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A great site is a usable one
In web design, when you think about flow we usually think about "task flows" or "flow charts" but there's another type of flow that we should consider. It's that feeling of total absorption when you're doing something you love to do and are not disturbed by anxiety or boredom caused by steps that are misdirecting, too long or overly taxing.
Flow, as a mind condition, was first proposed by psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and is described by a incorrect sense of time, a low level of self-consciousness, and full engagement in the task at hand. Software developers might experience it when they're working on their code, gamers might experience it when running Quake III, Christopher Cross felt it when he started his trip. For Web designers, it's just the feeling we want to achieve in the people who use our sites.
How can we create sites that inspire that feeling? First, it begins with a page that sorts out a serious problem and is complex enough to require a certain degree of learning by people who use it. The purpose should not necessarily be to develop a simple site. The purpose should be to create a page that is intuitive to use no matter how complex it actually is. However, you may think, hasn't there been a usability movement in web design over the last few years? Yes, but there's a learning curve for all the sites that seeks to solve a difficult task. You shouldn't confuse usability with a desire to avoid needless complexity.
The trick to make the complicated appear painless is to consider flow in your design. By designing a page that is fluid and intuitive and inspires flow, you make people get up-to-speed in a shorter time, reduce the chance that current users leave your site and change to a different one and create users that evangelize your page to their friends. That way you will get more users, growing activity, and greater awareness of your site.
The first point in creating for flow is to set certain goals for the users. It's vital to create both a global goal along with smaller, incremental goals. Goals help users understand what is their final destination and what steps they have to 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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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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