Navigation. Easy enough, right? Just throw a bunch of links at the top or the bottom of the page and call it a day. That could work, but that’s definitely not the experience we strive to give our users. We built MyFreestone™ from the ground up to be as intuitive and easy to navigate as possible. This user flow can be broken down into three main components: the side-navigation (or top-navigation if you’re on mobile), the wizards, and the editors.
- The Side-Nav Bar. The side-nav boils MyFreestone™ down into its most essential components: the viewing and creating of resources. Courses, customers, orders, and reports can all be easily found/created from any location in MyFreestone™ through the side-nav. We’ve also included relevant linking wherever possible. For example, say you are viewing a recent order summary; you can quickly view that order’s customer profile by following the customer’s link. And for those users who want to use MyFreestone™ on their mobile device, we’ve taken the best principles of responsive design and scaled down the navigation into an unobtrusive menu bar that manages to remain as feature-rich as its desktop counterpart.
- The Wizards. The next components we’d like to draw your attention to are the wizards. These multi-step pages make feature creation a breeze. By dividing each resource (be they courses, customers, etc) into like components, we can ensure that users only focus on the basic steps required to set up a feature. We’ve also made sure to minimize the requirements to actually complete a wizard. That way, our users can quickly create their resources and then later come back to add any more pertinent information.
- The Editors. The final core components of MyFreestone™’s user flow are the editors. After a good bit of research and feedback, we’ve found that the separation of resource creation and resource management leads to a more focused user flow. Resource management is accomplished in the editors and, much like the wizards, are tailor-made to the resource they are creating. The course editor, contains the most information and is subdivided into tabs that cater to a specific courses needs. This approach would not make as much sense for the order editor whose tasks include the viewing of invoices and updating order notes.
Hopefully this crash-course in user flow has gotten you excited about using MyFreestone™ to its fullest extent. We’ve placed our greatest efforts into making the MyFreestone™ experience not only an intuitive one, but an enjoyable one. We’ve given our users the features that we ourselves have wanted most. Features that will allow our users to quickly create and have total control over the content they create and distribute.
As always, please check out the Help Center or reach out to your Account Director if you have any questions about MyFreestone™.
The post Developer’s Notes Part 1: Behind the Scenes – MyFreestone™ Navigation appeared first on Peach New Media.