UI / UX Best Practices

Monday, March 1, 2021

Introduction

The “UI” in UI design stands for “user interface.” The user interface is the graphical layout of an application. It consists of the buttons users click on, the text they read, the images, sliders, text entry fields, and all the rest of the items the user interacts with. This includes screen layout,transitions, interface animations and every single micro-interaction. Any sort of visualelement, interaction, or animation must all be designed.

UI designers are graphic designers. They're concerned with aesthetics. It's up to them to make sure the application's interface is attractive, visually-stimulating and themed appropriately to match the purpose and/or personality of the app. And they need to make sure every single visual element feels united, both aesthetically, andin purpose.

What is UX Design?

“UX” stands for “user experience.” A user's experience of the app is determined by how they interact with it. Is the experience smooth and intuitive or clunky and confusing? Does navigating the app feel logical or does it feel arbitrary? Does interacting with the app give people the sense that they're efficiently accomplishing the tasks they set out to achieve or does it feel like a struggle? User experience is determined by how easy or difficult it is to interact with the user interface elements that the UI designers have created.

So, UX designers are also concerned with an application's user interface, and this is why people get confused about the difference between the two. But, whereas UI designers are tasked with deciding how the user interface will look, UX designers are in charge of determining how the user interface operates.

They determine the structure of the interface and the functionality.How it's organized and how all the parts relate to one another. In short, theydesign how the interface works. If it works well and feels seamless, the user will have a good experience. But if navigation is complicated or unintuitive,then a lousy user experience is likely. UX designers work to avoid the second scenario.

 

How They Work Together

So a UX designer decides how the user interface works while the UIdesigner decides how the user interface looks. This is a very collaborative process, and the two design teams tend to work closely together. As the UX team is working out the flow of the app, how all of the buttons navigate you through your tasks, and how the interface efficiently serves up the information user's need, the UI team is working on how all of these interface elements will appear on screen.

Let's say at some point in the design process it's decided that extrabuttons need to be added to a given screen. This will change how the buttons will need to be organized and could require changing their shape or size. TheUX team would determine the best way to lay out the buttons while the UI teams adapt their designs to fit the new layout. Constant communication and collaboration between UI and UX designers help to assure that the final user interface looks as good as it can, while also operating efficiently and intuitively.

"If a UX designer decides to do something different, they need to have a very good reason, because breaking a deeply trained expected behavior will likely cause people to do the wrong thing frequently"

Catching and retaining people’s attention has become increasingly difficult for organizations, so including a user interface / user experience (UI/UX) design strategy to the development process of your web/mobile application has become crucial to stay competitive or move ahead of your competition. Because if you spend marketing dollars to drive traffic to your digital assets, you want to make sure that you optimize the user interface to create an easy to navigate and intuitive user experience.It’s all about maximizing your opportunity to convert visitors into users, and ultimately into buyers and advocates. 

A well-developed UI/UX experience can significantly improve the satisfaction of your customers when interacting with your digital platform and applications, which translates into higher conversion rates, repeat business and greater revenue. Integrating UI/UX design in your process is highly relevant, especially in the context of increased adoption of the DevOps process. Having a UI/UX framework in place contributes to helping your teams develop a ‘user first’ focus, coming up with innovative ways to make it easy for people to buy from you, and creating more perceived value for your buyers,thus more reasons to come back and spread the word to their network.

Here are five key benefits of adopting UI/UX design:

  1. Increase customer acquisition and loyalty
  2. Maximize revenue generation opportunities
  3. Optimize resources, development time and costs
  4. Get more insights from user engagement
  5. Reduce troubleshooting and associated costs

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