Designing White Spaces, A Usability Issue
White (or blank) spaces are a good thing, at least in web design. As the web becomes more and more faster designers and programmers tend to place more features. At the end of the 90s we saw colors, pictures and sound in an excessive way. Unfortunately many web designers didn’t learn the lesson: sometimes, maybe usually, more is less.
Too much information and features are going to make a website difficult to use and to understand, affecting the whole site usability in a negative way. Users may feel themselves lost and silly, and they might leave forever.
This problem is starting to be seen at Amazon.com. There, the user is bombarded with a huge amount of information, images and interactive features. Just imagine for one minute that your a new customer at Amazon and you find yourself at this website:
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Another example is the Musician’s Friend website. Leaving almost no blank space gives the feel that using this site will be a headache.
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A good example
Flickr leaves a lot of blank spaces between elements, typography is big and homepage is not overloaded with information. Flickr is a powerful website that gives users a feel of simplicity. Notice the difference?
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Very true. I wouldn’t blame the designer of those overcrowded sites - it’s just the result of the client/company/marketing team getting too much say in the final design.
Whitespace is probably one of the better things designers have taken from the “Web 2.0″ trend over the past few years.
Now the Amazon example may just be an exception to the rule. Possibly.
They have so much brand recognition that people know what the site is about before they even land there. Even most first time users will have heard of Amazon and know its a massive shopping site. So they may just be willing to take the extra time to look around and see whats on the page.
Also considering they were a leader in using tabbed navigation I’m sure they do a fair bit of usability testing as well as conversion testing after launching new design layouts. Considering their traffic levels they could have reasonable results within days of making a change.
But of course they would NOT be looking for the optimum in usability but the best compromise between usability and revenue generation, being a big publicly traded corporation and all where profits come before users.
But those are just thoughts off the top of my head. I could be wrong.