The balance of competing agendas in website development and design
Functionality, visual and UI design, accessibility, and responsiveness
Balancing site technical requirements with design requirements is already challenging, but add to that the needs of accessiibility and function across multiple different types of devices, and you have the challenge of competing agendas that your website team works with every day.
Functionality
In order to get the site to do what it needs to do to function, whether that is letting people buy products, or get information, or sign up for events, there may be a need to compromise on how it looks. The layout may need to be different to accommodate the code, or a desired design element may simply not be possible to be rendered by the browser.
Design
The design, on the other hand, still needs to reflect the brand and have visual appeal. It needs to faciliate an easy path for the website user as well. Ideally, the design should stay constant as the website does what it is supposed to do.
Accessibility
To be accessible, the code and design need to support many different needs and ways of accessing the site content beyond what is considered to be the “default” way.
Responsiveness
Adding onto that all of the different devices we use to interact with websites. The site should be usable whether you are on a smaller, vertical device or a larger horizontal device. There are untold sizes in between. When we do our visual design, it is common to have a wider “desktop” design alongside a narrow “mobile” design. However the midsizes need ot be taken into account as well, or the site will appear to be broken on tablets. To be truly “responsive”, the website will change per device size and per browser and device settings.
Considering the needs to responsiveness, how much leeway do we build into our design to keep brand recognition? Are we able to support all functions even on the smallest device? What changes when people are using a touch device, or assistive functions like screen readers and voice command?
Your website team at work
This is the balance every website team needs to strike to produce and support an attractive, accessible, and functioning website. Working together on these aspects makes the site stronger and helps us contibute to the posiitive user experience we all seek to create. It is a challenge, but one worthy of our continued efforts.
