In order to be a relevant company, it is
imperative to have a well designed website and a strong online presence. It is important
to focus on the design of any website because good design creates order and
gives readers a way to know where they can find the information they are
looking for.
As Johnson-Sheehan discusses in Technical Communication Today, there are five main principles of
design. They are balance, alignment, grouping, consistency and contrast. It is
also becoming more and more important to be aware of cross-cultural design as
to not alienate visitors to the website from different cultures.
Balance
Balance does not mean symmetrical, it means that there is
equal weight on the left and right as well as the top and bottom of the screen.
Some examples of weight are that pictures and graphics hold more weight than
text and color items hold more weight than black and white. Also, items on the
right side of a screen weight more than those on the left side.
There is a similar banner that runs along the
bottom, which is made up with links of all text and no graphics. It feels
mostly balanced because the text, which is all the same size, has nothing to
compete with that would make it unbalanced.
Starbucks’ social media sites are all set up with the
typical platform template (i.e. Facebook banner with the wall underneath,
Twitter page with the icon on the top left and Twitter feed to the right,
etc.). Most of the design principles are decided for the company by the social
media platform being used.
Alignment
All the fonts and photos on Starbucks website are aligned to
the left. The site tends to follow the pattern of a photo or video on top of
the text that corresponds to it. Some pages have graphics or links in the
margin on the right side of the screen, but all the text and photos are still
aligned left in the spaces they are in.
There are certain pages of the website that do feel unbalanced because of the constant left alignment. There tends to be a lot of empty, white space on the right side of pages because all the text and graphics fall on the left side.
Grouping
“Items on a page that are near each other will be seen as a
unit” (Johnson-Sheehan, 493). Starbucks does a great job with grouping on their
website. Their top banner has six headings which each have drop-down menus with
pages relating to the main headings category. For example, the first heading
says coffee. When you hover over that heading, a drop-down comes down with
links to all the types of coffee and coffee brewing systems they have.
The website does not use many borders, but there are rules
that divide some of the sections so the groups are easier to distinguish. They
tend to be used between blog posts or to break up space between the end of a
post and user comments below it. There is also a rule at the bottom of each
page to differentiate between the bottom of the page and the top of the banner
that runs along the bottom of every page on the website.
Consistency
Design features are used consistently throughout Starbucks
website. As I mentioned before, the website is consistently aligned to the left
of the page. The same top and bottom banners are on each page. The font is the
same throughout as well and the typeface is all sans serif. It is easy to
distinguish between headings and regular text because the headings are all in
bold and larger than the actual text. On some pages the headings are bold and
green, and other pages are bold and black.
Color is used consistently on the website also. The logo is
dark green and white, and each page has both of these colors. The website text
is almost always in black, making it easy to read. On Starbucks social media
sites, the logo and the colors are consistent also. Their logo is the profile
picture for all of their social networking sites, which creates a sense of
uniformity between their stores, website and all social networking platforms.
Contrast
“Contrast makes items look distinct and different, adding
energy and sharpening boundaries among the features on the page or screen”
(Johnson-Sheehan, 505). It is easy to tell the difference between the top drop
down menu and the bottom banner and the rest of the website because the
background is dark and the text is light, whereas on the rest of the website,
the text is dark on a light background.
Headings are larger, bold, and sometimes green to contrast
against the smaller page text so those viewing the website understand the
heading and the text are different. The length of lines never goes more than
half the page, so it is easy to read but not too short to annoy readers with the need for quick back and forth eye movements. When
there is font or graphics on the right side of the page, the lines are shorter
so the reader knows it is a short piece of information.
Cross-Cultural Design
Starbucks is at an advantage as a global corporation at
having cross-cultural design. While their main American website does not have
much in terms of cross-cultural design aspects, there are sub-websites for the other
countries Starbucks is in. Most of the sites have generally the same layout,
which helps with consistency, but are in different languages. Some exceptions
are counties in the Eastern hemisphere such as Japan, Russia and Australia.
Conclusion
Overall, Starbucks website follows the main principles of
design. Most of the pages are balanced well and they are consistently aligned
to the left. Images and text that should be grouped together are. The contrast
of text and background colors makes the pages easy to read and pleasing to the
eye. The colors, fonts and logos are consistently used not only on their
website, but on their social networking sites as well and the use of
country-specific websites helps eliminate the problems caused by cross-cultural
design differences.
Having a visually appealing and well designed website is
important to help a company build a strong online presence. Starbucks has
accomplished this by being compliant with the main principles of design.
Works Cited
Johnson-Sheehan, Richard. Technical Communication Today. N.p.: Longman Pub Group, 2011. Print.
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