« Control-Freak / Zen Master | Main | Architecture and Web Design »
November 12, 2005
Redesign or Realign?
It's a feeling that pops up from time to time. Maybe things are feeling stale, or out-of-date, or aligned too closely with last year's trends. Or maybe you're just sick of looking at the same design hour after hour, day after day.
So you think to yourself "it's about time for a redesign".
As someone's who's been tinkering, albeit very minimally, with this blog's design, I understand the feeling (even writing this post I'm thinking to myself "hm, maybe I should change the color on that header" and it's only been like that for a week!).
I started thinking about this recently after reading Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign over at A List Apart. It's a great article, and I thought it created a good opportunity to talk about some homepage "realigns" we've done on macromedia.com over the last few years.
The current macromedia.com site design is a little over two years old. There were many business goals with that redesign (it was timed with the release of Studio 2004 for one), and it was fairly successful (PDF; opens in new window). Here's a screenshot of how the homepage looked (opens in new window) when we launched.
After a year or so with this design, we decided to make some changes, based on some new business priorities. We wanted to raise the profile of some of our Solutions offerings, and also took the opportunity to create more clear divisions between the different sections of content on the homepage, with the goal of making the page a little easier to scan. That design looked like this (opens in new window). General look is very similar; but the content and organization has been "realigned", and the visal design has been refined, rather then redesigned.
The current homepage was launched this last summer. It was another exercise in reorganizing content using the same visual lauguage. With this design, we wanted to create more of an equal presentation between the Solutions, Products and Developer Center sections, and get more information above the fold. We also wanted to create more areas we could use graphics, which in the previous design were pretty much restricted to the right column.
While we did have specific goals and requirements in mind, our motto during this project was "evolution, not revolution". Again, it was mostly content organization work, with no real new design elements.
Looking back over the 3 homepages, they're very similar, but each one was created with specific goals and requirements, none of which warranted a complete redesign.
As Camreron Moll writes, " It’s perfectly fine to refresh the entire design from the ground up if there’s good reason to do so". Just be sure you've asked the right questions, and thought through the strategy behind the design. You may be better served with a "realign".
Posted by nstraghalis at November 12, 2005 05:02 PM
Comments
Good insite on the homepage realignments. :)
Posted by: Chris Charlton at November 12, 2005 11:18 PM
I have a crazy background that I am using to impliment or underscore my careless abandonment for bandwidth...blah...blah...blah, no I want to push my design with very good UI. I played with the fireworks rolloevers here, but they are terrible.
I actually feel that the macromedia globalnav is the best in the buisness (thinking of SNL act where he keeps saying "you da best in da BIZ, boss.) Anyway I am having a very difficult time finding out how to impliment such a design. Why not make it more public on how macromedia achieved this.
More to the point: Do you know if the rollover buttons movie clips use gotoandPlay()/stop(), are they externally loaded flash PHP/XML, or are they movie clips loaded with actionscipts. It is very difficult to tell becuase of the use of CSS, and the .swf...
Posted by: Jake Hawkes at November 14, 2005 07:58 AM
Thanks for the compliment Jake. We did a lot of usability testing on that globalnav to get the interaction down.
There's 2 versions of the global nav on the site, one flash and one JS/HTML/CSS. you can see the non flash version here:
http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/store/html/index.cfm?store=OLS-US
feel free to dive in if you want to try to decifer the code. In the flash one, the rollover behaviors are controlled programmatically by setting tweens within timed intervals.
Posted by: Neil Straghalis at November 14, 2005 03:10 PM
Ahem... is an executive directive a good enough reason? ;)
Seriously, though, having been very much involved as the visual designer for all three of these iterations, I can say that periodic design evaluations are a great thing. The hard part is gathering the metrics which warrant change. Do you move certain nav items because they aren't getting enought click throughs, and if so, how do you reshuffle all of the other information?
Web site design is extremely rooted in information architecture, and I can say that each one of these home page iterations were all based on good IA, not on what most people consider "design." Every item on the home page was given SERIOUS consideration to its placement and inclusion.
I think the current version is so much better than the original version... hindsight is 20/20 :)
Posted by: Matt Snow at November 16, 2005 01:02 PM
Thanks for the comment Matt, you bring up 2 very important points.
1. The importance of good IA
2. In these cases, (changing the homepage of a software company with 1,500 employees and over 200,000 visitors a day), the proccess is very much a team effort, since in each case there was an IA, a visual designer, a project mananger and various strategy people involved, not to mention a developer who actualy built the page.
Posted by: Neil Straghalis at November 16, 2005 09:12 PM
