Some leisurely ruminating while mowing the grass today, I had the thought that we as web designers ought to have a parental attitude toward visitors to our websites, as a general principle.

In effect, we should treat our users as if they were our own kids.

I’m aware that this is a dangerous perspective on the surface. Some might take knee-jerk offense and argue that, on most websites, users are not kids and having a ‘parental’ attitude toward what are ultimately your peers is pretty darned douchey.

I would respond that these imaginary whiners need to take a pill, slow down, and discuss what I mean by ‘parental’.

‘Parental’ is not a swear, I swear.

There are a lot of ways to raise children, some good and some bad, but when someone tosses out the word ‘parental’ – or the phrase ‘treat them like kids’ – in casual conversation, it’s usually not positive. Many of us are familiar (purely anecdotal, but I’ll bet the claim is accurate) with institutions that set rules with little or no explanation, expect us to obey without question while being punished for (inevitably, predictably) getting it wrong. These ‘authoritarian’ kinds of institutions – be them parents, schools, churches, jobs, governments, legal systems, society in general – are demanding, unresponsive and inflexible. It’s an asymmetrical relationship wherein the subject is considered to be void of any real ability to determine his or her own needs and therefore right to any ‘valid’ claim, and the whole thing ends up being pretty horrible for the subjects while yielding questionable results.

You may know parents who fit this description. This authoritative concept of ‘parental’ is the one we usually have in mind when the word is tossed around, but this is not the concept I have in mind. No, my idea of parental is based on principles of guidance and anticipation rather than dictation and expectation.

Guidance and anticipation, not dictation and expectation.

Parents among you will know that, in recent decades, there have been efforts to encourage a more child-centered kind of parenting ethic, one which is responsive, flexible, and allows children to develop their own interests and value systems and doesn’t push on them what we, with our well-developed knowledge of certain and universal truth, think they should do and believe. The relationship is more symmetrical, wherein children have the freedom to determine their own needs, and parents understand those needs to be valid.

In my mind, this is a better concept of ‘parental’, one that I will now attempt (ever so weakly) to transpose to the work of web design.

With this responsive concept of parenting in mind, the notion of ‘treating users like kids’ speaks to an underlying perspective of anticipating user needs and structuring appropriate content and interactions, and of making information architecture and user experience as simple, plain, and user-centered as the situation will allow. There have even been more recent pleas to make the web experience enjoyable on top of these, which is in my mind a natural conclusion – perhaps a matter of course – of a truly user-centered design ethic.

We could dive really, really deep into the specifics of user interaction, information architecture, content strategy, and user experience to expand on this analogy, but I just want to focus on the nature of the relationship.

It’s a partnership.

Every website has some kind of intended purpose for which it is built. Its creators have goals they want to achieve through its existence, anything from simply allowing people to communicate in micro-bursts of up to 140 characters, to selling everything and anything on the planet, and they want to users to play along.

At the same time, visitors to a website have goals too, perfectly valid ones that need to be addressed.

It may sound strange to some, but these two sets of goals rarely line up. How many times have you gone to a website – say, for a university – looking for certain information, only to find yourself eventually picking up the phone (often another nightmare) or simply giving up entirely because you couldn’t find for the life of you what you were looking for. Probably too many to remember. Am I right?

Simply put, you weren’t taken care of. Your real needs weren’t anticipated, and you weren’t guided to the information you required. Instead, you got some schlock that was deemed important by a committee up there, somewhere. Bleh.

And that’s just it, where web design is like parenting, where it’s like being responsible for a child.

You see, the user is completely at the mercy of the web designer, just as a child is to its parent. The web designer, being a user-centric designer, therefore has a responsibility to ensure that the user has everything she needs to achieve her own goals. It would be irresponsible for the web designer to neglect the goals of the user or enforce other goals, just as it is irresponsible for a parent to neglect a child or force their own expectations upon a child.

Users need to be taken care of, their needs validated by having the website design anticipate them and then guiding the user to the desired solution.

However – and this is where the analogy must necessarily collapse – when a user determines that her needs aren’t being met, she leaves and goes somewhere else. A child usually doesn’t have the power to leave, at least not willfully, so there’s that.

So when I say ‘treat you website users like kids’, I mean it as a task marked by responsiveness, anticipation, and guidance – a respect users that puts them first.