Train of Thoughts - Designing the Effective Web Experience
June 21, 2002
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In Train of Thoughts—Designing the Effective Web Experience, Web
strategy and design consultant John Lenker provides insight for
how.
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Is Creativity the Enemy of Usability?
In Train of Thoughts—Designing the Effective Web Experience, Web strategy and design consultant John Lenker provides insight for how. Web enterprises must interact with people to be successful in the twenty-first century. This book is non-technical and is written not only for Web designers and developers, but also for any stakeholder in a Web enterprise that has a vested interest in ensuring that their online resources become more meaningful and valuable. In Train of Thoughts, you’ll learn to:
- Understand what motivates people’s online behavior and then convert that motivation into online results
- Communicate with people effectively online so that they really understand what the value proposition of an online resource is
- Combine forward-thinking information design techniques with systems that pave experiential pathways for people to journey along in pursuit of their interests and goals
- Properly employ personalization to build relationships
- Understand the true role of creativity online
- Uncover screen-space designs that aid and inspire the mind
- Reconcile business objectives with stakeholder needs
- Approach process in a way that keeps projects on time, on budget, and on target
- Create online resources that actually work when they’re completed
- Actualize creative vision appropriately for the Web
Contents:
FOREWORD-By Dr. Michael Allen
CONTENTS-Tables of Notion Summaries
PART ONE: UNDERSTANDING WEB EXPERIENCE DESIGN
i1 THE TENACITY OF INADEQUATE USABILITY STANDARDS—Breaking with the Status Quo
01 ‘USERS’ VERSUS PEOPLE—Understanding What Motivates Online Behavior
02 AFFECTING OUTCOMES—Converting Motivation into Online Results
03 COMPOSING NOTIONS—Making Online Information Meaningful
04 PATTERNS OF ANTICIPATION—The Art of Flowstem Development
05 PRODUCTIVE ORIGINALITY—Understanding the Role of Creativity Online
06 THE TIME/SCREEN-SPACE CONTINUUM—Designing Perceptually Experiential Media
PART TWO: USING SPEED TO SUCCEED WITH EXPERIENCE DESIGN
i2 PROCESS CONFUSION—What They Probably Didn’t Teach You in Process 101
07 STRATEGY FORMULATION—Reconciling Stakeholder Needs
08 ITERATIVE EXECUTION—Exploring Cycles of Planning, Execution, and Evaluation
09 DEPLOYMENT—The REAL Work of the Final Phase of a Project
10 ARTFULNESS IN CREATIVE EXECUTION—Doing Due Diligence
INDEX
CHAPTER 01 ‘Users’ Versus People–Understanding What Motivates Online Behavior
The people who interact with your Web enterprise through its online resources aren’t users; that would make you–the person or organization responsible for the existence of these resources–a pusher. They’re people and you function more like a facilitator. People don’t merely use the information that they access; they perceive it, absorb it, try to comprehend it, are affected by it, and then decide how to respond to it.
With this guiding notion in mind, the intent of this chapter is to persuade you to stop listening to those Web usability consultants who recommend that you dull-down your online resources and focus solely on the practical aspects of experience design. These one-track-minded consultants are as much hypnotists as anything else. They’ve basically succeeded in mesmerizing the online community by cultivating the false notion that people are mechanically minded robots whose sole motivations are to experience their online world as expediently and as practically as possible.
While there are certainly many valid practical considerations when designing online resources, under the guise of "usability standards," practicality itself is currently being taken to an extreme.
01.00.01 Practicality is not an underlying human motivation.
Instead, people seek fulfillment through consumption, as well as through social interaction and emotional experiences. The Web can help us be more practical people, yes; but more importantly it has the capacity to help us become better people–to enhance our minds and our lives–to help us better understand each other, the world, and ourselves.
Although the appropriate application of practicality in the design of Web experiences can contribute to fulfilling our true human needs and desires, designing our Web enterprises to be practical for the sake of being practical is a misguided and dangerously flawed idea. And most certainly–elevating practicality above all other design considerations goes far beyond necessity.
01.00.02 Journeying along a well-conceived experiential pathway is what makes interacting with a Web enterprise compelling.
Because people are multidimensional, an effective Web experience is successful on many different levels. Consequently, paving this "experiential pathway" involves employing varied sets of principles that address our multidimensionality. This holistic design perspective should draw from and synthesize principles that are related to psychology, understandability1, and creativity.
Up until now, however, consultants who are more technically minded have confused experience design with usability design. Usability traditionally relates to a "user’s" ability to navigate through and find information quickly on the Web, and grapples with some, but not all issues relevant to understandability as I’ve framed it in this text. Although usability does try to help people avoid the detrimental emotions that accompany frustration, for the most part usability ignores broader issues related to the psychology of emotion, the cognition of perception and learning, as well as the very real human need for aesthetic gratification.
‘Users’ Versus People–Understanding What Motivates Online Behavior - Page 2
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