Discover information and interactions in Web pages

Two weeks ago, in a well-known Internet media company to do an internal salon exchange. Some friends asked me, as a product design, user experience or interaction designer, in the design of the site what things to do?

Internet development to now, a variety of products form a wide range of dazzling. But complex web sites are made up of pages, and no matter what kind of pages, there are only two things to consider: one is the element to look at; the other is the element that lets people manipulate. My explanation is more popular, and there is no good abstraction of the concept, the purpose is to facilitate memory. The two things, "let people use" and "let people operate", are the information design and interactive design that we often say.

Information design:

Although the Internet is a virtual world, but I have always believed that any Internet products can find a realistic version of the map. Win7 New Note paper features very convenient, and its realistic version of the example is the 3M company invented timely paste products. and design similar to Jingdong Mall products, when we can not find the right path, always take the Xidan big Yue City do analogy.

Not only the product can be mapped, information design work is actually a bit like the real-world magazine design, editors in the production of a magazine. First of all, after considering various factors (including: Listening to users, magazine positioning, article quality, etc.), decide on a number of content sorting and display, such as: where the ads put? What page is the celebrity report? How does a column fit? When these problems are solved, consider how elements such as text and graphics will be formatted when the column is placed on a particular page.

In short, all the questions about the content structure and the layout of the content can be summed up in the information design, that is, the design of those Web sites or pages "let people see" elements. Information architecture is a profound knowledge, I only speak a few personal experience:

1. Show what the user wants to see. Most of the information on the page is user-oriented and what users want to see.

2. Show what you want the user to see. User specific needs must be satisfied, but many people came to the site only expected no demand, is to casually stroll. You can take the time to guide the people and show what you want to see for the user.

3. Conform to human visual system habits. Human vision is from left to right, from top to bottom browsing habits, eyes for a long time to see a single text, or a single picture of the wall will occur visual fatigue and so on.

Interactive design:

Interactive design refers to human-computer interaction, people refer to users, machine is the Web site system. The workload of the interaction design is concentrated in areas that can be responded to. For example: hyperlinks, buttons, input boxes, select multiple selection, list selection, and so on, these elements provide the possibility of human-computer interaction, which is called "operational" elements. Interaction is what you want the user to do, or what they have to do to achieve the next goal.

The cost of interoperability is much higher than the information on the traffic page, and the loss of all conversion rates is unavoidable. Once saw the homepage of a website, pop-up rate (users only browse this page and left) more than 50%, I have to the site's products and interactive staff said there are only two possible: first, the site can not find the user want; second, the interaction design is too poor to go to the next, so choose to leave.

1. Don't let the user think. The user would say, "Just tell me what you want me to do." Web sites and software are the only products that do not have a specification (if there are instructions, very few will see it). If the design of the interactive function of fish and fowl, the user studied for a long time or unintelligible, then you are dead. The user's departure is the biggest penalty for bad interactive design.

2. Don't let the user fret. 5 years ago, it took more than 5 minutes to register on a website, and complex filling items like a migration form, and once you fill in a bug, you have to do it again. Now go to see the site you can think of, 30 seconds can be completed, only need to fill in the username and password, other similar birthdays, sex and other "annoying" information has been removed.

The product manager or the interaction designer can abstract this part is the information design, that part is the interaction design, this can be better division of labor and arrangement work. But the user does not know these, to the user does not have the information and the interaction concept, each page is a whole for the user, either satisfies the demand, makes me comfortable, then stays, either does not satisfy the demand, makes me irritable, quickly leaves. So we can work separately, but there are a lot of things to think about from the perspective of experience.