Wanna improve your web designing? Read elsewhere!

I remember a girl who wanted to write, during my university days, a research paper on “Science and technical students and their approach to canon literature.” The first thing to be done, as she was being guided by her tutors, was to define “canon literature”. It happens that she dismissed science fiction, hence dismissing J.R.R Tolkien who entered the British canon in 1996 with “The Lord of the Rings”.

I’m saying this because sometimes, reading things out of our own world might give us other approaches to our work. These might help us improve our way of designing web sites. They might push us to other boundaries which are less rigid than just building either with creative juices and forgetting usability or doing just usability and code while forgetting the fun part of things.

You might for example tackle this report on Experts vs. Online Consumers: A Comparative Credibility Study of Health and Finance Web Sites published by a Stanford (Google anyone?) research group. This sheds some light on how experts evaluate a site according to its content, while online consumers evaluate the same sites on the basis of design. So if you want a website that sells both to experts and consumers (lightly said) you would need to have both content and design. Consumer Web Watch has a lot of other reports of that sort.

Who knows, you might even want to try Maslow’s classic psychology research on human needs where he defines the characteristics of the basic human needs and how to satisfy them. This is taught to marketing students: by designing a product that fulfills more needs than that of your competitor, your product might have more success whatever the price. Examples: Iphone, German/Italian Cars (for Europe) which can’t be sold in the US because of the need for bigger cars…

As the Dalai Lama said “Each year, go somewhere you’ve never been before”. This just might work to improve your web desiging.