Articles
Form and Function
What do we mean when we say "Form Follows Function"?
You've heard the phrase before- but have you ever stopped to think about what it really means?
For most people, if they think about it at all, it means that Form (that is, the shape something takes) is less important than Function (what something does). However, this isn't really the case. Especially when it comes to design and presentation.
What it really means is- the Form something takes SHOULD largely be determined by what it is meant to do.
This is as much true in website design as it is anywhere else in the world. A site that puts its design ahead of its function will inevitably have problems- not the least of which is a poor customer experience.
Let's take a look at the top 10 most visited sites in the US.
- YouTube
- Craigslist
- MySpace
- eBay
- Yahoo!
- Mapquest
- Bing
- MSN- Live
If you were doing a contest for "The Most Innovative Web Design" none of these sites would win. Artistically, they're all pretty bland (and Craigslist is downright ugly). But they're the top 10 sites in the US and have been FOR YEARS.
Why is that?
It is because the designers of these sites realize that their customers and potential customers want to get to what they're looking for and do what they want to do and be done. They don't want to wait for an animated Flash intro page (splash page), nor do they care how artistically the menu system was set up so as to be "different from everyone else so we can stand out". The deisgn of the sites are built around the function they provide. Once the function is set, you can do some tweeking, stylistically, but you should always build to enhance the experience while not effecting the function.
To put this in laymen's terms- If you were going to build a vehicle that was to have a lot of horsepower, carry a large payload and be able to tow... odds are you'd end up with something that looks like a truck. A truck doesn't look like a truck because someone built it and then decided what to do with it- they defined the function, built what they thought would work and then refined from there- keeping the idea of what it was meant to do at the forefront of the design. So now, every truck has similar features. They may differ in style- a Ford looks different than a Chevy or a Toyota- but they're all instantly recognizable by the core "I need to haul payload" design.