Interview - Vincent Flanders of Web Pages That Suck

SitePoint: You say that Web design is not about art, it's about making money. Can you elaborate on this? Do you feel this applies to design in general, or simply to commercial applications of Web design?

I only talk about sites where the purpose is to sell products or disseminate information. Why? Because there's no money in writing about personal, art, and experimental sites. Why? Because the book would only contain this sentence: "If you're creating a personal, art, or experimental site, do whatever you want. God speed."

SitePoint: You've written two books on the subject of usability. Are they aimed at designers or online business owners? Can you describe their key messages for us?

As you might have gathered, I like to maximize the potential audience <g> so there's something for everyone. At the very least, a design firm could buy the book, stick it on the coffee table in their foyer with a note "The sites we design won't make it in this book" -- unless of course they did <g>.

The key messages are always, "Know your audience" and "Know their tolerance for pain." I try to show you how you can make your Website more effective for your audience. Like I said, I don't care if a site is usable or not. I just care that your site makes people buy whatever it is you sell -- a product or a belief system. Usability is a tool. It seems to work more often than not.

SitePoint: What do you expect will be the major developments in Web design and usability over the coming years?

The one word answer is "SOAP." Look it up. It's the future. We're headed for the World Wide Weblog. The goal is to turn the world into Lotus Notes for the Web -- without any Lotus Notes software. Corporations are also going to be sharing data with other companies in truly transparent ways because of the cost savings. It's the backend that's important.

What really bothers me -- and I hinted at it earlier in our conversation -- is that Web design is becoming almost irrelevant. It's all about programming now, which is good for me because I'm an author and almost all of the documentation for software just sucks. I'd put up a site called DocumentationThatSucks but we all know almost all documentation sucks. Especially the Open Source and Pseudo-Open Source software. You generally can't install the software if you follow the directions the authors provide.

I expect a lot of usability is going to be built into future software. Imagine if all the blogging software out there complied with W3C standards? Just click "New Theme" and your whole site changes into XHTML compliance and accessibility. The designer will become more of a "site conceptualizer." S/he'll come up with the concept, steno-pool graphic designers -- 'cause that's what's going to happen to them -- will create the initial templates and the art, and the programmers of the server will see to it that all the graphics are optimized to each and every viewer for just the browser they're using.

And we'll all live happily ever after <g>.

SitePoint thanks Vincent for his time. Check out 'Son of Web Pages That Suck' today!