So let's get started. 1
And the first thing I want to talk about is that you should imagine your app as a journey. 2
So every single user that downloads your app right from spotting your app in the App Store through using 3
it, 4
achieving goals or completing tasks within the app, 5
it should be a journey and it should be a delightful one at that. 6
And you, as the app designer, is the craftsman that designs this journey. So you don't want to throw all 7
the information on screen and hope that the user will pick it up. 8
That's the very opposite of user interface design. 9
Instead, you are the tour guide that takes the user on a wonderful journey through your app. And in order 10
to do this you have to be able to shift and move their attention from place to place guiding them from 11
A to B to C. 12
Now let me show you what I mean. 13
Everybody who looks at this graphic will first look at the big bold title up here and then you will 14
look over here 15
and finally you will look down here. 16
And this is human nature. 17
Our attention is programmed in such a way that it's always drawn to the biggest the boldest the brightest 18
thing first and then it moves to the rounder things and then it moves the smaller thing and it moves to the 19
lighter shaded things. 20
So this is just how our brain works. 21
But as a designer you can use this information to curate the experience of your user. 22
So instead of chucking them a block of text that just looks like this, 23
and this is pretty much the website that you saw in 1999 24
a whole load of text with a lot of blue links. 25
Now instead a well-designed web page or app should be a visual journey. 26
The user should first be drawn to the title and then to the subtitle and then you guide them through 27
some large images, smaller images a little bit of body text. 28
And this one of the reasons behind the success of medium.com which is a blogging site that takes 29
away the burden of designing a good blog post from the writer and essentially gives you a really easy 30
way to format your article so that you go from title to subtitle to body in a very easy visual way. 31
And the benefits of having a well-designed website app is that you'll have higher user retention. When 32
confronted with a large block of text like this 33
how long do you think you'll last 34
reading it? This is something that's really curated on your reading journey is tailored. 35
Imagine how much more you can hold onto that user and you can tell them about things that you want to 36
tell them and show them the things that you want to show them instead of them simply being scared away 37
by your design. 38
Now this is a really cool website slash tutorial by a designer called Jeremy Thomas and the link for 39
it is in the text below. 40
And he basically dissects how we went from literally having no web design to something that is guided, 41
curated and a visual journey for users to go on. 42
And he's presented this information in a really interesting way through hyperlinks. 43
If you're interested in learning a bit more about tailoring a user journey in terms of user interface 44
design then I would highly recommend checking it out.