For the web, design is where art and science break even. It is one of the most difficult and exacting pieces to every project. Good design will enable a great product to achieve its maximum potential, and technology over technique will produce an emotionless product.The stakes are high as a user punches in a destined URL for the very first time, if a design is not up to (his/her) standards, there is little-to-no room for making a good second impression. Now before we delve a bit deeper on the subject, allow me to halt and warn you that I am no professional designer by any means. Like you, I am merely a user who believes in good taste and has an eye for functionality at best – well, according to my own “standards” of course. Standards are funny things though – they’re subjective, and everyone has a few benchmarks of their own. We can’t design for everybody. Let alone that it would probably be impossible to do, but you’d probably make everyone unhappy. Like anywhere, Arabia has grown to have its own design styles and that rubs off to websites in the region, but is it “good” design?
Observing design over time, it’s safe to say that it shouldn’t be taken lightly. It creates culture, which in turn shape our values and determine the future. It may be complex, but good design can be described as “clear thinking” made visual and intelligence made visible, and it covers so much more than the aesthetic. Design is usability, information architecture and accessibility. With my personal projects, I believe in user-interface (UI) simplicity and cleanliness – or what I like to call the “Don’t make them think approach”. It’s always a safer bet to launch with a design that is visually self-explanatory. The twitter (especially the original) interface is the epitome of this in my opinion, and you see many more following such a trend today. It’s effective because you can steer your users to wherever you want them to go, they can’t get lost on your page, and they know exactly where everything is. The most successful sites today provide just one service, or a few more. The users don’t have to think and just flow right in. Additionally, this would open doors to adding more complex design elements or usability later on the product’s life, design matures just as anything else – i.e. the new twitter.
What have Arabic sites been up to on the UI front though? There isn’t much to the history of the Arabic internet as a whole, but it is a tale of Forums and their trusty companions:
Yes…EMOTICONS. Don’t you just adore those little badges of joy! I just love those popping hearts circulating all over my screen…(Is my tone sarcastic enough there?) The truth is that the Arabization of the vBulletin’s admin panel (a forum publishing suite), users from the region dashed to put up their own discussion board websites. The majority of the estimated 0.5% of the Arabic internet content is locked up in forums for that very reason. The usage on these forums is absolutely massive, the numbers are in the millions as well, but is this due to the fact that forums are the most abundant or available outlets for Arab users or do we really relate to them as a culture? If international trends migrate over and prove to apply to the Arab world (which is becoming very likely), then we are destined to be liberated from the current model sometime soon. Take a look at these examples:
This can’t be the most aesthetically pleasing thing you’ve ever seen over the web, but it has become standard to some extent. Amazingly, the relatively basic Arab user actually finds his way around all the clutter and puzzling menus across these sites, the dead links don’t seem to bother either. To me this is a bit out of the norm, but what would happen if one of these forums were to upgrade its UI one day? Generally speaking, most people don’t adapt to change very easily and few sites have the pull to retain users, no matter what the alterations are; Facebook is one of those sites. Surely you remember when facebook plugged in some <a href=”http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2298898409″>major UI changes</a> some 9 months ago, people hated it so much that they began to petition against it. Some even threatened to deactivate their accounts for a day in protest. Yet do you hear any more of that today? Nope. People get used to it and move on because they are far too occupied with its activity feeds than with its design. They need it, and the same doesn’t apply to the forums of the world. If an Arab user rebels, he will probably take a stand and not come back.
A philosophy that we carefully follow at <a href=”http://www.d1g.com/”>d1g.com</a>, is to transition our population of users towards a more functional and obvious UI design. The look and feel of our site today is part of a larger strategy that sets us apart from the usual suspects in the market. As we continually study the behavior of Arab users, we become more ready to provide the masses with the types of services that they are looking for over the Arab internet. It is critical that we mold our environment to be “just right” and fit the fashion of the principal market we address. We are holding back on the design front to a large extent, but shocking users with something that is out of this world will only remain as “something that is out of <em><strong>their</strong></em> world” – we understand that would rather blow them away on the product and service side.
Clearly, it is cluttered but we believe that design is never finished until somebody is using your product. As one of the fastest growing online destinations in the region, our numbers suggest just that.
<a name=”_GoBack”></a>Despite all the denseness and crowdedness of Arabic web design today, we must conclude that “good” design can only be defined by appropriateness to audience, goals, and its effectiveness, not by its adherence to Swiss design or the number of awards it wins – those are different “standards”. Weighing against what I am personally used to, Arabs are more familiar with bad design than good design. We are, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what the majority of us live with. This is quite alright because we’re growing and developing, but our mindset as Arab nations must learn to become more malleable and adaptive to change. The old will always be more re-assuring to us, but the new should never be threatening. In the end, perhaps face-off isn’t between modern and old design, but between design itself and those who use it.