Deciding Whom to Accommodate?

This really depends on what the purpose of your website is. In class, they teach us to design for everyone, no matter what the purpose is. But this is always a huge challenge.

What kind of site are you making? Or is this a hypothetical question?

Heavy Doody said:

Just to clarify: Do They teach you to design for everyone, or how to design for everyone?



I'm not designing a specific site. I pretty much have my guidelines in place. I wouldn't call my question hypothetical. I'm just trying to understand other designers' philosophies and standards.

If it helps to come up with a scenario, let's say you're designing a site for a company that sells books or picture frames to the gen-pop.

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They try to teach us both, but it is easier to tell us to always cater to everyone's needs than to actually show us how, especially when I am a double major, and only spend half my time designing.

Personally I think the two most important aspects of good web design are (in this order) information layout and usability for a wide user-base. You can always tell a strongly coded website by checking it out on your RAZR and it's tiny screen.

Heavy Doody said:

We all know that we can't always accommodate everybody, but what is your cut-off point for deciding whom to accommodate? Do you design for 100% compatibility? 90%? 50%? Some other number?

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I don't think a number is useful for comparison because you can be 100% compatible for everyone, or just for your audience, which may be Mac geeks with high speed internet connections and shiny 23" ACDs.

In general, I design mostly for academic and non-profits and therefore the audience is from around the world and many have slower older computers.

- I design for 800x600. I try to maximize that space at about 780px with an elastic design that expands if the content is larger of if one increases the font size, etc. I use negative space which enhances the viewers experience at 1024x768+.

- I try to keep my pages under 100kb, for users still on dial up. I design mostly clean sites anyway, so this isn't a problem. Needless to say, we don't use flash much.

- I design for IE6+, Safari, and Firefox using mostly CSS/XHTML. I don't use CSS hacks, just conditionals. I also don't use any javascript/PHP hacks to accommodate browsers. Haven't found the need for it.

That pretty much covers near 100% of my audience.

jng said:

I don't think a number is useful for comparison because you can be 100% compatible for everyone, or just for your audience, which may be Mac geeks with high speed internet connections and shiny 23" ACDs.

In general, I design mostly for academic and non-profits and therefore the audience is from around the world and many have slower older computers.

- I design for 800x600. I try to maximize that space at about 780px with an elastic design that expands if the content is larger of if one increases the font size, etc. I use negative space which enhances the viewers experience at 1024x768+.

- I try to keep my pages under 100kb, for users still on dial up. I design mostly clean sites anyway, so this isn't a problem. Needless to say, we don't use flash much.

- I design for IE6+, Safari, and Firefox using mostly CSS/XHTML. I don't use CSS hacks, just conditionals. I also don't use any javascript/PHP hacks to accommodate browsers. Haven't found the need for it.

That pretty much covers near 100% of my audience.

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These are really good tips. Along with not using much flash, you should avoid using too many pictures, and don't make any pictures too big, as that adds to the load time too.

Heavy Doody said:

So is it safe to assume that you guys don't start with a specific percentage in mind, or am I misunderstanding?

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I don't say "I am going to design this so 90% of users can effectively navigate it", no. I mean, that seems like an impossible task. How can you guess that 10% of the people accessing this site will be on a certain platform, or have a certain handicap.

I guess my advice is just design to your best ability with as many demographics in mind as possible. Check out some site usability tutorials, that may help you out some more. There are also some good books on this. Go to the web design section of your local barnes and noble or borders.

Heavy Doody said:

So is it safe to assume that you guys don't start with a specific percentage in mind, or am I misunderstanding?

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Well I think everyone should start out with a percentage, specifically 100%, but not everyone agrees. In fact, most don't comply.

In my design practice, I primarily work with web standards, xhtml and css. I generally design for an expected audience of 800x600. I do not use css hacks. I title every image as well as use alt descriptions. I use logical titles for pages as well as html files. I verify all my pages with w3c validation.

When and if using javaScript effects such as fades etc.. I am sure to see it that if the user does not have javaScript that the content will still be accessible.

If I purse Flash, which is rare, then I am sure to use it in a way that is complimentary and effective to and for the content. Macromedia proved that if you want a Flash site to be accessable that you would need a whole team of usalbility experts, which most designers or budgets can afford.. example: J.K.Rowling's website. I know that their point was to say "Flash is accessible!" but I feel that they communicated just the opposite.

I know that there is no way to 100% guarantee that every single user out there will be able to access every bit of content. I do my best, within the time and budget provided. When conceptualizing a project I can say that I do have good intentions to make the sites usability as high as possible.

Then there is my own personal creative work.. which at times negates everything I just said

Heavy Doody said:

100%? So you're going to design for... Say... The occasional WebTV user (544x372 and bloated text)? Or maybe people with 256 color displays (still 2%)?

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I was referring to 100% of what I outlined above.