Let Usability Come Before Design

Web design skills are still in demand as poor sites abound. For a discipline that is at least 10 years old and is practised by millions of people, web design should be reaching maturity. Yet for the third year running the annual Interactive Bureau survey of the UK's top corporate websites has slammed FTSE 100 companies for lousy design, confusing navigation and basic technical flaws such as poor speed of loading and cross-browser compatibility.

The tools used in web design are cheap or free and the skills easy to acquire. The problem is with the way they are used - there is no substitute for professional training and experience.

Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen said that during the second half of the 1990s usability took second place to design and that bad design played a part in the collapse of dotcom companies because customers would not use difficult websites.

A good website design establishes an identity or brand, enables users to find what they want easily and provides the right balance of information on each page, requiring neither excessive scrolling nor excessive clicking. Websites will probably be linked to corporate data systems and may be used to capture information from customers, so they need to be responsive and secure.

Although many of the skills are similar to those in print design, websites are dy