Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Web application user interface without any Menu

If you are like me, with little creativity with UI (!), on a new project you always start with a simple layout, banner followed by a row of menu and then a two column body that ends with a footer. Well, here is an example:-
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CampZero
zero hassle camping
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Home | Place a booking
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Welcome |
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Campzero.com, all rights reserved
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Well, there are other ways and you will almost always see good visual elements in most websites. However, somehow all of these beautiful sites come with some sort of menu. This post is about a site that doesn't have a menu at all.
Yes it is possible to create a web app without a menu. The application that I recently developed is designed around an intuitive workflow. The workflow itself drives the app and it does so without any menu. For example, on landing you see a dashboard with three sections. Main section shows highlights of different projects, sidebar contains the search box and top part contains profile card. Now, you can navigate the whole application from here. For example, select a project you will see main section with the project latest activities and the search box will search in the scope of the project.
The point is, if you know the users of your app will most likely follow one of a few workflows, then you can design a UI that flows naturally.