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Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.

New Channel 4 Homepage

Reading Seth Godin’s latest blog post, Beauty as a signaling strategy, I was reminded of this quote from David Gelernter (from his book Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology). Godin  says:

We treat people and products differently when we think they’re beautiful. The reason people and organizations have invested so much in beauty over the years is that beauty pays off. A website that doesn’t cram ads into every single nook and cranny is more beautiful…

The last sentence resonated with me particularly. Here at Channel 4 we’re just about to launch our new homepage. This is part of a major redesign project that has been going on to update the design, usability and user experience of the site (check out the new TV listings page and programme detail page). The new homepage was designed to be a high impact and beautiful page, which shows off the Channel 4 brand.

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Allan Mertner wrote about Rethinking the Home Page and my response was getting to long to be a comment so I’m writing it as a post!

Allan said:

Today, visitors typically visit web sites as a result of a search or a deep link from somewhere else. And that means that you have to make sure every page on your web site feels like a ‘home page’, i.e. a page where every visitor feels welcome.

I wholeheartedly agree – it’s not all about the homepage. I think that if the navigation and usability of your site has been well thought out then a user landing on a page 2 or 3 levels deep within a sites hierarchy should feel comfortable that they know what the site is about and how to get to a home page or section home page. A home page should be an introduction to your site and if you’re blogging have your latest blog entry. Not a long list of the last 87 blogs, but only the first paragraph of each visible.

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A very interesting report was published in February which analysed Vistas, XPs and Mac OSXs usability by Pfeifer Consulting, which did some very detailed analysis of the Mac and Windows UI. It conculded that (naturally) OSX was the superior UI, but also that Vista/Aero is worse than XP!

Now, there is always going to be strong opinions on UIs, as you are in the realm of personal taste. Because a UI is such a visual and tactile thing everybody has an opinion on it. While people tend to reserve judgement on the particulars of a feature, when it comes to the UI people feel comfortable commenting.

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The following point was part of a comment posted in response to my last article:

the single menu at the top of the screen is more confusing than helpful,

I’d like to comment on this as it is a common “issue” that Mac-o-phobes quote when trying to compare Windows and Mac OS. The arguement that the Windows placement of the menu bar is more usable than Apples implementation is just not true! Fitts’ Law states that the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target. This means that the Apple menu acquisition should be about five times faster than Windows menu acquisition, and this has been proven in user tests.

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