Myth #19: You Don’t Need Content to Design a Website

Posted on | July 22, 2012 | No Comments

Editor’s note: Lanita Pace-Hinton at the Knight Dig­i­tal Media Cen­ter (based at UC-Berkeley Grad­u­ate School of Jour­nal­ism) shared this site, UXmyths.com, with me. It’s fas­ci­nat­ing, whether you pub­lish web­sites or just read them. This is the kind of stuff we, as jour­nal­ists today, need to under­stand. This is just Myth 19, so don’t neglect to go look at all the oth­ers; this one just hap­pens to deal with con­tent. — Susan Older

Myth #19

Many design­ers cre­ate wire­frames and comps with “lorem ipsum” filler text. Using dummy text often results in an aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing but unre­al­is­tic design. What’s worse, it cre­ates the illu­sion that con­tent is secondary.

The fact is that users come for the con­tent, not the design. Con­tent is by far the most impor­tant ele­ment in user inter­face design. A web­page with a sim­ple struc­ture but qual­ity con­tent per­forms much bet­ter on usabil­ity tests than a nice lay­out with sub­par text.

Why base your design on actual content?

Designer Luke Wrob­lewski argues that “using dummy con­tent or fake infor­ma­tion in the Web design process can result in prod­ucts with unre­al­is­tic assump­tions and poten­tially seri­ous design flaws.” He also explains how these designs usu­ally fail when real con­tent is added. — Death to Lorem Ipsum

Read more by click­ing here.

Category: Blogs and Websites, Content, Displaced Journalists, Myths, Online

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