Designing Web Applications – Nathan Barry

Designing Web Applications Information

Learn to design an experience your customers love.

Are you scratching your head wondering why people sign up for your application, but never come back?

It’s not that you set out to create a poorly designed product, but lots of mistakes—big or small—along the way left you with an interface that does its job, but is painful to use.

So what now? Hire a designer to fix it for you?

I think you can learn to fix it yourself. Undo those mistakes one at a time to create an experience that your customers won’t notice. Wait… what? Yes, I said an experience they won’t notice. Frustration and confusion get noticed. Completing a task quickly and easily doesn’t.

Great experiences feel effortless. Designs are clear, buttons are easy to find. The process will go so smoothly that the customers won’t think anything of it.

That’s good.

That means your customers are using your application to get work done without feeling confused and frustrated. That’s the kind of product they can recommend to friends and co-workers.

Sound good to you? Let’s jump in and cover what you’ll learn in Designing Web Applications.

DESIGNING WEB SOFTWARE IS DIFFERENT THAN DESIGNING WEBSITES

If you approach both the same way your software will be painful to use.

Design for repeat use

A website is visited once or twice by a single user, and maybe more often if it has frequently updated content. A web application, on the other hand, can be visited dozens of times per day, meaning you need to focus on designing for efficiency.

Complex Interactions

Often web applications have complex interactions that need to be simplified for the user. This is not normally a problem on marketing websites, where the main interactions are simply reading or watching content.

Task completion

Business software is only used because it helps people complete tasks. They have a job to do and they want to get in and get out. It is critical that you design for these different flows to make your user’s job as easy as possible.

About Author

Nathan has been designing software with Photoshop for 8 years. In that time he’s suffered through hundreds of tutorials designed to teach photography—not interface design. Because of that frustrating learning experience he is determined to teach software professionals exactly what they need to know to design great software.

Nathan is the author of Designing Web Applications, The App Design Handbook, and Authority. He also founded the email marketing company ConvertKit.

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