Design by Community

Design by Committee

One of the often quoted rules of web design is that design by committee is a really bad idea. There are always a number of people involved in decisions around web design but problems arise when that number is more than a few. Projects stagnate through indecision, or web sites turn out to be bland and uninteresting because of the need to please everyone. For example a large committee given a choice between white or black will often end up going for a compromise grey.

From a web designers perspective, the ideal situation is where they are given free reign to make all the decisions themselves, but meanwhile, back in the real world, the best that can be achieved is that there is one or two people apart from the designer who can make all the decisions.

With a larger group, decisions inevitably take longer (either the group has to meet all together which depends on shared available time, or members have to communicate in other ways e.g. email). Group members all have their own perspectives and agenda for what they want from a web design project. Often this manifests itself as a requirement for every department to have their fair share of the home page real estate and a jockeying for position within that page.

From Committee to Community

Design by community is a different approach, where the decisions are based on the needs and opinions of hundreds or thousands of individuals. Although that sounds like a recipe for disaster, in practice it means that the normal means of reaching decisions has to be replaced by other ways, for example polling or focus groups. The process has to be more democratic to work, although inevitably there will be some individuals or groups who dominate to some degree.

For many projects design by community isn’t a practical option but it’s certainly used for many web applications and systems e.g.

• content management systems
• blogging platforms
• social media applications

What is also true is that aspects of design by community pop up in most web projects. Why do I say this? Because designers use established good practice all the time. There is innovation happening, but good design is generally based on existing principles that in some cases have been around for years. For example, it is very common for websites to display a logo in the top left corner of the page and for this to link back to the home page. There is no rule that says this is how things must happen, but it has developed over time and become an unwritten standard. It has developed by designers innovating and then the community feeding back. In this example the feedback has been generally positive which is why it has become the norm, however there is still debate over certain aspects e.g. whether on the home page the logo should not be a link as it would be self-referencing.

Some innovations disappear almost as quickly as they arrive, because they get the thumbs down from the community. They are either to difficult to use or implement, or inaccessible, or perhaps just ahead of their time.

Although the pace of change on the Web seems very fast, in many ways it is slowed down by this community action, which is probably a good thing. Development of the web needs both innovation and sanity checks. Corporate culture is generally quite conservative and a web design brief from a large organisation may have a long list of requirements which are effectively design decisions e.g. logo in the top left, search box top right, horizontal navigation bar. Things do change over time though and even the largest organisations are now happy to consider using things like breadcrumb navigation or tag clouds which were both radical innovations when they first appeared.

In Conclusion

So the message is, don’t ignore the community; use it to your advantage in establishing what are good practices for web design, in particular regarding usability and accessibility. And don’t be afraid to suggest this sort of approach for establishing requirements for large web projects, especially if the alternative is a twenty person committee who meet once a quarter to make the decisions.