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A great site is a usable one
With web design, when we think of flow we usually mean "task flows" or "flow charts" but there's a different kind of flow that you should consider. It's that feeling of complete absorption when you're doing something you like to do without being disturbed by anxiety or boredom caused by steps that are confusing, too long or overly taxing.
Flow, as a mind condition, was primarily proposed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and is characterized by a distorted sense of time, a lack of self-consciousness, and complete participation in the process at hand. Software developers might feel it when they're writing code, gamers do feel it when playing Quake III, Christopher Cross felt it when he went sailing. For designers, it's just the feeling we want to achieve in the people who use our sites.
How do we create sites that inspire that feeling? Well, it begins with a page that solves a serious problem and is complex enough to ask for a certain degree of learning by the user. The goal should not certainly be to create a simple site. The purpose should be to develop a site that is painless to use no matter how complicated it really is. However, you may think, hasn't there been a usability trend in web design over the last couple of years? Yes, but there's a learning curve for any site that want to solve a complex problem. We shouldn't mix simplicity with an urge to avoid needless complexity.
The way to make the complex appear painless is to consider flow in your structure. By creating a page that is smooth and intuitive and inspires flow, you make new users get up-to-speed more quickly, lower the chance that existing users leave your site and change to a different one and create users that promote your site to other people. That way you will get more users, increased activity, and bigger awareness of your site.
The first point in designing for flow is to determine certain goals for your future users. It's vital to create both an overarching goal and smaller, phased goals. Goals help users understand where they're going and what steps they have to take to arrive there.
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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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