Metafluence

Complexity threshold design

Over my years of providing professional web design services, I’ve learned a few lessons. The biggest lesson I learned is that design is a process, not just pretty graphics. What I used to consider design, I now refer to as the stylization phase in a longer design process. You see, design is more than just aesthetic considerations. Web design is about creating a web site that solves the problem for which it was commissioned. As Mies van de Rohe would say, form follows function. The form a website takes on depends on the site’s intended function. Ultimately, all websites are created to serve information for a specific purpose. The amount of information and how it is organized depends on the strategy the site’s creator is using to accomplish his/her mission. And, while it may be strategy that determines whether or not a site has a gallery, blog, forum, or some other section, it is the volume of information within those sections that determines the organizational structure.

For example, if a site has a single image to display on a web page, it’s not hard to figure out how to place it on that page. If there are five images, a designer must make some decisions about how to lay them out based on how the images relate to accomplishing the page’s objectives. If a designer has twenty images, then it may be time to consider a gallery page of thumbnails that click through to larger images. If the designer has one hundred images they may want to consider breaking those thumbnail pages up into multiple pages. If the designer has five hundred images they may want to consider adding tags and a search function to make navigation easier. As the designer has more content to work with, he/she will need to make more organizational considerations to make the content consumable. I refer to the points at which content volume requires new organizational structure as complexity thresholds.

Thinking about design this way really helps explain why web design is driven by the specific content. I’ve had many clients that wanted me to create a design before we had the content, only to discover later that the design either didn’t have enough room or there was too much space for their final content. Overdesigning a site’s organizational structure is just as bad as putting too much on one page. I had a client that asked me to create category pages for their products, but they only ended up with a dozen products. The shopper had to click on 4 different category pages to see their full product offering. They would have been better served to have a single page with the categories separated with headlines, which would have been obvious if we started with the content.

Currently I don’t have a system for determining when content reaches a complexity threshold, nor what specific form of orgaization is required once the volume becomes unwieldly. Although, there are certain data structures that are common among websites such as blogs, galleries, links, etc., so I do think it’s possible to determine numbers for when a volume of content hits a threshold and what additional levels of organization are required. I also think it’s possible to create a smart content management system that automagically adds new levels of organization when a person’s volume of content hits those thresholds. If some cool programmer out there wants to develop that application, I’m all about providing the project’s functional requirements and default design. For now, I’ll just have to rely on my experience and design sense to make those determinations.