The concept of the concept of a website

What is a concept? What role does it play and when is this role played out?

A little while ago I was talking to a fellow UX designer about some projects I did. He asked me about the concepts behind the work I was showing him. For some reason, I had a hard time explaining the concepts. I was so deep in the woods that I could see the forest for the trees. So it was about time to climb a big tree and overlook the landscape… Anyway, I thought it would be a good idea to delve back into the concept of the concept in relation to designing the web.

A concept is the start of a design

The word concept stems from the Latin concipere. Which means to become pregnant with something (an idea), develop something in your mind, understanding something, form an opinion and to start something. So it clearly has something to do with the start of something, a first design, a collection of abstract ideas that may or may not turn into something. When designing a website, the concept is the answer to the problem the site is trying to solve, the story the site is trying to tell. During the analysis, the design starts with a concept. But once you have an idea for the website, the conceptual work is not done. All parts of a website: the UI design, the information architecture, the interaction design, the content strategy, the content choreography, even the coding, all involve conceptual work. And all the concepts of the different parts relate to the overall concept, they make the overall concept and the overall concept makes them. So the conceptual work is never done. The concept is not a fixed entity, it constantly evolves due to new insights in different phases of the project.

A concept is a system of ideas

In the world of philosophy, a concept is a mental projection of one or more ideas. A concept can be described with certain properties with which you can relate it to other concepts. A concept usually combines multiple thoughts. A concept is not one single idea, it’s a system of interrelated ideas. A good concept attracts other ideas, invokes other ideas. A good concept makes things fall into their place.

A concept can be separated from the design

Concepts can also be found in the art world. In art, there is even a whole branch that is called conceptual art. This is art where the idea is more important than the aesthetic, material or technical considerations. There is a famous quote from the conceptual artist Soll Lewitt: “The idea is a machine that creates the art piece.” He is well known for his murals that consist of written instructions like “Draw a square of 14′ divided horizontally into two equal parts. The top half matte, the bottom half glossy.” Anyone can create the mural and, depending on the complexity of the instructions, the result will differ slightly. Things like the exact choice of materials, the steadiness of the hand of the executor and the shape of the room will result in different art pieces. The instructions are the art. So a concept is something you can put into words. A concept is something that can lead to several design interpretations. It’s detached from the design. It’s the thinking part of design.

A concept is a rhizome

Soll Lewitt clearly separates the thinking from the doing and doesn’t let the doing influence the thinking. In his artwork there is no feedback loop. This is in stark contrast to regular design processes which consist of a series of doings and reflections. This is the power of Design Thinking: you do (design) and reflect on that (think) and this gives you more and different insights than you would have had by just thinking. These iterations of thinking and doing can be so small and often are so intuitive that the conceptual decisions can become tiny pieces that are hard to separate from the design. All small conceptual pieces are connected to each other and sometimes it becomes hard to articulate the overall concept from this intricate network of conceptual decisions. When the design project advances, the concept becomes a rhizome. A rhizome is a network of roots under the ground that occasionally sends up a shoot from its nodes. The network of conceptual thoughts is under the ground and the visuals and interactions you see are the shoots from the rhizome. The user only sees the shoots, but they are fed and interconnected by the invisible rhizome of conceptual thoughts.

When the concept of a website becomes irrelevant

When I’m knee deep in work on a website, the conceptual work revolves around the questions of what information should be provided (content strategy), how it should be organized (information architecture), how it can be accessed (interaction design), how it should look and feel (visual/information design) and how it should be built (coding). It all starts with why, but the concept quickly turns into an intricate network of thoughts and things, pieces, elements. The project then takes on a life of its own. The project gets its own rules and direction. The website becomes more demanding than the concept. When the website goes online, it becomes detached from the concept. The why is gone. It doesn’t even matter if the initial idea was good, interesting, new or original. The true value is created in the execution and in its use. The founders of Twitter had a totally different idea about the why. If asked they’ll describe the service in totally different words. But once it was online, the nature of the design, the possibilities of the service and the use its users put it to, became far stronger than the initial idea. This doesn’t mean that you don’t need a concept to start, to design and to code. It doesn’t imply that the concept doesn’t play an important role in the creative process. On the contrary. Soll Lewitt was right. The idea is the machine that makes the work. But once the work is finished, the concept is irrelevant to its users. And the closer you get to the shipping of the product, the smaller the influence of the concept becomes.