7 Rules for Great Web Application Design
First thing on Saturday I listened to Robert Hoekman, Jr. talk about the 7 Rules for Great Web Application Design. Robert is the author of
Designing the Obvious
and
Designing the Moment
. The panel focused on human psychology and how that relates to design principles. Most applications on the Internet are successful because they support innate human desires.
1. Understand users, then ignore them.
People are bad at predicting their own behavior. They don’t know how they will act in a situation until they are in that situation. We need to know what they’re going to do and ignore what they say they’re going to do. This emphasizes the importance observing users, not just interviewing them.
One company found an opportunity to sell milkshakes in the mornings by realizing that customers didn’t want breakfast; they wanted something to do during their morning commute that would keep them busy for the entire time. They installed a milkshake kiosk from 7-9am each day and sales went through the roof
2. Build only what’s absolutely necessary.
It’s easy to add features, but applications need to have clarity. By only adding what you need your application can be as simple as possible and accomplish users’ goals
Most people here said that their hard requirements for a mobile phone were a telephone and the ability to browse the web. Stocks, weather and calculator were all optional. All of those features are nice, but for most users they add to the clutter preventing them from finding what they need.
Senduit
is a file sharing service that has only one form. You choose your file and when it should expire and it gives you a private link. That’s it. They could have added file management, but that would have also required user management. They have a great service because they did exactly what users needed and nothing more.
3. Support the users mental models.
People don’t think like computers, they think like people. We need to come up with things that are grounded in what they already know. Consider the trash bin on modern computers. It’s grounded in the established concept of throwing items into the bin, rather than typing a set of cryptic commands to delete a file.
4. Turn beginners into intermediates immediately.
The primary goal of WordPress.com is to create an account and their old homepage design featured three ways to create an account. That seems effective, but one of their developers had his friends calling and asking how to sign up. He suspected that the conversion rate could be improved. As it turns out, users couldn’t find the signup link, so they left the site because they didn’t want to feel dumb. They created a new home page design with a large, green sign up button. The new concept took about ten minutes to design and conversion rates went up 12% on the first day and up 25-30% the following week.
5. Prevent errors. (And handle the rest gracefully).
It’s really easy to make mistakes in interactions. By eliminating the possibility of errors, you can make users feel smarter.
Robert told us that he really enjoys using
Backpack
, but couldn’t figure out why until he prepared for this presentation. He went in search of applications that handled errors well. After an hour of working with Backpack, he identified that you couldn’t make any errors in Backpack. He couldn’t find anything that returned a confirmation or an error page. Users feel smarter when they don’t make mistakes and thus the product is a pleasure to use.
6. Design for Uniformity, Consistency and Meaning
Communicate what your site is about. Robert talked about
squidoo.com
and how most of its incoming traffic is on internal pages via Google. Users tended to bounce because they didn’t know what to do next. Adding the tag line “Share your knowledge. Make a difference” helped to provide that meaning to users.
7. Reduce, reduce, reduce. (And refine.)
Robert cited the well-known “
fish story
” from Presentation Zen. I’ll let you read it for yourself, but the point is that all of the contextual clues about the store were already there, so the store’s sign was unnecessary and merely reduced the signal to noise ratio. They reduced (and refined) the sign until it contained only what was necessary, which turned out to be nothing at all.
There’s a lot of overlap in these principles and that’s because they're part of one underlying truth: Communicate Intentionally. Every element on your page communicates with your users. Choosing them intentionally allows you to say everything you want and nothing you don’t.
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