March 1998: Genevieve Moore

March 3, 1998

The following article was originally published for the Site Builder Network Workshop (now MSDN Online Web Workshop.)

The whole universe of the user's perception and interaction with your piece becomes the subject of the design.

Though a creative director for Red Sky Interactive , a San Francisco-based interactive strategy, design, and development company, Genevieve Moore sees her position as neither design- nor Web-centric. "I see the Web as one facet of a larger multimedia industry," she told SBN, "an industry in which good design depends on more than a nice composition." Genevieve graduated with a BA in fine art from University of California at Santa Cruz in 1985, and followed up in that field with an MA from California State University at Chico in 1989. She jumped into designing interfaces for prototype multimedia applications directly out of school. Later, when she began freelancing for Red Sky Interactive in 1995, Genevieve shifted her focus from CD-ROM and other multimedia projects to Web design. For a few examples of Genevieve's work since joining Red Sky full-time in 1996, look at http://beyond.landsend.com/ .

SBN: When you were a kid, you obviously didn't dream of designing for the Web. How did you end up working in this field?

Genevieve Moore: Actually, when I was a kid, my father would take me to the local college computer lab -- and while he worked, I would play with the Hewlett-Packard mainframe, using a teletype to write little BASIC programs and play "Hunt the Wumpus." I always wanted to be an artist. It wasn't until I went to Chico State in the late '80s that I was able to put these two loves together. The college had a computer lab in the art department, and I lived there. There was also a program called "Summer Arts" that I went to in 1988, which is when I took my first multimedia class. Once I'd touched HyperCard and VideoWorks II, I was hooked. I actually took fine art classes in school, and intended to become an artist, before I discovered the multimedia industry. In my last two years at college, I used Studio/8 on a Mac II to create a series of paintings, which were output as cibachrome prints and framed. After college, I went to Los Angeles in 1990. Within a week, I had a job with AND Communications in their computer graphics department. I've been in multimedia ever since.

SBN: If you were starting out to become a Web designer today, what would you do?

Genevieve Moore: Well, I wouldn't expect to have a life-long career in Web design, for one. If I wanted to be a designer, I would learn the elements of good design that span all the media: print, multimedia, perhaps even film and product design. That way, the skills are in place, and you can use them in whatever medium is available and interesting to you. The rules and procedures that apply to Web design in particular are in fact always changing, and May not be around in five years. But the rules of good design are constant.

SBN: Still, certain issues come into play when you design for this medium. What would you say are the elements of good Web design?

Genevieve Moore: A great site should achieve three goals. It should fulfill the client's needs and goals; it should be intuitive and entertaining for the user; and it should be true to itself -- that is, internally consistent and faithful to its own logic, metaphors, et cetera. This is all done by design: design of the look and feel, design of the information architecture, and design of the navigation. I'm very strongly in the "form follows function" camp, and feel that great design is dependent on great functional artisanship. The whole universe of the user's perception and interaction with your piece becomes the subject of the design. In many ways, it's more like product design, because you want users to forget quickly about the interface. You want them to be more interested in what they're doing than how they go about doing it.

SBN: How do you approach a new design assignment?

Genevieve Moore: I look to meet the three criteria of Web design I mentioned earlier. First, I make sure that the client's message is conveyed in a way that is agreeable to them. From then on, I'm the user's advocate, and approach the look and functionality of the Web site from a user's perspective: What would I like to see? What would I think is clickable or use to navigate? What would be cool or fun? Overarching these questions is the experience as a whole. What is the mood of the site? What is the goal or message? Everything on each page should support the message and make it an easy and pleasant experience for the user to get that message.

SBN: What about the issue of balancing site design and performance?

Genevieve Moore: If a site is designed well, it's also fast, both in download time and usability. The word I like to use for this is "elegant." The elegant solution solves a need in a way that's so efficient that it's beautiful. The user doesn't want to wait half an hour to load a page, and she doesn't want to have to search through obscure hierarchies to find information. A site can't perform well if it's designed badly, and a nice-looking page isn't going to fix bad information design. So, as far as the Web is concerned, "good design" includes high performance.

SBN: What is your opinion of the current state of Web design technology?

Genevieve Moore: I think the technology is terrific -- and actually, despite all our grumbles about it, amazingly adaptive and versatile considering all the browsers and platforms in use. I'm pleased at how quickly we've gone from text-only to rich multimedia sites, and can't wait for the next breakthrough. I guess I'm optimistic about the future. I expect that in the next year, cross-platform compatibility will be easier to design for. As more people have the essential plug-ins -- Shockwave, Real Audio, et cetera -- we can count on our audience being able to see what's happening.

SBN: What system do you use at home?

Genevieve Moore: I have a 250 MHz PowerComputing Mac clone and a PowerBook. My husband is a free-lance 3-D animator and uses Softimage on a Windows NT machine. We also have a LAN tying the two together, so we can collaborate more effectively. I've reproduced the functionality of my office machine at home, so I can work from there.

SBN: Aside from the agency work you're doing, what other Web work are you involved in presently?

Genevieve Moore: I just finished a personal site for my husband, and I'm now working on an activity site for kids that I'd like to have up in six months or so. It's based on using characters from a public domain children's series to create interactions and puzzles, and uses Shockwave so children can interact with the characters. The idea is to take illustrated kids' books one step further. We read these books as children, and want to bring them into the twenty-first century and make them fresh for a new generation.

Photo Credit: Doris Kloster; Michael Moore/Microsoft Corporate Photographer