The challenges of designing for giant websites
The increasing importance of the digital element in our lives leaves a massive footprint on both users, and creators of digital experiences due to one key element: design.
Margaret Gould Stewart, Product Design Director at Facebook and former User Experience Director at YouTube revealed in her TED Talk entitled “How giant websites design for you (and a billion others, too)” the difficulties entailed by designing large websites which addres more than a billion people.
Designing at scale is a terribly difficult thing to do, as Stewart explains, since it requires a combination of two things: the audacity to believe that the product designed is something that the entire world wants and needs, and the humility to see design more as a tool that positively impact peoples’ lives, than merely a component of your portfolio.
In design, details matter. Designing at scale makes details matter even more. The example presented by Margaret Stewart is the redesign of the Like button on Facebook.
The team at Facebook who manage the Like button decided that it needed to be redesigned, and had to put in 280 hours of work over the course of months to finalize the project. All for a tiny little button which is being viewed on an average of 22 billion times a day on over 7.5 million websites, becomes a very important element for the experience of the Facebook users.
In order to make proper design decisions for the user’s digital experience, a designer, as Margaret explains, can use a vast amount of data followed by iteration, testing and research. But, as the design is created for human beings, there are other things that a designer needs to attend to, besides data: intuition and empathy.
Next, what a designer needs to prepare for when redesigning something is introducing this change to users. People can become very efficient at using bad design and when a change happens, if it’s for the good, it still can be very frustrating. Thus, the necessity of introducing change carefully. The example that Margaret presents is of when YouTube decided to change the star-rating system with an up-down voting binary model. This decision was taken after looking at the data which was showing that people were mainly rating videos with 1 star and 5 stars, but nothing in between. To introduce the change, the project team decided to publish the data graph that presented the results showing these findings.
The next major thing to be taken into account is to see who your users really are. When designing for the whole world, a designer should be aware of what the needs of all these people are, as diverse as they may be and to find a way to accommodate all this diversity of needs. Because design needs to be able to cross boundaries, overcome language barriers and device functionality barriers.
All these aspects related to looking at even the smallest detail as an important thing, using your intuition and empathy together with data, testing and iterating, knowing your audience and then carefully introducing change are essential when designing at scale. And as Margaret confesses, most of these designs have a short life span, as they must evolve to accommodate the needs of the users. But being part of such a gigantic system and having such an impact of her work is what brings the thrill in what she does.
References:
Image source:
