Excerpt from What is Web design

1.3 designed for users

A common mistake in Web development is to design websites for designers. The requirements of designers rather than actual users are considered. If the designer ignores user requirements, the process model cannot guarantee the quality of a site. Remember the important principles of Web design:

Rule: The designer is not a user.

What the designer understands is not what the user understands. As a designer, you have direct knowledge of Web sites. You know where the information is and how to install the plug-in. You have the best screen resolution and browser settings. You must accept the following facts. Many users do not understand the websites you carefully design as you do. Their interests are even different from those of you. Considering the importance of users' interests and expectations, it seems appropriate to directly design users in the way they wish. However, if you consider another basic principle, it is not a good idea:

Rule: The user is not a designer.

Not anyone is or must be a Web designer. Just like expecting a movie audience to guide a movie based on the movie they watch, it is silly to expect users to design websites simply because they browse many sites. Users often have many unrealistic site requirements and expectations. The user will not seriously consider a part of the Web site. In short, users do not have a comprehensive understanding of the Web like designers. That is to say, the key to a successful and easy-to-use Web site design is to think from the user's perspective as much as possible. The user-centered design requires putting users first. But what can we talk about with users? Is there a typical user? Is there a representative internet user, and we should design a site for him? Maybe not, but we should consider general features such as response time, memory and other cognitive and physical capabilities when designing the site. A review of cognitive science helps us understand the basic capabilities of users, which will be further discussed in Chapter 3rd. Remember, when users have commonalities, they also have personalities. It may be difficult for one user to look simple. Designing websites for users with common characteristics may not meet the requirements of all users. Users with strong capabilities may feel that there are too many site restrictions, while new users may feel that it is too difficult. A user is a group of individuals with certain abilities and characteristics. When websites focus on commonalities, they should also consider individuality, as pointed out in the following principles.

Rule: it is designed for user commonality, but differences should be considered.

Benefits and availability

Good Web sites are useful to users. Effectiveness includes two aspects: usefulness and availability. Usefulness refers to the potential functions of the site to meet user needs. Availability refers to the ability of users to achieve specific goals through site operations. For example, consider a site that provides online banking services. It can be said to be useful if it provides user-desired capabilities such as balance of payments checks, transfers, and payments. However, the website may also fail completely, and its functions may be confusing and cannot be effectively used. Obviously, a website is not a good site if it cannot operate properly or is poorly designed or even has errors. The availability of the site will be very high, easy to learn, in order to achieve the user's goal when people are satisfied without errors.

1.7 appearance problems

Although a good site must have good functions and a simple navigation system, these features cannot be recognized immediately. The appearance of the site is often the first to be noticed. Although good taste cannot be forced out, it is almost impossible to predict, but we know that good Web design is directly related to the user's taste of the site appearance, and the first impression depends on the online site. Without any prior knowledge, the user may consider that the second site (front-end) is more worth browsing than the first site. The appearance of the site affects users' views on the site. A site with a good appearance is regarded as a better site with a poor appearance, at least at first glance. Therefore, there are the following rules:

Rule: The appearance will significantly affect the user's judgment on the site's value at the beginning.

Note that appearance may also be important in gaining user trust, which is crucial for online transactions. If you know nothing about each site, consider which site you will choose to trade. Remember, trust is not only related to the site, but also largely influenced by the initial impression recognized by a third party or the company's reputation.

Overall impression value

Appearance is very important at the beginning, but when users continue to use it, they will gradually pay less attention to the appearance. When a user leaves a website, he will have a comprehensive impression-the general feeling of successful website access. In general, this feeling may be positive, negative, or neutral. Consider a case where a user hates a website. Why? Does the user find the site difficult to use? Is the website access speed slow? Is the website running very badly or often fails? Is the site poorly designed? Any of the above reasons may lead to negative comments on the site when the user leaves. The appearance may have a big influence at the beginning, but the final impression comes from the combination of content, appearance, technology, and availability. The overall impression value may be related to whether the user has achieved the goal during the access process. In this way, although the appearance plays a dominant role in the first impression, the appearance of the final impression is complicated. The following rules can be summarized:

Rule: The overall impression value of a site is influenced by the appearance, content, technology, availability, and user satisfaction.

Although the overall impression value does not only include the user's appearance evaluation of the site, it does not reduce the importance of the Web appearance, colors, backgrounds, text usage, images, and page styles can all be used to improve the page expressiveness.

If there are visual barriers and the computer environment does not support graphical browsing, the sites with good visual effects are destined to be more interesting. Do not focus on the specific appearance of the site or those pages that can be downloaded, just consider what is more pleasant at the abstract level.