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Why put usability first
With web design, when we think about flow we mostly mean "task flows" and "flow charts" but there's another type of flow that you should consider. It's that feeling of complete absorption when you're doing stuff you love to do and are not disrupted by anxiety or boredom caused by tasks that are misdirecting, too long or overly taxing.
Flow, as a mental condition, was primarily introduced by psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and is characterized by a incorrect sense of time, a low level of self-consciousness, and total engagement in the process at hand. Program engineers often experience it when they're writing code, gamers do experience it when running Guitar Hero III, Christopher Cross felt it when he started his trip. For design artists, it's just the feeling we hope to achieve in the people who use our sites.
How do we create sites that inspire that feeling? Well, it starts with a site that solves a challenging problem and is complex enough to require a certain degree of learning by the user. The purpose should not certainly be to design a simple page. The goal should be to design a site that feels painless to navigate no matter how complex it really is. But wait, you may think, hasn't there been a usability movement in the design field over the last few years? Yes, but there's a learning curve for any site that seeks to sort out a complex problem. You shouldn't confuse usability with an urge to avoid excessive complexity.
The trick to make the complicated feel friendly is to consider flow in your design. By creating a site that is fluid and intuitive and engages flow, you help new users get up-to-speed in a shorter time, reduce the chance that current users leave your site and switch to another and produce users that promote your site to other people. That way you will get more users, increased activity, and bigger awareness of your page.
The first point in creating for flow is to determine clear goals for your future users. It's vital to develop both a global goal as well as smaller, incremental goals. Goals help people understand what is their final destination and each step they'll take to get there.
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