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5 Well Designed Web Apps

We all use web apps these days. I’m sure many of you hate the cloud, but love or hate it is here to stay… I’ve picked 5 web apps that I feel are well designed. 5 apps that you can use cues from as you develop the front end design for your own web app. No doubt all of these have had serious time and effort put into user experience and keeping things S-I-M-P-L-E. Without further adieu here are my favorites:


1. Mint
mint.jpg
As a designer I’m generally struck by page layouts that are initially eye-catching, yet upon further investigation prove to be quite usable. Mint plain and simply delivers in this area. I’m constantly struck how I can quickly glean pertinent information from the site. If they actually pinged my bank more frequently and my balances showed up correctly - I’d be a much more happy Mint user.


2. Facebook
facebook.jpg
The quintessential bar for social media. Facebook garnered a bit of a negative rap for the recent redesign of their site. However, the new design succeeds in many areas where the old site failed, especially in the separation of the news feed and profile information. As with all popular social sites, I’m sure Facebook will end up being consumed by ad space as it attempts to better monitize itself. Time will tell…


3. Gmail
gmail.jpg
It’s just so simple right? I test email layouts frequently for work, and have to log into Yahoo! mail and Live mail regularly. I cringe each and everytime I do this. Not only do I have 1,000s of junk emails for viagra, penis elargement, and well you get the idea… but the layout itself is just plain complicated. Enough with all the javascript hoopla - I just want to read my damn emails…


4. Google Analytics
google-analytics.jpg
At the risk of complete Google overload I’m including Google’s web analytics application on the list. When Google first bought Urchin I found the resulting interface a bit TOO basic. Simple to a fault in this case, however, Google has slowly added more features over time including segmentation. The simple visual foundation has proved to serve Google Analytics well. With segmentation you can easily look at complex charts breaking down visitor data amount other information points with ease.


5. Digg
digg.jpg
Last and certainly not least. Love or hate Digg, they have done a spectacular job of presenting the information on their site in a readable way. Digg might be one of the most skimmed websites. I rarely read more than the first few lines of article before choosing to digg or not digg. The headlines are HUGE as are the voting buttons next to them. In my humble opinion this is where Digg succeeds over similar news voting sites.



I plan on continuing this “web app design” topic as a series. Stay tuned as I will be offering tips and advice including: “who should I hire to design the front end for my web app”.

authors
scott whigham
grant moyle
chad weaver
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