Web design has always been a strictly defined set of rules and practices, but what we haven’t considered is the full spectrum of possibilities.
So far, 2015 has been the year of boldness, and breaking the templated boundaries of strictly defined rules and practices. Done boldly, designers can push the limits of human interaction and imagination on the web.
Bigger is better right?
It is a very rare case that you hear someone say, “Make that smaller!” Bigger and simpler is the direction we are headed in. Users are craving that “cinematic experience”, or “book cover” first impression. The goal is to wow, and draw in the user with a straight to the point graphical interface.
The story behind a “Cinematic” or “Book Cover” web trend is to provide and visual and pragmatic engagement. The ability to give a user maximum impact as soon as they land on your site, and use the entire area “above the fold” to maximize real estate across all platforms, enabling clear and concise marketing techniques. For instance, when PayPal update their homepage to a fullscreen video background. In this case, the video is used to emphasize the company’s motto: “We’re here, there, anywhere”. It shows short grabs of potential PayPal customers doing business in a wide variety of places. Wherever they are, they can rely on PayPal services.
The Interaction
Since birth, we have always felt, touched, and explored the world. We learned by feeling, by doing, and by indulging our ever aching need for exploration and adventuring; that subconscious want for more. Jumping forward from the era of Flash websites, new technology like HTML5 Canvas has taken leaps and bounds in the digital art of interaction. Building on the “bigger is better” theory, we want to be taken on a journey, and submerged into the experience of more than just clicking links and navigating through bland, cluttered white pages full of unnecessary text, images and useless links back to nowhere.
A perfect example of this is Weber’s BBQ Cultures website, which immerses you into a world that you control the outcome of, while providing a sea of information in a whole new interactive way.
While designing interfaces, we usually do everything to enable users, and clutter them with every option they could ever hope and dream for. This website shows that disabling users for a certain amount of time may sometimes enable a better experience, and provide them the clearer more precise information they were initially seeking.
Demonstrating the Benefits
Tying back into “Bigger, Better, Bolder” one definitive aspect of that theory is removing the clutter. Users love the “Cinematic” and “Book Cover” experience of being drawn into a website, they do not want to click, skim, and navigate through tiers of pages and decipher complex page names, debating if they are in the right place or not.
The goal here is to attract attention and create a certain sphere around your products. Let your visitors travel through your company. Draw your visitors in and capture them with an engaging story. You want to guide your visitors through your site and towards your call to action.
Conclusion
If we summarize “The year of bigger, better, bolder” in one sentence, the most important thing to think about when designing a website would be “Content First”. That mantra has always been true. But nowadays, an increasingly aesthetic emphasis on web design can reveal many of the mistakes made in the pre-design phases – concept, navigation flow planning, wire-framing, copy-writing, and so on. The main drive between this type of interaction is to present your product in new and engaging ways, or tell more vivid and interactive stories. Guiding your visitors through your content, and towards your call to action. Whether it be a media wall of social content, a one page scrolling experience, a micro site or an interactive media experience that takes control and leads the user through an immersive journey.