Using Intelligent Design to Achieve a Competitive Advantage
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You could enter ‘best web design practices’ into any search engine, and I bet that you’d come across a bevy of art, tech, and development sites with their own take on the iconic question. Scroll a little further and you’ll enter the blogging zone, where a maze of different designers will tug at your inspiration and lead you to believe that one way or another is the best way for you. They might even be right, and that’s great - but it isn’t what matters.
What should matter is how you employ those practices to achieve something superior to a product without. Design is a wonderful, attractive pursuit, that habitually gets lost trying to achieve something revolutionary before it gets to achieving something usable. In the case of web development, intelligent design should be the form following the function of creativity, empowering your users with something useful as the result of your labour of passion.
Consider a brand, built on the idea of a playful demeanour and colourful exuberance, but none the less driven by sales (as many brands are). For a 'personality' like this, intelligent design rests squarely between the necessity of the recognizable navigation that brings in sales and makes content the highlight of every page, and the loud rush of animations and interactions that blur functionality but are loyal to the brand's image. It lies in finding that balance, and then crafting something memorable. The results will almost always be a more sophisticated and rewarding experience for both developer and user.
From a business perspective, intelligent design can be the tipping point that turns a bounce into a purchase, or a reader into a follower. When you work from the ground up, strictly functional navigation and forms will maximize the amount of users who get to where they want to go (and where you want them to be); a thoroughly considered visual/interactive experience will keep the user interested in the product and reaching the purchase, follow, or bookmark button(s). The two processes will work in unison to encourage users to feel something and then guide them to where they need to go to act on those feelings.
These functional relationships are used to achieve a competitive advantage in the marketing and sales landscapes by making experiences more memorable and eCommerce shops more intuitive. The right design for your website will act on these relationships while silently guiding your traffic to points of interest. The only way to achieve this is with a compelling voice and absent friction. Without the two in unison you may not sink, but you will certainly encounter competitors who have focused their resources and consideration on these attributes.
What this achieves client-side is twofold: on the one hand, clients will inherently associate functionality and customer-consideration with your site (few things are as disheartening as complaints that a sale couldn’t be completed due to unintuitive functionality). On the other hand, as a modern, quality, well developed source of variable x, you will garner the confidence and loyalty of clients as well. Valuable traits that will not only establish credibility, but also return traffic.
Think of intelligent design, then, as the new baseline criteria for remaining competitive in the digital space, where the quality and authenticity of your product will encounter barriers to market saturation if your users don't find your website to be both functional and compelling. Seek out the designers who can make your intelligent design a reality, and do not settle for less.
The saying goes ‘function over form’, but for web designers, I think ‘function and form’ might be right on the money.
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