With people's short attention span, sites need to be designed for scanning, not for reading. There are five things to make this easy.
Create a visual hierarchy, take advantage of conventions, break pages up into clearly definable areas, define what is and isn't clickable and minimize noise.
Creating hierarchy gives emphasis to the most important things by making them bigger, a different color or more defined. Noticing when a visual hierarchy has been placed takes practice for we see it daily and never think much of it.
Conventions give meaning to things we see daily such as a news paper. What is large is usually the headline and the following copy is the details that the headline summed up. Whatever falls underneath a picture is usually describing the photo above. Nobody ever taught us this, it is what we have gathered from previous experiences and basic knowledge. On the web, conventions are also very present, like lists of links in blue and body, like a newspaper. When trying to be inventive and doing something new on the web, one must make sure that everything is evident in purpose and functional.
Some pages become stressful on the mind when decisions are not clear. Every like should not make the viewer worry whether or not they make the right decision.
Body copy is often full of what the author calls 'happy talk' where the writer is throwing out useless information such as a welcome paragraph or instructions to do the most basic thing. Happy talk needs to go away and be replaced with self explanatory links and directions.
http://psd.tutsplus.com/tutorials/designing-tutorials/9-essential-principles-for-good-web-design/
http://gdbasics.com/index.php?s=hierarchy
http://www.aiga.org/webinar-responsive-web-design/
No comments:
Post a Comment