Web Design: It's Not Just Colors, It's Restructuring To Serve Users Needs

Given his background as a veteran designer in the high-tech industry, one might think Harold Hambrose viewed the explosion in popularity of interactive Web design as a good thing for business. That's not the case.

"That whole Web design thing was absolutely one of the worst things that ever happened to design in America," says Hambrose, founder and CEO of Electronic Ink, an 11-year-old digital design company based in Philadelphia. "It gave everybody the belief that designers were all about aesthetics."

In fact, that's only a small part of what Hambrose's 90-person company does for clients like the New York Stock Exchange, Reuters and MBNA Bank. Electronic Ink's team uses a "human factors" approach to integrate comprehensive user research into every phase of a product's design and development.

"We are sitting with factors analysts and working with technologists to help people use business tools and [enable companies to do] business together," says Hambrose, who is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon.

"Our designers are doing that, not by making designs more colorful or screens prettier, but by understanding data and restructuring it to serve users' tasks better."

Although the company didn't see the lightning-fast growth that so many Web services companies saw last year, it managed to steer clear of the economic troubles that befell many of its competitors later on. As a result, the company has managed to double its annual revenue every year since its founding.