One of the major focal points of our design philosophy for RentWiz has been to reduce the amount of mouse clicks a user has to make in order to access the features of the application. By doing extensive user interface planning, we developed a set of rules that our design team followed while creating the visual structure of the application.
Two Clicks or Less Rule
Through-out the design process and the following iterations, we focused on trying to make features as close as 1 or 2 clicks would get you. No one should have to wade through long navigation menus and obstacles just to add the listing data.
The flip side of this is that most often, in an effort to make all the major features in a site immediately accessible, some designers will go overboard and overload the page with links and shortcuts. This causes unwanted clutter in many cases and turns out to be counter productive as the end-user has no idea of a navigational structure and is left to figure it out for themselves.
We simply designed a navigational structure that allows us to quickly move a person from one section of the app to the other within one to two clicks. By making this our mantra, we forced ourselves to “lean” the app out, cutting unnecessary pages and combining features, or simplifying them so that they could be pulled into similar pages.
Other Pages
One of the benefits of developing an app for a very specific group of users is that you get to pick and choose much of the technology and development techniques that you want to use for the app. We were able to use a fair amount of the jQuery framework to bring in great javascript features and some AJAX to further reduce page loads and navigational flow.
Concerns
One of the issues we are dealing with now is planning future development and expansion of the app and how it will effect the design of the application in it’s current state. Additionally we are working hard to ensure that we don’t restrict the user’s ability to interact with the application because of AJAX / javascript / browser limitations.
Above all, our goal is to make RentWiz as useable as possible!
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