Website business philosophy

Website Business philosophy:

1. How do people browse webpages
1. Try to conform to the user's habits and make people accept unfamiliar things at a cost, unless we think this price is necessary.
2. The more important things are displayed on the page, the clearer the visual hierarchy is.
3. You must highlight the items you can click.
4. Divide the page into clearly defined areas
5. Omit unnecessary text

Ii. Navigation Design
Basic elements: Website Logo, website column, home page, search, utility or help.

The Website Logo, usually in the upper left corner of the page, appears at the top of the page's visual level. You can use either of the following methods to make it the most conspicuous content on the page, or let it cover all the other elements of the page. Of course, the design of the Website Logo has a psychological impact on people.

A website topic, also known as a navigation bar, is the top layer of the site hierarchy. In many cases, navigation bar can accommodate level-2 navigation (drop-down menu ). In many cases, the label design is a good way of expressing the navigation. Amazon.com almost develops it to a perfect state. Pay attention to the following points when designing the navigation using labels:
1. When you enter the website, a tag is selected;
2. Draw the tab correctly. The activated tab should be located before other tabs;
3. color differentiation allows each topic to use a unused label color and use this color on other navigation elements of the page to integrate them;

The search function. If a website provides the search function, remember a simple formula: An input box, a button, and the word "Search". Do not make it too complicated. For example, changing "Search" to "Search", "Quick Search", "Quick Search", and "keyword search" will make users think. If you must provide options for the search box (narrow the search scope), you must think twice and carefully provide options so as to provide the most reasonable method. Also, ensure that these options are indeed useful, otherwise, the user's psychology will be frustrated.

It is worth noting that when many websites reach the second-level page, the navigation will become fragmented and can be used freely. This problem is so common that it is difficult to find good examples of third-level navigation. In fact, the time spent on the underlying page is usually the same as the time spent on the top page. Unless we design the navigation from top to bottom at the beginning, it will be difficult to add and maintain consistency in the future. This means that before we discuss the color scheme of the home page, it is very important to have a demo design that shows all the potential levels of navigation on the website. To achieve this, the designer must work closely with related planners, and the designer must know the overview and details of the entire site in advance.

One thing that designers often ignore is to remember to add a name for each page. As if there is a street sign at every corner, the driver can know where to go at any time without thinking. The page name should appear at the location where the page content is covered. It should be the largest text on the page in most cases.

In short, a website with a good navigation system can tell users the information at a Glance:
What is this website? (Website Logo)
On which page do I use? (Webpage name)
What are the main topics of this station? (Navigation column list)
What options do I have at this level? (Page navigation)
Where is my navigation system located? (The "you are here" indicator on the page)
How can I search?

3. homepage design
First, you must acknowledge that the home page cannot be controlled by us. This is because everyone has a point of view. To make everyone satisfied, even the best home page design cannot be achieved. Therefore, it is inevitable to make some trade-offs when designing the homepage. But there is one thing you should not forget-to convey the overall image, that is, at a glance, people can feel what the station is doing. The sooner the better, the clearer the better. So when a visitor enters the home page, we are very laborious (several seconds to understand) to tell him four questions:
What is this website?
What is on the website?
What can you do here?
Why are you here, not somewhere else?

So how to convey this information:
1. The slogan, that is, the place close to the Website Logo. A refined, personalized, and vivid slogan can immediately remind people of the content of the website. But there are also exceptions. If a company's brand has reached the point where it is a household name, you can omit the slogan.
2. Welcome advertisement: a brief description of the website, which is displayed at the top of the home page without scrolling the screen.
3. Where should I start? After entering a new site, the viewer should know exactly after quickly scanning the Home Page:
If you want to search, you can start from here.
If you want to scan, you can start from here.
If you want to scan the most exciting content on this site, you can start from here.

Pay attention to the following issues when designing the homepage:
The home page navigation can be a little different from the lower-level navigation, but the content must be visually consistent.
You don't need a drop-down box, because it is hidden information.

4. How to Solve the endless design debate-availability testing-what most companies have not done
There is no better way to test the website availability. Arguing only wastes time and team effort, and passing tests to transfer right and wrong discussions to effective and ineffective ones makes it easier to ease the debate and break the deadlock. In addition, the test will let us see the user's motivation, understanding, and reflection, so that we will no longer insist that the user's thoughts are the same as our thoughts.
If you want to build a good website, you must test it. Testing a user is twice better than not Testing. Testing a user earlier is better than testing the last 50 users! We do not do much about this, and it seems that we do not pay much attention to this in China. Network companies generally need to test program flows more than interface experience tests.

So how to test?
1. testing can be performed in every process of the project. You do not have to wait until the project ends. At the beginning of the project, there must be someone (the project owner or designer, or someone else to discuss and the designer shows it) use the team's collective skills, experience, creativity, and judgment to create some versions (even a rough version), and then carefully observe people's views and use of it.
2. The number of ideal users for each round of testing is three, up to four. The first three users may encounter almost all the most obvious problems, and more importantly, they need to perform several tests to correct the problems in time. It is noted that testing users can be used by almost anyone who knows how to access the Internet, not necessarily in line with the target audience of the website.
3. Test Equipment. You only need an office meeting room, two chairs, a computer, and a camera (which can be replaced by screen recording software. We can transmit the camera signal to a nearby office (or even a small place) so that the development team can observe everyone without interfering with the testing users.
4. Anyone can initiate a test. Anyone can watch the test.
5. test items:
"Understanding" test. It is to let the test users see the website, and then see whether they understand the website, and understand the website's objectives, value propositions, organization methods, and running methods.
Test the key tasks. Let the user complete some tasks and then observe how they do it.
There is also the most concise "test" method, that is, when a page is ready, you can immediately show it to others to see if they understand it. Of course, we have done this!

In short, we need to make a "good" webpage:
-- Let users know what they do on our website to the maximum extent
-- Tell users what they want to know
-- Minimize steps
-- Spend some time thinking
-- Know the user's questions and give answers
-- Provide assistance to users
-- Easy to recover from errors
-- If you are not sure, please apologize to the user.