Design

Web applications are becoming increasingly popular these days. This is because of rapid use of the tools and technologies for developing them. But system designers are generally identifying the situations and have found out that web applications possess very significant advantages over traditional applications. Up till now the center of attention of web application development has been the tools.

Little attention has also been paid to the development process. Current development environments make it so easy to create simple web applications that they possess the unfortunate side-effect of encouraging us to evolve applications in the absence of serious analysis and design.

Any system possessing non-trivial complexity is required to be designed and modeled.

Following are the main design principles that should be implemented while designing Web applications:

Understand the users and then ignore them

It is important to find out what people need for designing web application. To find out what users need, you should examine their behavior rather than asking them, because people are often not acquainted what their needs are or they are unable to communicate the correct information. The developers are also required to focus on the activity rather than on audience.

Build only what is absolutely necessary

Simple applications are mainly useful because they allow users to concentrate on the goals they need to accomplish.Senduit is an example of a file-sharing application which is very simple to use.

It is simple because no account is required and the major attention is paid on the main taskLogging in and managing an account, like changing your preferences would be unnecessary and make the application more difficult to use..

Just because software comprises many features, it doesn’t mean that it is useful. The additional options could interfere with the work flow.

Support with the user’s mental model

A mental model is a symbol of a real-life action. For e.g. a trash can icon, makes it clear what the function is without being user having to recognize the inner workings of the operating system.

Turn beginners into intermediates immediately

You should try to make it easy for the new users to get accustomed with the application quickly. This means to show clearly what the website is all about and what can be done by users on it.

The website should be instinctive, so that the users are always acquainted with what is happening and what their options are, because people like committing mistakes.

Prevent errors and handle rest of the thing gracefully

Task flow and interaction can be designed to avoid mistakes from taking place. The application should be easy to use and should provide the user the freedom to do whatever they want to the extent of not even possessing a spell-checker.

Design for Consistency, uniformity and meaning

The website application should be such that it communicates efficiently what the website is all about. The website should be uniform and convey the exact meaning.

Thus, by following above guidelines, an efficient web application design can be created which will be helpful in getting more and more traffic.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 11:42 am and is filed under Web Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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