A few years before the Internet achieved critical mass in business commerce, the company I worked for wanted to launch a multi-million dollar advertising campaign. Before jumping into this as a business-as-usual project, we conducted some research on the target market of engineers to understand the elements of the "ideal" product ad for this market segment.

The most important result was that the engineers did not want to spend time trying to figure out what an ad meant. They disliked confusing headlines and illustrations. Their ideal ad had a headline that "could be read from 25 feet away" consisting of the single compelling reason they should be interested in the product -" The World's Fastest, Smallest, Lowest Power", et cetera. Next, they wanted to see a graphic that supported the claim of the headline followed by other elements in decreasing order of importance. The result was that the ideal ad for this market was not at the creative edge of advertising but was very efficient in communicating the salient advantages of the product.

I was reminded of this research several years later by two events: One of the magazines for the Web site design community ran a column saying the education that had gotten today's Web site designers to their current positions was obsolete. It maintained that people with backgrounds and majors in performance media such as theater and cinema were needed. The same week that column appeared, there was a presentation of a Web site usability study at one of the major Internet conferences. A surprising result was that of some ten sites in the study, the Disney Co. Web site, a media rich site, into which tens of millions of dollars had been poured, was rated lowest by test subjects while the Edmund's car site, which at that time was simple text, was ranked highest. If the Web needs performance media designers, how is it that Disney's site, developed by a company awash in that type of talent, faired so badly against a plain site like Edmund's?

The answer is that the magazine column was written from the vantage point of the cutting edge of technology and there is always a gap between the vision of the cutting edge and the reality of the market place as expressed, in this case, by the usability study. Explore some of the sites that are regarded as the avant garde and one often finds exciting graphics, small type, questionable animation, and generally poor usability, particularly at the access speeds most users have. Flash is wonderful but who hasn't bolted from a site that is glacially slow to load? Usability suffers not only at the cutting edge, but even in many mainstream sites where one encounters obscure layout and poor search performance.

Web site users, like those engineers of several years ago, want speed and efficiency in their quest. Virtually all usability analyses indicate that users come to a site with a particularly search expectation and everything about the site is subordinate to the site's ability to quickly fulfill the user's primary objective. While usability is key to user satisfaction, it should be balanced with visual design that differentiates and engages the user.

The tension between visual design and usability is caused in part by our arrival at a technology plateau dictated by the constraints of spanning multiple Web access devices and legacy PC platforms, low bandwidth, the limitations of design tools, and the lack of design imagination. An example of the lack of design imagination is the almost ubiquitous "folder tab" format used to navigate many Web sites. In this case, the problem is more accurately the expedient copying of a design format developed by early successful sites rather than spending the time and taking the risk to develop an original design. Why come up with something unique when there already exists a format with which millions of users are familiar?

The dynamic nature of the Internet provides an enormous opportunity for creativity but the challenge of marrying refreshing, bold design with usability remains. The view that performance media professionals are needed may be premature, but a higher level of design without sacrificing usability isn't.