Designing Design?

Whenever I sit down to make my website, I get thinking, how should it look? I always start with focus on the looks and then once I make a nice flashy page, I start thinking, "Isn't this too gaudy?", "Is this page really usable?", "Will this page have huge load times with all that graphics?". A lot more questions come to my mind and eventually I would have worked on a reworked the page about 10 times finally giving up on the very concept of creating a page.

I decided to sit down and think it over. On of the great help that the corporate world has given me is that is has taught me to think from the client's point of view. For me, my clients are the visitors to my blog and I have to think from their point of view. If I were to be visiting a blog then what would I like to see there? The content is of course of paramount importance. If there is no content then what is the use of creating a blog? So, lets move on and think about what else will make a difference. The differentiating factor is the design.

I took this as a case study and tried to think practically and with real life examples. The first success story that hit me was Google. Before Google, we had famous search engines such as Yahoo, Altavista before Google came in. What was it that made Google click?

1) Simplicity: This was one of the key factors in making Google a success. The page was clean and uncluttered and had just the information that the user wanted - the Search Box. No fancy portals, no news content, no distractions. They weren't trying to sell their other products from their search page.
2) Performance: The design was so clean and simple that it was downright effective. There was no large graphics and images to be loaded on the page and hence page loaded times were simply amazing. People started thinking that Google is a faster search engine not because of their sophisticated algorithms (which of course they had) but because of their page load times. And they let their users know how fast they were. They had and still have that small timer at the top of the screen which shows how long it took to display(find?) the results. The users were happy to know that they don't have to waste time to get their search results.
3) Innovation: Google brought a new product into a market which already had enough of similar products and still managed to take the world by storm. They brought in innovative technology in the form of AJAX, they brought in innovative design philosophies, they brought in innovation in the form of usability and features. New ways to search and filter search data. New range of products bubbling out of the Google labs every few weeks.
4) Usability: If I give a kid the Google page and asked him to work on it what would he do? There is one text box, so he might go there and enter something. There are just two buttons to click and he would go ahead and click on them. The second button says search, and so when he clicks on it it shows him a page which contains a lot of references to the term that he entered. He understands that the page gives him more information on the text that he entered. There is nothing else that he can do on the page and hence its so intuitive to use the page. No distractions whatsoever.

I believe that one should learn from the example that Google has set.

An another important thing that I have learnt is consistency, not bordering on Monotony. Its important to have consistency across all your products in terms of look and feel. Intuitiveness is so important. The user should feel at home using the product without having to spend hours in front of the help pages. Once he spends even a few minutes in learning a product, he shouldn't have to spend more than a few seconds in using the other products from the same stable. That is consistency. Of course consistency shouldn't be at the cost of monotony. The user shouldn't get bored of seeing the same kind of pages day in and day out, and that needs a lot of creative thinking.

I have tried to use as much of this research as possible when I have created my blog pages. I do believe that I will still need to improve the look and feel of these pages, and I will do that overtime. Of course your valuable feedback is ever important in this endeavor of mine. :)