You might have been startled and amazed by the new sites that are releasing almost everyday and grabbing your attention big time. You just might think “Gosh!!! How did these guys visualize such a cool site…?” Here’s the little secret.
UI 2.0 as the design parameters are called these days, is based just and just on ease of usability. While visualizing and planning for the designs you need to ask ourselves these 3 simple questions:
Where the user is? – This is because the users should be happy with their present location in the site. The navigational pattern as well as the page content should be such that the users’ need can be presumed and portrayed accordingly on every of their landing pages. Also, some real good developers make their users do things as they want to. Like, giving a flashy interactive application or a tag cloud with admin specified large tags; you can pull in the attention of a user and then lead them to their designated flow of activities.
The next question would be; where the user is coming from? – This is because by no means the users should be allowed to leave shores... read that as website. The user might not be satisfied with their current location due to lack of content or any other factors and in that scenario they should have an option to go back to the previous page(s). Not only this but to envisage the users’ imminent movement within the site, it’s always important to keep track of their path in the website. To hunt a Tiger you need to keep track of its pug marks…right.
Finally the most important question; where the user can go? – This is the million dollar question. Everybody wants to know this and trust me even the users wants to know the same, more badly than you do. This is where the real challenge and competition is. The business logic, stickiness factors, viral marketing attributes and all such other development aspects are directed to tap the users need from the website. As I mentioned earlier, smart people make their users follow the trail which they have prepared the best and thus increase their business prospects and that’s the best way to solve this question. Create an USP and sell it with maximum visualization. Wherever the user tries to go you should tend to make them arrive at the page(s) which are meant for more visits. There is a simple rule. Kill the users’ initial interest and help them grow the one which you intend to.
Battle won… You have your profit making website ready for the coders to integrate their flashy stuffs.
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1 comment:
Nice post Sumit, just a few thoughts...
for people who are involved in website planning I think a good way would be to create a flowchart on how they want the users to move throughout their website touching the key pages and there should always be a "Plan B" and if possible "Plan C, D and more" . What I mean by this is that if I am not able to drive my user to generate a sale for myself, may be I get a lead from him, if not a lead may be a newsletter subscription and so on...
Its true that a well planned strategic UI design gives us a lot of control on how our users navigate the website. This can probably be at its best when there is sound coordination between the business team and the web team because the most productive UIs can be created only when the designers would have a perfect understanding of the business logic and also the user perspective.
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