1. Fewer distractions

This is something I’ve touched on previously, but with the absence of navigation bars, there’s obviously fewer distractions. Navigation bars have become a place to store all the content you can’t fit on your website. On top of that, we put every single page we’ve imagined and come up with on the navigation bar. Some are junky and cluttered. Some have telephone numbers and search boxes. Some are just big and only have three small links on them. Some have drop-down menus that span the entire height of a website. What’s the point?

In the past few years we’ve come to notice that web design was becoming a little too cluttered, thus the resurgence of the ever-popular minimalist design. But instead of really fixing the problem of clutter, we’ve just stripped our web designs of the exciting stuff. In addition, the focus on the menu and the sitemap have really cost us the most important parts of the website. Immediately when we start designing, we are taught to think of the sitemap and how everything is going to connect. Imagine if we spent that time thinking about what the audience wants and how they’re going to use it.

2. Customer Focus

At one point, I posed the question of whether or not flat design has made our web sites too simple. I’ve also asked other community members if they think minimalism is killing our creativity. I’ll spare you the lengthy read and summarize by saying this: we’ve traded in spectacular design for subtle web experiences. What do I mean? We’d rather have a simple blog with a white background, as long as the posts auto-scroll. We’d rather use a monotone or two-tone color scheme and make the highlight color something totally expected. Because we think that’s cool.

Now, I must admit that we must be weary of over-designing. It’s something I don’t recommend at all. But it seems like we just stopped designing all together. And the things we find to be good design are really only things other designers can notice and enjoy. It took me about 5 years to learn the lesson that what a designer may think will look good isn’t always what the customer thinks looks good.

In order to be successful with this, we have to focus on the customer/audience like never before. We have to try to figure out exactly what they want to see and how they want to see it. Navigation bars have kind of been like a guided process before, but since they’re the norm we’re just slapping it on a site as one-size-fits-all. The focus on the customer creates a greater connection with them and lends itself to experience driven designs like never seen before.

3. Experience driven designs

Let’s build a bridge. This bridge connects what we want them to see along with how we want them to see it. The length of the bridge varies depending on how far away the two are from each other, but there must be a bridge nonetheless. We obviously want to have the smoothest bridge possible so the transfer of information can be as smooth as possible. By ridding ourselves of the navigation bar, we’ve created a platform to have a fully immersive brand design that should cater directly to the customer.

This allows us to now create experiences. Yes, we’ll probably have to get away from the world of strict minimalism. However, this gets web design back to what it should be; a space on the web dedicated to the relationship between a brand and its customer. These experiences should make visitors more away of the brand while also creating an interesting way to do so. Rather than just clicking a link and being taken to a whole new page, now there’s an opportunity to really create something. There’s an opportunity to take all the cool new advances in HTML and CSS3 (aside from just scrolling) and create something magical and mindblowing.