Functionality 'v' Design??

stuartc1

What do you think is important when building a website or and intranet ?? see the poll above.

piersk

What are we talking about here?

stuartc1

Its a poll, What do you think is important when building a website or and intranet ??

piersk

Ah, I see. Wasnt sure what yore were on about...

Bunkermaster

user freindly functionality is everything. If there is no functionality what's the use of building software? If it looks ugly noone will use it what'd be the use of that great software?

PS : Lotsa peeps still use character based MVS (or other Mainframe) applications, God help them.

stuartc1

indeed.
I believe working functionality is 100% the most important, but its also pretty important to make apps user friendly with a neat interface.
Its just that lots of scripts you get on the internet, and even some software development websites are shockingly ugly (with green backgrounds and yellow text... and the like). It makes you wonder why these folks bother, all that hard work to make quality software and it looks bloody rubbish.
It can work the opposite way also, you get sites full of fancy Flash and high quality design, but thing like simple forms crash... ha, ha. youve gotta laugh.

bastien

if it doesn't work, you don't get paid...remember too that users are the lowest common demoninator (some i know need instrunction to breath😉 ) ya gotta make it idiot proof or at least as idiot proof as possible

programming law #1
60-70 % of the code show be designed to validate user input and protect them when they do sometihing stupid..

the rest is the code that actually does the job

the_Igel

Yeah.
Design is design: it's not about bells & whistles, it's about usability.
A program should a) work, b) work stable, and c) be usable. No more, no less.
And yes, "work stable" means "is idiot-proof".

br__ken

graphics suck 🙂 i like fast idiot-proof pages. then again, css is my new lover.

Wave

peoples, dont forget that there are two main categories of web sites (we talking about web development, isn't it?)

information
presentation

so it's depend's on what you site aimed to - shock users with whistles and bells (reasonable bells in right places) or give em alot of information with minimal amount of graphics.

and even if your site is more information then presentative, it's a good idea to develop an appropriate graphic design too. it's a good pleasure for peoples. definitely it is.

Bunkermaster

Originally posted by Wave

and even if your site is more information then presentative, it's a good idea to develop an appropriate graphic design too. it's a good pleasure for peoples. definitely it is.

if you site looks like crap people won't go there period (the only exception would be google though 😛)

Wave

you're right.

so it's the fact - let's make functional and good looking sites. amen.

the poll is closed. 😉

the_Igel

Good look doesn't mean bells & whistles. As for me, Google is one of the best-looking sites ever 🙂

Bunkermaster

the tab system of google is not clear enough for non experienced users to use (my father tried Google once and gave up, he went back smiling to Yahoo and thought his son was a barbarian who knew nothing about the web 😃)

I especially like the part they added recently :
News-New!

but TBH I don't use google portal anymore, I installed the googlebar and that's my search engine (I see results pages only now). Great thing about the google bar is that you can access the google cached pages (meaning that if you changed something and google has it in search cache it's still accessible 😃)

kaumilpatel

When you have created something that does both; functionality and design... you have created a big bad monster 🙂

jeremuck

I'm not sure about that 60 - 70%... I think that's pretty modest.

I thought it was the 20-80 rule: 20% of the code operates 80% of the time.

Assuming most of the time, the user knows to do the right thing (especially after factoring in time and experience), then 80% of the code is for validation.
It also probably means that bells and whistles hardly ever get used.