Advice on design issues-opinions solicited!

[djohnson]

After spending months redesigning our multiple help systems to use TopNav in Flare 11 (and now Flare 12), and asking for and not receiving assistance from our design department, I received a summons to a meeting to discuss changes to the work I'd spent months building and tweaking a template for.

This template was designed to accommodate multiple languages, computers tablets and phones, and to easily swap in color schemes for different products (which was very hard because the product color schemes created by our design department are quite hideous).

Aside from asking for some impossible things, I was asked to do some things very contrary to my personal philosophy for Help.

First, I was asked to make the text be a medium gray (#555555) rather than the near-black that I'm using (#252e30, which is the same color used for text on the support pages of our website). To me, the higher contrast of dark gray-to-black on white is more readable than mushy gray on white.

Next, I was asked to make headlines much larger, and add more whitespace between paragraphs and on the page margins. Personally, I know the value of white space, but I feel the need to balance it with the fact that the customer will likely be using Help in a smaller window side-by-side with the application, so white space is not even a luxury, but a detriment.

= = = =

I'd appreciate some feedback (am I crazy? am I right? are there concrete examples for either position?) and some assistance in gently bringing my reality to the design team (since plain words haven't worked) -- if indeed I shouldn't abandon my own stance and re-think my design.

Thanks!

Don Johnson

[roboHAL]

Hey Don. I'm sure you know its easy enough to achieve what has been asked of you with some simple CSS tweaking. If you're looking to make a case supporting why you shouldn't use certain color schemas, there are numerous articles on the web. For example, https://99designs.com/blog/tips/designe ... blindness/ or http://www.cs.mtu.edu/~nilufer/classes/ ... ntrast.htm.
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[ChoccieMuffin]

Regarding the font colour, mention "accessibility" and you might get them with that.

As for showing them the error of their ways, can you make a mock-up of what they want it to look like, and then show them why it doesn't work? (Don't spend a lot of time doing it in Flare, maybe create a Word document with table cells the size of a tablet and mess about with local formatting.)

Pick a help page that has a long title (that will look horrible if the text is too big), and quite a lot of text (so the user has to scroll a lot). If you do one document showing what it'd look like in their version, and another showing what it would look like in your version, you may be able to convince 'em. If that succeeds, then you can just carry on with your design.

Who ultimately makes the decision on what it should look like?

If it's you, then make a note of the discussion and keep your mock-ups so that you can show that their suggestion has been considered and rejected.

If it's whoever you ultimately deliver to (depends on your organisation - we deliver to people on the development side of the business, you might deliver to marketing types) then ask them to mediate and decide whether you can proceed with your wonderful version or whether you have to spend ages (lay it on with a trowel!!!) implementing the inferior design suggested by the design team and tell them why yours is better. Give them your demo documents and get them to make the decision (taking into account how much extra time it will take you to make the changes, and you're so pressed to meet the delivery schedule as it is so do they really want to jeopardise the delivery schedule?) and then do whatever they decide. You will have made your point, and if the decision goes against you at least YOU don't get the flack when everyone whinges about how bad it looks or how long it took to implement! (And keep a backup of the stylesheet that YOU designed so you can change it back!)

Best of luck, and deepest sympathies.