Not Every Design Element Must Be Memorable
When most people think of web design, they think of pretty pictures, layouts, and coded web pages. While those are important ingredients, they're merely design tools— nothing more.
Design is about solving problems for people, not building things. In fact, "not building" something is the best type of design you can offer. The web doesn't need more crap, and people don't want more crap.
It's not necessarily a bad thing if you don't remember every single thing you've read on a website or know exactly what you clicked on. Although data testing may not reveal this, not all tasks need to be memorable. Sometimes you just need a directive, like "what's on your mind?", to get people engaged with a webpage.
5 comments
Jeremy (ZURB) says
If you recognize that element you've sketched in this post, what's interesting is that the action you take is memorable (we use it and do that all the time) even though the actual designed element isn't.
Bryan (ZURB) says
Jeremy right. The Facebook form element that we sketched is arguably the most used form on the web, yet 90% of people won't be able to create an accurate sketch of it. It has text in the box, is surrounded by a 1 pixel gray box and doesn't have a button.
Greg Barr says
I think the root of what you describe here goes beyond web design, and is in fact the biggest challenge in designing anything -- be it a web page, logo, business card, powerpoint slide, whatever. Most people (who are paying for design work) look for the fanciness and slick elements that make something look "professional," and in so doing they don't respect the simplicity that can make something elegant and effective for the end audience/users.
(Nice job on the Facebook form, by the way, it's definitely the form that I use more than any other, and I bet I coulda sketched it except for the fact that Roboform just skips me through it...)
Jeremy (ZURB) says
It's probably telling that we think this is the web (or web-related) form we use most. We forget others we use even more:
- Web browser's address and search fields
- Google's search field
- Email's "To:" field
And in mobile: SMS text message fields.
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