As a designer for web, I have noticed many times how incredibly talented artists who create amazing designs for print try to design for web with very little knowledge of the technology, computer-human interaction, usability, and many other important things that distinguish web product from print one. Unfortunately, it happens a lot – when web sites or even user interfaces are designed by purely print designers, – they get a barely usable product.
The situation has been turning around lately. But there are still lots of websites out there designed by print designers. And I don’t think that it is going to end nearly soon.
So what are the differences between designing for print and for web?
There is a concept of Cognitive load is “amount of mental processing power needed to use your site”. Its value is crucial for interactive products and not so important for print product. When it comes to printed material, there is still time the user spends looking for important information. It’s dramatically smaller than when he’s trying to get to the information on a website.
Cognitive load is inversely proportional to usability of your project. The longer time user needs to find what he is looking for, the bigger chance that he either forgets what he was doing or leaves the website.
That is why even nice and clean design which works perfectly for print products may not be considered usable for web products.
Print material could be delivered, carried, and read by your target audience at their convenient time. But you have to direct your target audience to your website, and only then make it easy for them to find and read the contents.
Print material could be carefully read from paper. That’s much more convenient and comfortable versus reading from the screen. Print product is scanned visually in order to find information a reader is looking for. Users read website using hand when moving a mouse from object to object. The difference between sight reaction and a movement is quite different and proportional to cognitive load of the project: the longer time user requires to find information he needs, the bigger cognitive load is.
Design of a print product page is visible fully right away, and the design concept can be taken and perceived by a human mind at once. It’s much better scannable. Web design elements appear to website users consequently as they are viewing the site and scrolling the page. Depending on lots of variables such as the amount of content, screen size and resolution, content structure, – sometimes even important content elements may not be visible right away.
Here’s another great article on Web Design vs Print Design: Differences Between Print Design and Web Design by Jakob Nielsen.