Postures for the Web

Designers may be tempted to think that the Web is, by necessity, different from desktop applications in terms of posture. Although there are variations that exhibit combinations of these postures, the basic four stances really do cover the needs of most Web sites and Web applications (we discuss more details of designing for the Web in Chapter 37).

Information-oriented sites

Sites that are purely informational, which require no complex transactions to take place beyond navigating from page to page and limited search, must balance two forces: the need to display a reasonable density of useful information, and the need to allow first time and infrequent users to easily learn and navigate the site. This implies a tension between sovereign and transient attributes in informational sites. Which stance is more dominant depends largely on who the target personas are and what their behavior patterns are when using the site: Are they infrequent or one-time users, or are they repeat users who will return weekly or daily to view content?

The frequency at which content can be updated on a site does, in some respects, influence this behavior: Informational sites with daily-updated information will naturally attract repeat users more than a monthly-updated site. Infrequently updated sites may be used more as occasional reference (assuming the information is not too topical) rather than heavy repeat use and should then be given more of a transient stance than a sovereign one. What's more, the site can configure itself into a more sovereign posture by paying attention to how often that particular user visits.

SOVEREIGN ATTRIBUTES

Detailed information display is best accomplished by assuming a sovereign stance. By assuming full-screen use, designers can take advantage of all the possible space available to clearly present both the information itself and the navigational tools and cues to keep users oriented.

The only fly in the ointment of sovereign stance on the Web is choosing which full-screen resolution is appropriate. In fact, this is an issue for desktop applications as well. The only difference between the desktop and the Web in this regard is that Web sites have little leverage in influencing what screen resolution users will have. Users, however, who are spending money on expensive desktop productivity applications, will probably make sure that they have the right hardware to support the needs of the software. Thus, Web designers need to make a decision early on what the lowest common denominator they wish to support will be. Alternatively, they must code more complex sites that may be optimal on higher resolution screens, but which are still usable (without horizontal scrolling) on lower-resolution monitors.

TRANSIENT ATTRIBUTES

The less frequently your primary personas access the site, the more transient a stance the site needs to take. In an informational site, this manifests itself in terms of ease and clarity of navigation.

Sites used for infrequent reference might be bookmarked by users: You should make it possible for them to bookmark any page of information so that they can reliably return to it at any later time.

Users will likely visit sites with weekly to monthly updated material intermittently, and so navigation there must be particularly clear. If the site can retain information about past user actions via cookies or server-side methods and present information that is organized based on what interested them previously, this could dramatically help less frequent users find what they need with minimal navigation.

Transactional sites and Web applications

Transactional Web sites and Web applications have many of the same tensions between sovereign and transient stances that informational sites do. This is a particular challenge because the level of interaction can be significantly more complex.

Again, a good guide is the goals and needs of the primary personas: Are they consumers, who will use the site at their discretion, perhaps on a weekly or monthly basis, or are they employees who (for an enterprise or B2B Web application) must use the site as part of their job on a daily basis? Transactional sites that are used for a significant part of an employee's job should be considered full sovereign applications.

On the other hand, e-commerce, online banking, and other consumer-oriented transactional sites must, like informational sites, balance between sovereign and transient stances very similarly to informational sites. In fact, many consumer transactional sites have a heavy informational aspect because users like to research and compare products, investments, and other items to be transacted upon. For these types of sites, navigational clarity is very important, as is access to supporting information and the streamlining of transactions. Amazon.com has addressed many of these issues quite well, via one-click ordering, good search and browsing capability, online reviews of items, recommendation lists, persistent shopping cart, and tracking of recently viewed items. If Amazon has a fault, it may be that it tries to do a bit too much: Some of the navigational links near the bottom of the pages likely don't get hit very often.

Web portals

Early search engines allowed people to find and access content and functions distributed throughout the world on the Web. They served as portals in the original sense of the word—ways to get somewhere else. Nothing really happens in these navigational portals; you get in, you go somewhere, you get out. They are used exclusively to gain access quickly to unrelated information and functions.

If the user requires access via a navigational portal relatively infrequently, the appropriate posture is transient, providing clear, simple navigational controls and getting out of the way. If the user needs more frequent access, the appropriate posture is auxiliary: a small and persistent panel of links (like the Windows taskbar).

As portal sites evolved, they offered more integrated content and function and grew beyond being simple stepping-stones to another place. Consumer-oriented portals provide unified access to content and functionality related to a specific topic, and enterprise portals provide internal access to important company information and business tools. In both cases, the intent is essentially to create an environment in which users can access a particular kind of information and accomplish a particular kind of work: environmental portals. Actual work is done in an environmental portal. Information is gathered from disparate sources and acted upon; various tools are brought together to accomplish a unified purpose.

An environmental portal's elements need to relate to one another in a way that helps users achieve a specific purpose. When a portal creates a working environment, it also creates a sense of place; the portal is no longer a way to get somewhere else, but a destination in and of itself. The appropriate posture for an environmental portal is thus sovereign.

Within an environmental portal, the individual elements function essentially as small applications running simultaneously—as such, the elements themselves also have postures:

  • Auxiliary elements: Most of the elements in an environmental portal have an auxiliary posture; they typically present aggregated sets of information to which the user wants constant access (such as dynamic status monitors), or simple functionality (small applications, link lists, and so on). Auxiliary elements are, in fact, the key building block of environmental portals. The sovereign portal is, therefore, composed of a set of auxiliary posture mini-applications.

  • Transient elements: In addition to auxiliary elements, an environmental portal often provides transient portal services as well. Their complexity is minimal; they are rich in explanatory elements, and they are used for short periods on demand. Designers should give a transient posture to any embedded portal service that is briefly and temporarily accessed (such as a to-do list or package-tracking status display) so that it does not compete with the sovereign/auxiliary posture of the portal itself. Rather it becomes a natural, temporary extension of it.

When migrating traditional applications into environmental portals, one of the key design challenges is breaking the application apart into a proper set of portal services with auxiliary or transient posture. Sovereign, full-browser applications are not appropriate within portals because they are not perceived as part of the portal once launched.




About Face 2.0(c) The Essentials of Interaction Design
About Face 2.0(c) The Essentials of Interaction Design
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2006
Pages: 263

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