I am in the early stages of designing a website for a friend, and I wanted to get some feedback on his asthetic preferences for websites. I started by sitting down and drawing a storyboard with a handful of different designs and features, but decided that I needed a more useful way to find his broader ideas about design and layout.
For this purpose I have devised a little test, at the moment consisting of eight questions, but likely to change considerably as it evolves from eight marker & colored pencil drawings into something more considered.
Taking the test is very easy: simply write down if you prefer A or B from in each of the pictures. I hesitate to call it profound, but it did force me to reconsider some of my recent layout decisions.
Question One
Question Two
Question Three
Question Four
Question Five
Question Six
Question Seven
Question Eight
The Results
This isn't a test designed to magically read your personaity based on your webpage preferences, and there really isn't an automated response or evaluation mechanism I can give you. Its really designed to be useful for a designer trying to understand the aesthetic of the individual they are designing for. It is incomplete, and most noticably doesn't address color preference.
For the record, my answers are ABBBBAAB. Anyone disagree?
I thought this was funny, since I just started using python and as the link my name takes you to will show....
I picked the exact same.
AABABBBA for me.
I love this type of test. #6 was tough for me without seeing content, but the content div is slightly wider than the header, so I chose 6.
@Peter: Interesting point about #1. It was a tough choice for me, but I thought about how much I like John Gruber's all grey design and went with A.
Had another friend take the test and he scored BABBAABB.
Peter,
You're right about the left/right horizontal/vertical divide. That was totally unintentional. That being said, I did the drawings on the backs of worksheets I made for an elementary school class and decided not to use... its not the most professional of projects.
You're right about the Ruby/Python web style. In some ways I prefer Python web style (as per my choices on the test), but my website is done in Ruby style... because I think thats what humans want to see. (And by humans I mean people who don't program.) I think the "Simple is better" rule has a corollary when applied to design: "Simple is better, unless its boring."
Interesting little test. #4 was tough for me. If there's relatively little body text, as displayed in the picture, then I prefer B, but if there's a lot of text in the main section (several pages), I prefer A.
Also, I'm not sure how intentional this is, but the drawings on the right are more vertical, and the drawings on the left are more horizontal. This was actually the biggest thing I noticed with #3, it took me several seconds to notice that the sidebar changed sides.
I scored a BABBBAAB. The first question looks like it might be a mild predictor of Ruby-web-style vs Python-web-style. The Python community is very content-driven, often using simple black text on white background. The Ruby community more frequently has a fixed-width container for content, and colors everywhere.
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