Rikcat Industries

Blogs and blog-like designs have become so commonplace, it made me ask the question “What interface traits make blogs successful?” By far the unifying quality is design rhythm. Blogs break a lot of the early web design convention, like pages being too long or the fear that people will not scroll past the fold. So why is this approach more accepted and used today?

What’s Design Rhythm?

Design rhythm is a consistent repetition of design elements that builds a pattern or rhythm. The pattern creates unity and helps users distinguish one post to the next. The flow that is created makes people naturally scroll to the next item and creates good scan-ability.

If you look at any of the major print publications’ websites, you’ll notice that they try to translate their print approach to the web with various degrees of success. I would love to see a major publication experiment with a rhythmic approach to designing their homepages. One company who is giving it a shot is AOL with their news.aol.com site. While not a news organization, their previous design was more like a traditional newspaper site. It’s interesting to see a larger site like AOL change its design philosophy.

Rhythm Supports Usability

Design rhythm supports consistency and contextualization, two of the ways I wrote about in the post “5 Ways to Make a User Interface Intuitive“. Consistency creates pattern which helps users easily scan pages to find beginnings and endpoints to posts. Contextualization is supported by grouping information like category, date published and comments together in context with the posting.

Search is one of the most used applications on the web and the design of results pages haven’t changed much. This is because their user interfaces are universally understood and follow the principals of design rhythm. Search result pages were some of the early pages that broke web design conventions and still have staying power.

In Conclusion

The design rhythm approach is accepted because users are much more savvy about scrolling. Users respond to discernible patterns that they can scan quickly and intuitively understand.