Changing the way I design for the web

When I started out experimenting with web I would find a cool new technology or tool and make something with it. I wouldn't care if it only worked on Chrome, or if the README for the project confused the reader with a bad setup guide or overly technical language, or if it took 5 seconds to load and render. It didn't matter; I wasn't designing anything, simply plugging bits together to see what worked and learning from it. Unfortunately though this frivolous attitude worked its way into a lot of my early web projects for friends or university. I'd attempt to apply design principals, but end up just designing for me.

Don't get me wrong, this naivety was good. It gave me the opportunity to explore the web without worrying about user's needs, to say "Screw non current browsers, I wanna use the fetch API with no polyfill". But now I'm dealing with the next chapter: making well planned, user tested software that people other than just me want to use. It's a bigger challenge than I thought and making it so everyone can enjoy and use it is even harder. It influences every aspect of design, from ensuring colours and their contrasts are friendly to those with vision impairments, to optimising mobile experiences for those with little or no network connection (Something I experimented with using train timetable data).

Every decision one makes when designing the web for others, needs to put them first every time. That's hard. Or at least that's hard for me. I've been used to designing selfishly; putting my favourite colours or fonts in the product. When in reality that colour makes it hard to read the headings against the background, and the fancy fonts hit the load and render time hard without yielding an increase in readability.

It's a case of conscientious design; considering all possibilities and presenting them to the users to indirectly select through real world testing, enabling them to collectively make the product better and more usable.

I've still a lot to learn in this area and hopefully I can refer to this post when I inevitably choose a font that simply looks nice and doesn't help anyone but me!