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A great site is a usable one
With web design, when you think of flow we mostly mean "task flows" or "flow charts" but there's another kind of flow that you should keep in mind. It's that feeling of total absorption when you're doing something you love to do without being disrupted by frustration or boredom caused by steps that are confusing, repetitive or overly taxing.
Flow, as a mind condition, was primarily proposed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and is described by a distorted sense of time, a lack of self-consciousness, and full participation in the task at hand. Software engineers often experience it when they're writing code, gamers might experience it when running Guitar Hero III, Christopher Cross felt it when he started his trip. For Web designers, it's exactly the feeling we want to promote in the users of our site.
How can we design sites that inspire that feeling? Well, it starts with a page that sorts out a challenging problem and is complicated enough to ask for a certain degree of learning by the user. The goal should not necessarily be to develop a simple page. The purpose should be to develop a site that is painless to navigate no matter how complicated it actually is. But wait, you might be thinking, hasn't there been a usability trend in web design in the last few years? Yes, but there's a learning curve for any site that want to solve a difficult task. We shouldn't mix simplicity with a desire to avoid needless complexity.
The trick to make the complex feel painless is to design with flow in mind. By designing a site that is smooth and intuitive and inspires flow, you help new users get familiar with it more quickly, lower the chance that current users leave your site and switch to a different one and create users that evangelize your site to their friends. That results in more users, growing activity, and greater awareness of your page.
The first point in designing for flow is to set clear goals for your future users. It's vital to develop both an overarching goal and smaller, phased goals. Goals help users understand where they're going and what steps they'll take to arrive there.
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ArtIcons Pro can find, extract, edit and create Windows icons in color depths up to 16 million colors. Import and export icon images, create and handle icon libraries. It supports the new icon format introduced in Windows XP (8-bit transparency). Download it
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IconXP can edit and create Windows icons in color depths up to 32-bit True Color. It supports the new icon format introduced in Windows XP (8-bit transparency). You can customize desktop and folder icons. Download it
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Any to Icon allows you to convert multiple BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG, WBMP and WMF images to Windows icons in one action. It also breaks down entire icon libraries into individual icons. You can change color resolution and size to create customized icons. Download it
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Icon to Any allows you to convert Windows icons and cursors into BMP, JPG, PNG, GIF, ICO, CUR, WBMP and RC formats. It has a wizard interface. It's simple to process multiple files at once. You can find icons and make images for use on Web pages. Download it
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ArtCursors allows you to edit Windows cursors in color depths up to 16 million colors. You also can search files and folders for cursors, import and export cursor images and create cursor libraries for better and more efficient storage. Download it
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AhaView supports all popular graphic formats, including JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, ICO, CUR, ANI, WBMP. You can browse images in thumbnail mode, view pictures full screen with zooming features, convert images to JPEG, PNG, BMP formats and manage files. Download it
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CustomIcons is an ultimate tool for customizing the icons on you desktop, in Windows Start menu and many other locations. Using CustomIcons you can easily replace default Windows icons with the ones to your choice. Download it
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