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A great site is a usable one
In web design, when you think of flow we usually think about "task flows" and "flow charts" but there's another kind of flow that we should keep in mind. It's that impression of total absorption when you're engaged in something you like to do without being disrupted by anxiety or boredom due to tasks that are misdirecting, too long or overly taxing.
Flow, as a mental condition, was first introduced by psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and is characterized by a incorrect sense of time, a lack of self-consciousness, and full engagement in the task at hand. Program engineers often feel it when they're working on their code, gamers might experience it when playing Guitar Hero III, Christopher Cross felt it when he started his trip. For designers, it's just the feeling we hope to achieve in the users of our site.
How do we create sites that promote that experience? First, it begins with a site that sorts out a challenging problem and is complex enough to ask for a certain degree of learning by people who use it. The goal should not necessarily be to create a simple site. The goal should be to create a page that is painless to navigate no matter how complicated it actually is. However, you may think, hasn't there been a simplicity trend in web design in the last few years? Yes, but there's a learning curve for all the sites that seeks to sort out a complex problem. We shouldn't confuse usability with a desire to avoid needless complexity.
The trick to make the complex feel painless is to consider flow in your structure. By developing a page that is smooth and intuitive and engages flow, you make new users get familiar with it more quickly, lower the chance that current users leave your site and change to a different one and create users that promote your page to other people. That way you will get more users, increased activity, and bigger awareness of your site.
The first point in creating for flow is to determine certain goals for the users. It's important to create both a global goal and smaller, incremental goals. This will help users understand where they're going and what steps they'll take to get there.
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ArtIcons Pro can find, extract, edit and create Windows icons in color depths up to 16 million colors. Import and export icon images, create and handle icon libraries. It supports the new icon format introduced in Windows XP (8-bit transparency). Download it
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ArtCursors allows you to edit Windows cursors in color depths up to 16 million colors. You also can search files and folders for cursors, import and export cursor images and create cursor libraries for better and more efficient storage. Download it
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CustomIcons is an ultimate tool for customizing the icons on you desktop, in Windows Start menu and many other locations. Using CustomIcons you can easily replace default Windows icons with the ones to your choice. Download it
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