Design Reviews Are A Necessity
No matter how great you think something looks, it is always a good idea to get another set of eyes on it. Design reviews have shaped AniBrain’s current design greatly and I can’t be more thankful to those who took the time to give their honest thoughts and ideas to the site’s design.
AniBrain’s previous design, which was never released, was heavily inspired by the original jellyfish logo. I wanted to go all-in on a jellyfish-anime design and I did. Here are some screenshots of an unreleased version of AniBrain:
I personally thought it looked cool, like a team of jellyfish were doing all the hard work recommending anime behind the scenes. But I received the same feedback from everyone who glanced at the landing page: “Why Jellyfish? What does that have to do with anime?” I was so obsessed with the jellyfish theme that I didn’t realize the confusion it would create for people coming to the site. After all of that feedback, I decided to change the landing page to immediately convey the site’s purpose and be more clearly anime-focused. Here is the current landing page (as of the date of this post):
The new landing page uses popular anime characters so people will immediately know that they are on an anime-focused site.
There are two major takeaways from this article:
- It’s easy to go far down a sub-optimal design path when you’re the only one looking at the design. A good idea is to sketch a rough design, get feedback, and iterate on it until you reach an accepted design. This should be done before any implementation in order to save you time. The old landing page was entirely an SVG and took me forever to make, all just to never be seen or used. I would have saved a lot of time discussing my ideas first, prior to implementing them.
- Even after implementing a design, it should still be reviewed by others, especially those who represent your target user. It is very easy to get “tunnel vision” when you’ve been working on something for a while. If your target user can’t immediately understand your page’s intent, then you probably need another design session. You won’t be there to explain a page’s purpose to each and every new visiting user, so it’s important they can determine it themselves.
Hope you enjoyed the first article of many :) Check out the AniBrain and let me know what you think of the rest of the design!
