The Five Planes
From The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett (Summarized)
The User Experience is what any website is all about. When you develop a website you want to account for any action the user is likely to do. This might seem like a lot, but it is not all that bad. You might have experienced it before, where most sites have similar or even the same look and functionality. That is because others have done the research before and can be used by you. You can also use your own passed experience when designing new websites.
Jesse James Garrett wrote a book named The Elements of User Experience, in which he breaks down the user experience to 5 elements that need to be considered when designing and developing a website. These are the 5 steps every website should go through:
Strategy
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This is the conceptual state of the website. What is the end goal? Where do you What's the end goal of your website? At this point anything can be said and written down. Later things that are far off will be taken out. |
Scope
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The scope stage you should decide what should and shouldn't be included in the website. This includes content and functionality. No one website does everything. Yo have to limit your site to a narrow section, but comprehensive to cover the goals of the site. |
Structure
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This is the stage where the website is starting to get modled. Where are the pages going to link to? How does the user flow going to be? All these questions need to be answered at this point. |
Skeleton
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Now we can start working on how the website is going to look. A few layouts can be drawn up to visualize the website. |
Surface
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This is the last stage. Where all the user experience elements come together to make your website a success. Much of the time is going to be spent on this stage getting the website to look right. |
These stage provide a good overall structure to build a successful website. In some points you might find yourself going back and forth between some of this stages as you work of the site. Consider these stages as guidelines to point the way through building your first website.
