Common Craft Blog
Good Experience: The Page Paradigm
By leelefever on February 23, 2004 - 9:38am
Good Experience - The Page Paradigm
More experience-based guidelines from Mark Hurst. He re-iterates a point he made in 1999 that he called "The Page Paradigm". It goes:
On any given Web page, users will either...
- click something that appears to take them closer to the fulfillment of their goal,
- or click the Back button on their Web browser.
I think this is a simple observation that is easy to forget in design for usability. This guideline was something that I hadn't considered:
Consistency is NOT necessary. For years, students of UI and UX have been taught that *consistency in the interface* is one of the cardinal rules of interface design. Perhaps that holds in software, but on the Web, it's just not true. What matters on the Web is whether, on each individual page, the user can quickly and easily advance the next step in the process.
Good Experience: The Page Paradigm
I thought Peter Merholz's analysis of the article was interesting -- you might, too. Also some good comments over there:
http://www.peterme.com/archives/000281.html
Good Experience: The Page Paradigm
Thanks for the link Jeremy. I do like his post and ensuing comments. I don't think anyone in Mark's position can relate general guidelines without people shooting holes through it.
I thought it was funny to see people bragging about working on 100k page sites and then others sarcastically posting "you folks are so cool for working on big sites"
Good Experience: The Page Paradigm
ha haha
Yes, perhaps that's how you know you've "made it" in the blogosphere -- when other people start deconstructing and criticizing your innocuous opinions.