Methods

Users

Before considering any design, first stand back and take a look at your audience, these are the people who will be using the site, so it would make sense to include them right from the start.

This is the main difference between MIS and other designers, MIS designs are created around the users not the company or individual requesting the design.

Target Your Audience

Decide which users your site is going to be aimed at, if you are a graphical design company, chances are you will want a graphical site, showing off your work to customers, this means slower downloads for your page.

If you are creating a charity site, chances are that you will want to be accessible to a wider audience on many platforms, a less graphical approach is more suited to this to improve interoperability and speed due to smaller file sizes, and cut down on bandwidth so more people can visit(dependent on hosting details).

Attention Span

Attention spans vary from user to user, but one thing remains, users do not like to sit around twiddling there thumbs waiting. It is a proven fact that if a page takes longer than 7 seconds to load, virtually all people will navigate elsewhere.

As technology improves, this becomes less of an issue, but this still has some bearing one other areas. Splash pages (introduction type pages) and flash sites are a good example of this, and should be avoided for people pitching a product or service as it can encourage users to navigate off the page if it takes to long to load.

User Interaction

People expect, and always have done, if something does not work or is hard to use, they will go elsewhere. Your whole site should be based on user interaction, and should flow in a manner that is logical.

Bad interaction could be navigation in strange places, hypertext links in different colours throughout the site, scattered content and hard to read text.

Good interaction could be logical navigation in a usual place, uniformed pages keeping things the same throughout the site, good content flow and setting a focal point for each page consistent with your audience (usually the main text body).