Ilse Crawford is one of the foremost interior designers in the world. In a documentary of her work on Netflix titled “Abstract: The Art of Design,” she says that interior design is more than just shopping for furniture. 87% of our lives are spent in buildings so how they feel, look, and smell matters. It can determine how someone experiences their life inside this space.
I’ve been recently exploring UX (user experience) and this vein of thought seemed exceptionally insightful. You could try to boil down UX to picking colors and a layout. That mentality is only going to hurt in the long run. Awareness of your customers time and attention is more likely to create quick and easy sales, return customers, and improved customer service.
Take a look at the website of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry by my UX idols, Dogstudio.
The website is a scrolling, intuitive, composition. I’ve always been told that design is about stripping everything away but the essentials and then making those essentials beautiful. This does the trick. By providing all the necessary links and nothing unnecessary, they ensure that the viewer is drawn to the correct location. Leading lines draw your eye to the two important actionable items, Plan your visit, and Tickets. Emphasis is placed on items by using font, size, icons, lines, and boxes to communicate importance with proper use of negative space. The scrolling slider provides advertising for upcoming exhibits in a way that is compelling and artful.
Another important note is the constant composition. A classic composition concept is the rule of thirds. In this concept, a piece of art is divided into thirds, horizontally and vertically, with points of importance placed at the intersections of those lines. This can be communicated further using the Fibonacci sequence or the golden ratio. Viewing a scrolling website as a composition, as the viewer changes their perspective on the website, the rule of thirds should apply as often as possible. You can see here how the design frames the information intuitively.
This website acts as its own sales funnel by familiarizing parties that may be interested in the services the museum provides. It educates and excites viewers in the areas of its specialties and also provides sales support.
Think about how your users experience your website. Imagine how long it takes to get to a certain piece of information. Is the relevant and compelling information communicated prominently? Build something your customers want to use.