MAMUAYA

…an approach to the design of products, services and environments based on a holistic consideration of the users’ experience. Experience design is therefore driven by consideration of the ‘moments’ of engagement between people and brands, and the memories these moments create. Also known as experiential marketing, customer experience design, experiential design, brand experience. Wikipedia definition

Ever used YouTube? Wordpress? Gmail? Wonder why they are so successful? These web apps have one thing in common.. satisfied users. Its hard to make a user happy, never an easy task to do. First of all, why does a happy client can make a webapp be a success? Simply as this, happy user will use the app again and again and even recommend their friends to use it too. More users means more traffic, well.. this one is quite relative but in general : more user is better.
Now, how can we make our users happy? Before going on, users will be divided to two : end-users, and users behind the screen. And yes, both of them needs to be satisfied but we will only discuss from the end-user side of the story.

Usually in webapps, the first process a user will do is registration. Netvibes as i tumbl it earlier have a very unique registration process ( wont go into details ) because its very easy for users to find the link to register and it only took a minute for the whole process. Of course almost all webapps need less than a minute for registration, but sometime it makes a huge difference because the first impression matters, and User Experience Design is all about impressions.It important that the positioning of links is easy to find by users, and also color scheme that direct the visual to certain section within a website. This is not so hard if you use a basic white background color like Flickr or Youtube, but on other color it will be more difficult ( yet still doable ). Exactly, why do majority of successful webapps use white? Other that the previous reason, it is also doesnt tire the eye. Heavy colors like black, bright red, bright blue tend to make our eyes tired and of course this is a minus point. A human eye is always attracted to a lighter color, so usually the main content ( the one you wanna focus ) is using a lighter color than the borders or menus.
Wordpress 2.5 and Magnolia for example, used a very light duo-tone creme color with white on the main content and i like it very much. And it also use classic icons and small elements with bits of darker colors, unlike the rest of the 2.0 webapps that uses 3D effects, or mirror effects, and lighting effects.

Speaking of Wordpress 2.5.. before we go further, let me say this : HappyCog ( designer of wp2.5 ) is a top notch user experience designer that have dealt with prestigious clients and developed great products ( such as magnolia ), i am a big fan with their writings and i have nothing against them. But there’s something about the new wp2.5 that bothers lots of wp users. From the first version of wordpress, the admin page -take the new-post page for example- has a horizontal structure for essential options. In the old wp (
Moving on. The other thing to focus on is accessibility. Simply told : make user access the webapp from any browser and from any OS from any machine ( desktop pc, pda, laptop, etc ). Users are getting mobile, and connect to the internet so giving a broad of alternatives in using you webapp in a major move. One webapp that excel in this is Twitter. Twitter is a microblogging app ( bloggin in 140 chars ) and is able to receive blog posts ( called tweets ) via text from mobile phone, via instant messenger, and it also have open api’s that is used by ShareIt and lots of other client apps ( Twitteriffic, TwitterFox, Snitter, etc) and of course via web.

For now, this is my version of the elements ( to be considered ) in order to design a webapp that satisfy users :
1. Color Scheme
2. Layout
3. Element Positioning
4. Usability
5. Accessability

I would love to write more about this, but seriously its now 2 am and i am as sleepy as hell. To be continued…