Category: Web Sites

Alexander Younger is the founder of MGT Communications, whose client list includes some of Canada’s most recognized brands ranging from large financial and retail organizations to museums, television shows and artists. It holds a number of awards to its credit including a Gemini Award for Most Popular Website for Room Service, a people's choice award for designer Sarah Richardson's website and Best Investor Relations website for RBC Insurance. Alexander's expertise includes leveraging technology to gain business efficiency; web site design, strategy; and online communications. He has been featured in the National Post, City TV, Globetechnology.com and Profit magazine and is an accomplished speaker.

One Degree: The sites MGT builds are gorgeous, but they break all kinds of usability guidelines and best practices.  For example, you have splash pages (generally considered the height of poor design) on most of your client sites.  What gives?

We have high regard for usability experts like Nielsen, but we also believe that 'usability' has evolved as the technology has evolved. Usability started as a way of making old technology (crummy browsers, slow connection speeds) work better for the majority.

We incorporate usability testing (which we conduct in our designated, in-house MGT Lab) into our experience-based designs, ensuring that a highly usable website is wedded with the complete brand experience. All of our sites are tested on real users to get their feedback, understand what they need to get to and to uncover ways we can make our sites better. Creating experiences is what good design is about today – and the technology (bandwidth, browsers) is now there to support it on the web. Designers are going to be able to do more and more to create experience-driven sites without sacrificing on ease of use and access to information.

I agree that splash pages were a horribly overused (and in those cases with bad animation and tinny cloying music, overused horribly!) ‘trend’ that thankfully dissipated due to user outcry.  However, for brands that rely on a strong visual component and in some (and I stress some) cases, a splash page can be an elegant introduction to a site if done properly.

One Degree: I really thought that Jakob Nielsen, Jeffrey Zeldman, Dan Cederholm, Joe Clark, 37 Signals, and others had done a really good job of explaining why it was crucial that we design using web standards instead of sticking with table-based design. Doing a "view source" on sites you've built shows your crew is still coding like it's 1999.  Do companies demand this or are you just sticking with what you know?

2 Comments