industry

This page considers the web design industry, currently emerging from a painful adolescence.

It covers -

• shape of the industry
• fragmentation - offline models for the proliferation of design houses
• wanting what you get - are customers more to blame than designers?
• analysing the analysts - do the gurus practice what they preach?

     shape

Estimates of the size and shape of the industry - businesses and individuals constructing sites on a commercial or other basis - are problematical. As with much writing about the web, striking anecdotes and myths are easier to find than hard figures. Overall it seems clear that the industry (in Australia and overseas) is highly fragmented. Size is not necessarily an indicator of expertise or effectiveness.

The number of standalone major specialist web design houses - many of which featured in glossy journals from 1995 onwards and were the recipients of awards - appears to have shrunk as business models (or merely expenditure) proved unsustainable. Prominent departures in 2001 included Australia's Spike.

Many major clients appear to be turning to more traditional advertising/design houses (which in turn often outsource their online activity to specialists on a project basis), with online survivors rebadging themselves as 'new media' or digital production houses. As with the metrics business, there's been considerable consolidation among the players and cutbacks in their offerings.

Small agencies and individual operators continue to enter the market, often buoyed by a belief that a Mac and black tshirt and passion for flash are the ticket for success. There are enough trains leaving the station for some of those beliefs to be correct. Later in this guide we've offered some suggestions about choosing the train that best meets the needs of your users.

     fragmentation

Development of much of the market has been analogous to the desktop publishing revolution of the 1980s, when the availability of cheap processing power, irreverence for basic design principles and pliable design software saw the emergence of numerous 'designers' ... and lots of truly horrendous layout with weird typefaces and crude clipart on smudgy purple photocopies.

Fragmentation over the past five years reflects

the newness and craft nature of the industry: no-one has been building websites for more than a decade, most sites are simple and built by hand rather than mass-produced or requiring work by large production teams

few businesses have grown large enough to command a substantial market share and the lack of large-scale production economies permits small design houses to compete on an equal cost footing with large competitors

low entry barriers: clients are uncertain about what works or what to expect, as discussed later in this guide anyone with chutzpah and a machine can go online and announce (legitimately or otherwise) that they're a web designer

demand is so large and diverse that it takes a large number of firms to accommodate buyer requirements. Some design houses have accordingly concentrated on very narrow niches, for example the handful of funeral home site designers such as Funeral Home Web Design (here) and its associate DeathCareWebDesign.Com (here).

much work is undertaken by amateurs, semi-professionals or by businesses (large and small) that will deliver products under cost in the hope of establishing a presence

the emergence of new tools such as Flash and disagreement about basic standards or initiatives such as WAI. Two perspectives are provided by figures in Volker Turau's 1998 paper Web Design: Industry vs. University and Richard Miller's Web Interface Design: Learning from our Past paper; other studies are highlighted in the Metrics & Statistics guide on this site

the ongoing tension between the 'graphics' school and the 'usability' or 'information architecture' school (at its crudest, between visual designers and traditional IT people)

     wanting what you get?

The latter point is complicated by different user needs - given our sense of what visitors to this site want we've leaned towards Jakob Nielsen austerity rather than a flash-saturated, almost cinematic experience best experienced with a big screen and fast connection.

There is an entertaining introduction to that debate in the A List Apart article Usability Experts are from Mars, Graphic Designers are from Venus and in Nalini Kotamraju's 2000 sociology thesis (PDF) A Skill is Born: The Emergence of Web Design Skill. For a more self-indulgent view see Megan Sapnar's 2002 paper From Text Effects to Canned Goods: Identity Construction and Visual Codes in the Flash Development Community.

Another perspective's provided by Discovering the Gap Between Web Site Designers' Expectations and Users' Behavior, a paper by Takehiro Nakayama, Hiroki Kato & Yohei Yamane. As Steve Krug comments in Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (extract here) many web designers think that the user is "just like me". As a result many sites are designed by designers for designers, or by technicians for technicians".

As a result there is some truth in the gibe that the "single greatest enemy of good web design" is the designer from a traditional visual design background who considers web design is all about graphics, color, space, and balance. Those designers want the site to look good, be different, or be "cool". They want the reader to have an experience, although its clear from empirical studies that most users are in search of content (and impatient about finding it) rather than in search of an "experience".

The 'normalisation' of the online population means that there is increasing agreement among users about information architectures. That is not the death of avant-garde online design but where most users go, most designers will have to follow.

Others come from a technical background and consider that design is about pushing technical boundaries. They assume (or require) users have fast machines, bandwidth to spare, free time and loads of plug-ins. Many, alas, also assume that everyone has a degree in technical engineering and view playing with web gadgets as "fun."

     analysing the analysts

It is always interesting to see whether experts follow their own advice. Was the resounding statement about probity the first document to be shredded when things went bad at a client such as Enron? And what about their own sites?

Analyzing the Analysts An Information Architecture Analysis of Top Business Analysts' Web Sites, a 2001 report (PDF) by Chiara Fox & Keith Instone of the Argus information architecture group, examined the sites of industry leaders Forrester Research, Gartner, Giga Information Group, Delphi, IDC and META Group. Their conclusion, consistent with independent analyses, is that the giants have not been 'walking the talk' and setting an example for their clients.

It is usefully read in conjunction with studies such as Jakob Nielsen's 1999 Alertbox Who Commits The "Top Ten Mistakes" of Web Design?




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