Added: 05/09/2006 |
Some clues on content and application web interface designThe web interface design subdivides into two major areas, such as the content web site design and the application web site design. Although to some people the web interface design might seem like one vast field of expertise, there is still a significant difference between those two above mentioned areas of specialization, and design interface professionals, working in those areas have to possess quite different skills and knowledge. In this article, we would like to take into consideration some hints on the differences between the content and application web interface design, based on the comparison.
Both of these areas include working on and designing such things and web site functions, as performing a preliminary web design analysis, designing links, frames, searching options, page titles, a hypertext, scrolling, browser buttons, etc. However, in these two web interface design areas all those tasks are accomplished quite differently. There is one major difference that lays in the foundation of the content and application web interface design. That is the goal of creating such web sites and their functions. When you create the content web interface design, you mainly pursue the goal of generating some valid web traffic to your site and attracting visitors. Moreover, once you have attracted those people and they visited your web site, you design it in such a manner that they would be tempted to stay on your site and search through it as long as possible.
In the content web interface design professionals most commonly use graphics, various images, texts, subscription forms, etc. Nonetheless, when you work on a project of creating an application web site, you pursue a completely different goal. Most of such web site would contain very little text or images, since the people, who would visit such sites, are purpose driven and their purpose is not to search the site content for information, but rather to accomplish certain tasks. Thus, they would do very little reading or searching through.
When you approach the task of a preliminary web interface design analysis, you have to ask yourself a very different question from those, which you would have asked in the case of creating the content web site design. Through such analysis you have to be able to learn what tasks target site customers wish to accomplish, visiting this web site or which tasks they would perform repeatedly or frequently. What guidance or assistance they may need, using such a web site, etc.?
As you may see, the questions you have to find answers to, working on the application web interface design, differ much from those, asked when creating the content web interface design. In the second case, a designer would ask such questions as "What information should contain a web site, or, what information is the most important and has to be placed on a home page? How to divide that information on topics and subtopics and how to make the site easy to search through?" All those questions are content oriented, while in the first case, the analysis questions are task and project oriented and that is the key difference between the content and application web interface design.
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