Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

When testing Web designs with users, it would be interesting to add in a control design. An option that represents the baseline, the lowest acceptable bar for Web design. It may even purposefully ignore the wireframes and not fulfill the strategy.

But who is going to take the time to design a "standard" design that doesn't work?

Look no furter than the open design community.
http://www.opendesigns.org/

These folks publish generic, themed, downloadable, Web design templates - for free. They are out there "making the Internet a prettier place." Now I know that this is not their intention, but could we use this as a resource?

Is there a lot of low quality stuff? Sure. But you could always look to Smashing Magazine for a control design of higher quality.

Grab one of these, shift the hue to match the corproate palette, slap a logo/image/tag line in there and voila, you have a base-line design.

Would this work? Would it help the test or ruin it?