UX Design via Bruno Munari
User design and User Experience; these are today's buzzwords but are concepts that have been around since the invention of the wheel. Now, we do not often give much thought to the humble wheel, after all, wheels literally surround us and of course they make sense to us. But, what is the wheel really if not one of the original successful user design experiments? How many iterations forward from the original could we possibly be and how does the final product differ from the original concept? You see, like it or not, we are subject to a constant cycle of design/experience. Design being what we imagine something should be like, and experience is what the user decides something should be like through their own actions, laziness and values.
Up until recently, I thought I had a pretty reasonable grasp of what UX was but I faced a steep challenge when I built my personal portfolio, www.szymonfugiel.com. As a visual artist, I assumed that I would be king of design, and that naturally, as long as it looks good then the right experience should happen. I consider myself an artist hence design should be natural. After months of laboring away, I launched my website and began on the next task, getting people to the website. Once I started marketing it became apparent that I had an issue. My bounce rate was sky high. 80% +.
I didn't get it. My website was beautiful, seamless, Steve jobs himself would have applauded me. It was like, I made the new iphone and it had no buttons, and assumed that, surely it must be intuitive. However, it seemed like no one agreed and I was stumped, so I figured back to the drawing board. I started showing everyone I knew my website and watched them as they attempted to navigate it and noticed some trends that were related very closely to my design choices.
By coincidence, I had just started reading Design as Art by the late contemporary artist turned designer Bruno Munari. Bruno altered his successful career as a visual artist and turned himself into one of the key designers of the 20th century. Among his many ideas, was one that was best explained in a chapter called " How One Lives in a Traditional Japanese House" in which he describes the simple homes of traditional Japanese families. These homes are designed out of practicality. For example, where the Western World will jam pack their kitchen with utensils, lemon scrapers, melon squarers and squash knives, the Japanese will instead use chopsticks for almost all of their cooking and eating. There is no mess, the food is consumed and cooked as well, if not arguably better than most western families and there is no mess or need for mass storage. The rooms are multi purpose and can be adjusted to suit whatever activity is going on, simple mattress', paper walls, and vast openness. How does this apply to UX? Bruno makes reference to the contemporary furniture design of the seventies where the avante-garde had crept its way into the home and reached a point break where the discussion of usability versus design began. He makes a simple point; what good is a beautiful chair, if it is not able to fulfill its purpose as a chair. A chair must have a certain amount of legs, and be able to support a human, so at some point one must draw a line in "design". This applies to a number of things across the board but really rang true when i turned back to my portfolio.
What did I do? I forced usability and turned away from a total focus on aesthetics. Seamlessness turned to obvious separation, beauty turned to simplicity. Firstly, my landing page changed from a display of my work in half entirety, to an introduction that would naturally lead people to assume there is more to see. Did I like this? No. Did I like the look of it, forcing people to an intro? Most definitely not. Did it make an impact? Most certainly. Then, I was lead to remove the seamless portrayal of my art and had to create a broken up display where one was forced to see that there was separation. Again, I did not like the look of this, but was relegated to prioritizing usability. Lastly, as you can see below, I redesigned my mobile menu. As 75% of my users came from mobile, I needed a menu that would force their experience to involve as many pages as possible.
This menu created a major change. In addition to simplifying, I designed an arrow into the menu, I knew where I wanted everyone to start, and so I directed them.
What happened? After the changes outlined, my bounce rate dropped to, and has remained about 30%. Now, there are better bounce rates and there are lots of other metrics, but after only the smallest changes, inspired by a man that had probably never uttered the words user experience in his life, I am able to direct my traffic where they should go.