct, of course, but this needn't contradict my position on form and function. The right information, cleanly exposed in a usable, understandable interface is much more effective at influencing opinion than an over-designed and ornate website that distracts from its purpose by irritating its users and wasting their time.

Good design, like good writing, is about removing every element that can be removed before the thing as a whole stops doing its job. The appearance of the machine, which is less important than its function, will actually be pleasing automatically if the machine is efficiently and economically constructed. Beautiful design, like beautiful poetry, is about economy. This applies particularly to websites and the internet where competition is fierce, time is limited and people are already pretty annoyed.