One of your worst nightmares as a web designer is getting caught up in a conversation where you’re trying to defend a design decision, and what you’re battling isn’t a rationed and informed perspective based on sound design principles of ratios, colour theory or typography, but rather the personal opinion of the loudest voice at the table.

“I think the page is too narrow. I hate it when I have to scroll through pages and pages of content,” says one person.

“Hmm. Yeah, but, I don’t know…I don’t like it when the page is too wide….makes it too hard for me to scan the text,” says the other.

“Well, yeah, sure, but well. I just think it looks better when it’s a little wider.”

“Well how wide do you think it should be? It’s actually filling my whole browser window right now.”

“Oh really? I’m looking at it on my laptop and it’s not.”

“Well it’s filling it on mine.”

And on it goes…

It can catch you off guard, and it can be delicate to tip-toe around what you really want to say: “What you yourself personally think doesn’t really matter! (unless you have something more to base that opinion on).”

So what can you do to better prepare yourself for the design presentation? How can you arm yourself with the right tools to walk into a meeting confident that you can politely, and yet assertively, re-affirm the decisions you made with coming up with your design?
One of the best ways to confront - and also pro-actively deal with - the rise of personal opinions in a design discussion is to arm yourself with some good solid data, and web statistics are one of the best ways to do this.

Opinion vs. The Informed Web Design Decision

Web statistics are helpful for making informed decisions about the design, development, and on-going maintenance of your website.

Rather than relying on personal preferences or anecdotal observations, statistics provide a broader and more objective context for helping you make decisions that will best accommodate the needs of your online audience.

Web statistics can help you decide:

• how wide (or narrow) to make your web template
• when to separate content into separate pages or when to use anchor links in a single page to make sure content isn’t lost “below the fold”
• when to change your page layout or add new design elements to aid with navigation
• what tools and technologies you can reliably expect your audience to be able to use (e.g. Flash)
• what time of year/month/week/day to complete major site-wide changes

Statistics will not make decisions for you - but what they do is provide you with information that you can then make a judgment on.

For example, if you find out that only 3% of your web visitors are using browsers with a resolution of 800×600 pixels or less, you could now consider the impact of creating a fixed-width template at 1024 pixels wide (giving you a controlled and relatively large page to work with) vs. a fluid-width template (giving you a less-controlled but more flexible and adaptable page).

For any design decision, there are always pros and cons. But with web statistics, you will at least be able to make informed decisions on what the benefits and trade-offs are rather than relying one person’s opinion.