Prinicpals of Web Design Part 1

So, reading through The Principals of Web Design by David and Jean Farkas, I've begun to realize how little I actually work like this. The way they describe web design seems so purposeful and structured, whereas the way I actually work is a lot more chaotic, what Steven Krug would call muddling through. For instance, I built a web form that submits information via email yesterday. I'd never done anything like that, so I went through several examples of web forms on the web, borrowed lines of code here and there and basically pasted something together that does what I want it to do. It took about four hours of lots and lots of frustration and change, but I finally got it to work. Now, according to the Farkases, I probably should have taken an hour or so and sat down, mapped out my goals, and systematically figured out how to reach each one of them.

Sure, maybe I did that in my head, but I definitely didn't commit any plans to paper or really consciously make any plans for that matter. I had a vague idea of what I wanted and an even vaguer idea of how I wanted to get there, and with a lot of frustration and an equal amount of perseverance I managed to get where I wanted to go.

Most the web designers I know operate a lot more like this than the Farkases methods. They have ideas about what they want and a vague idea about how to get there, and they just go, rapidly without a lot of planning. Most of the writing they do comes about during the bug fixes when they start making lists of problems, and putting those into hierarchies. I think Krug's examples of the problems found during user testing are a good example of this aftermath.

I kind of had the same problem when I was reading Contextual Design last semester. It's a great idea, it probably is a necessity in a corporate design setting where there are multiple people working on a project, and it is probably a good idea for an individual to take notice of the pre-planning stages, and it would have saved me a lot of work with the project I'm working on now if I worked this way, but it's a lot more fun just to jump in the pool with both feet and not worry about the sharks swimming in the deep end.