The Paradox of Website Design

Sitting here on a very pleasant Sunday morning, sun coming in and window open, playing a mindless video game on my computer and daydreaming about paradox, like warm weather in February (rare in my part of the world) and wasting time with perhaps the most efficient tool ever invented.

Lev Manowich, a professor in visual arts at the University of California, San Diego, wrote an oft-cited book a few years ago called the Language of the New Media. In this book, he discusses the dynamics between the two dominant cultural forms represented in the new media, database and narrative: “As a cultural form, the database represents the world as a list of items, and refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning of the world.”

This dynamic tension between database and narrative is the paradox of Internet communications. The ability to store, organize and retrieve co-existing with the sum of all human utterances. On another scale, even when designing and writing for the simplest of websites, some reconciliation between the “natural enemies” must occur. A few examples are listed below:

1. Search Engines vs. Narrative - A recent (December 2005) article in Communication World by T.J. and Sandar Larkin points out that we use search engines, then hunt and click on web sites, to find “small pieces of data buried in big data sets.” During this process, our attention spans are short and our tolerance for reading narrative is low. This behavior would indicate that the Internet is database driven. But it is narrative that drives search engine algorithms and helps to determine the ranking of a site. So search engines are driven to find what users don't want. Communicate information in a way that favors the user and the user may never find your site.

2. User Demographics vs. Language - Internet users tend to be among the best educated and rank among the highest income earners in our society. Over 90% of Canadians with a post secondary education are using the Internet vs. less than 40% of people with less than a high school education (Statistics Canada, Household Internet Use Survey 2003). There should be the potential for your website to communicate at a higher level of comprehension than other media. But studies show that site navigation steals mental resources away from comprehension. This limits the potential of narrative as an integral part of the site and relegates narrative to attachments.

3. Random Creativity vs. Social Conformity - Web sites are a dynamic media that could be, and perhaps should be, changed often, experimented with and used creatively. But researchers, like Fogg at Stanford, have found that people make very quick judgments of a site's credibility based on its superficial appearance. So even though there is an expectation of random access to information, there is also an expectation of linearity, a narrative construct that will guide the user. This expectation often forces designers to conform to widely accepted standards and limits creativity. Often very boring templates have a better initial reception than attempts at creativity.

4. User Behavior vs. Branding - A Brand is a symbol of a company's narrative, ideally instilling associations with favorable metaphors. Ebay is arguably one of the most successful brands to emerge since the Internet came into being. The name has become part of the lexicon of everyday speech, a traditional benchmark of brand success. Yet, last month, January 2006, over 14 million searches for Ebay were made in Overture alone. Grant it, they were using the brand in the searches, but given that they knew the name, one has to wonder why they searched at all. The paradigm of the Internet as a searchable database is perhaps changing the nature of a brand, an archetype of corporate narrative.

Communicators - wordsmiths, artists, designers, photographers, etc. - tend to have a strong bias towards narrative. Communicators are storytellers, who believe there should be a beginning, middle and an end. Speaking for myself, I have had a difficult time wrapping my mind around how to use websites as more than online brochures or catalogues, in other words, as repositories for narrative. Trying to think through the possibilities of blending database functions with the narrative, trying to ease the tension, has helped me scratch the surface of some exciting applications that I have applied in my teaching, my volunteer work, my marketing and my work with clients.

One practical way that I have found to reconcile the opposing forces, is to learn user friendly web sites for the functional database applications, feedback forms, shopping carts, photo albums, calendars, newsletters, polls, and so on. These are the things that make sites dynamic and yet are boring to implement. Getting them done as easily as possible, frees up time and energy for the narrative, the story telling.

When you are learning to swim, at some point you have to jump in the water. Once you overcome the surface tension, navigation is relatively easy. I hope pointing out some of the tensions that arise from the dynamics of the Internet, creates some new perspectives on this powerful form of communication that in many ways is still a grand experiment.

Ron Strand is a member of the faculty of the Centre for Communication Studies at Mount Royal College and President of Strateo Consulting Inc., a marketing and communications consulting firm. His firm is a participant in http://www.freesiteoffer.com

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