On the Web, speed, organization, transparency, and consistency driven your solution. This article explains how to keep in keeping in these aspects and customer needs during the design and styles of the web page.
The focus of the Book of the web design is usually the style instead of design. The design focuses on the understanding of the subject or content and provides a useful way for service users. The style is a necessary component designed, but it is only concerned about visual performance.
The difference between the two is very important and is easily ignored. Web designer Jeffrey Zeldman said, when the difference between the style and the design disappears, "We are all meaningless candies, don't know what it is."
In the best design, style is located behind the appropriate solution. On the Web, speed, organization, transparency, and consistency driven your solution. In the process of establishing a site, you will often encounter challenges, sometimes confused about the correct design choices made. This article focuses on how to put our customers' experience in the first place, as well as the low endurance of the customer's low performance and service. In keeping in the following principles will make you do your right thing easier.
Principle 1: Speed priority
Most designers do not take the speed as a problem. But the Web is an interactive experience and is not a visual experience. The interactive experience is placed under a certain step. When the user needs to wait, they will lose control and the experience will decrease.
Customers will not care about what they wait, although these reasons may be bad dial-up, Internet congestion or server issues. They just want to know what information on your site is now, not after a while. Waiting for the page to display too long sites to go to other places, no matter how your site is useful, or how they are related.
Many investigations focus on the page loaded by the page and the impact of its shopping. Studies have an important impact on the download time of poor download. Consumers believe that the Internet provides the services you need. Ask them to postpone their request will cause the customer to lose. Every year, it is estimated to be $ 25 billion due to the income of Web performance issues.
Zona Research Institutions discovered that the homepage of the Web site is approximately 30%. This means that there is approximately one every 3 site visits to leave after the request home page. Reduce the page of the page for about 1 second, which is 6-6%.
However, it seems that everyone's attention is small for speed problems. Figure 1 shows that the homepage of the business web site is constantly slowing down. This is a large extent because the company only focuses on the quality of the content, which uses the key to form a meaningful experience. However, the study shows that the customer thinks slowly is useless (shown in Figure 2). Therefore, it is the highest priority in the design of the acceptable download time in use. As a designer, you can play an important role when you meet this demand.
Figure 1: Home performance is drop
Image Description: Although the study shows that the site visitor reflects negative for a slow site, the data is displayed in the business site home page is slower and not accelerating. More advertising and dynamic generating pages have contributed to this performance sluggish. This chart shows the average response time of 56Kbps connected to popular tourism, shopping and securities trading sites.
Figure 2: Do not use slow download test customers patiently or hinder usability
Image Description: Most people in the world are still using low speed, so they should minimize the elements on the page. For example, if you use image navigation, put them in a group instead of isolation with each other.
The actual situation of the network
The Internet is a complex, distributed network that supports the number of increasing data and users. Its production is to connect to the college, government and military agencies, and have not intended to handle international trade with billions of US dollars. The result is that it has a certain limit, the most worthless of the waiting time, or is called lag. The data packet is passed from a computer to another computer, and the waiting time refers to the time interval between the request and the response information between the computer. In the past few years, most of the web content (such as the content provided by many business sites) has become dynamic. Real-time (dynamically) combination content requires more bandwidth than sending a static page, but also a higher responsive web server and application. Any delay caused by information processing increases to the network delay. Most of your site's response ability relies on complex interactions of network technology, software and hardware.
The prerequisite for the fastest design is how to understand how the page reaches the customer from the server, as well as where there may be potential delays in the road (shown in Figure 3).
Figure 3: Acceleration process
Image Description: Before you design a quick site, you must understand how the web page reaches the customer from the server. This is a complex and mostly invisible process.
Many business sites use specialized content delivery services (such as Akamai and Digital Island). These companies have designed a refundable system that can intelligently delete a lot of delays in the network.
Degaining negligence
Although there may be a lot of errors in network processing, most of these factors are invisible for temporary users. If the page is loaded slow, and in many places where you put images are empty boxes, the programmer group will first call the designer, because your job is absolutely visible. The programmer group requires you to reduce the page more easily than one of the problems in debug application servers.
You are ready to handle similar situations. Figure 3 is a good start that helps you understand which things can be adjusted in the design, and when your adjustment is not enough, you can suggest that the group's other members will find the problem.
If you have a slow download page, you collect the supply information. Starting from any related performance data, the size of the full page with HTML and the image is recorded. Some HTML editing software programs (such as Macromedia Dreamweaver) will automatically calculate this information. Set page restrictions and make sure no pages exceed it. Sign a contract with some companies that can constantly measure site download time and wait time (such as Keynote Systems4). The speed of your site should be the highest in frequent testing.
Bottom line
Although the proportion of users who use fast access to continuous increases, the capacity of online users who still use dial-up connection is critical (shown in Figure 4):
Figure 4: Online users divided by connection speed
Test the tolerance of the visitor's download time is 2 to 10 seconds. Because all evidence is displayed, the better the speed, the target should be 4-5 seconds for each page (shown in Figure 5), whether this condition may mean that hundreds and thousands of dollars on your bottom line gap.
Figure 5: Consider bandwidth
Image Description: This chart is useful for estimating how long download time is costly on a page in the best network. But you have to remember that the waiting time in the network will increase the delay.
When there is a historical performance and the total amount of the page size, you can let the group recoate to other places that may have faults. More importantly, you may become a user-proclaimed user, and make the best user experience becomes the most important standard.
Imagine a person in the Sales, "two advertising positions on this page". You may answer "Add these locations) Each page will add to the download of 28KB. The speed slowing will have a negative impact on sales. Do you want this?". The usual explanation is not so easy, but connects the requirements and reality, you can educate all the parties involved in this problem. The speed is a design problem, but it is not the only place you can do. As a designer, what you can do is more than compressed JPEG or cleared HTML. If your site is more likely to use, even if the actual download time is the same, your customers will think that the site is faster.
