Is it about color choices, layout, or which component to use over another? Designing for a specific person doing a specific task or set of tasks is the glue that holds the product together. Make sure that when designing the interface for your next project you have a clear understanding of your users, their goals, and how and when they will likely use the product.
You and your team will have collected a considerable amount of information from user interviews, surveys , and other UX research to understand how the product should function within the context of how and when users are interacting with it. While it might seem like a no-brainer, ensuring that your user interface design has clearly defined navigation patterns throughout the product is easy to forget.
When designing each screen, ask yourself: Can a user tell where they are, where they came from, and where they can go on each page? If not, this can easily be solved by implementing a design pattern like breadcrumb navigation where users see the history of the steps and pages they took to get to where they are now. These sorts of navigation patterns act as maps so that users can orient themselves within a product.
Without a clear map, users can easily get lost and frustrated. They often miss crucial pages and tools, and instead spend more time questioning how they got there in the first place.
Good UI design comes from creating a sense of familiarity and ensuring that everything on a screen makes sense and works in ways that the user expects it to work. The best UI design examples feature a clear understanding of visual design basics, especially when it comes to color and typography.
A lack of consistency and discrepancies like this can confuse users, which is something UI designers want to avoid at all costs. While UI designers should still get creative with their interface designs, the look of a product should never distract users from completing the task at hand.
Sometimes, and particularly in the case of enterprise UX, the look and feel of the application is so seamless that it goes unnoticed by the average user. Additionally, typography decisions should be made with careful consideration of how users will process information. Good UI design examples will show an effective use of hierarchical typography choices to distinguish different levels of headers from body text and button text and ensure typography choices are legible.
Users should always be informed of system operations with easy to understand and highly visible status displayed on the screen within a reasonable amount of time. Match between system and the real world. Designers should endeavor to mirror the language and concepts users would find in the real world based on who their target users are.
User Control and freedom. Offer users a digital space where backward steps are possible, including undoing and redoing previous actions. Consistency and Standards. Interface designers should ensure that both the graphic elements and terminology are maintained across similar platforms. For example, an icon that represents one category or concept should not represent a different concept when used on a different screen. Error prevention. Whenever possible, Design Systems so that potential errors are kept to a minimum.
Users do not like being called upon to detect and remedy problems, which may on occasion be beyond their level of expertise. Eliminating or flagging actions that may result in errors are two possible means of achieving error prevention. Recognition rather than recall. Minimize Cognitive Load by maintaining task-relevant information within the display while users explore the interface. Human attention is limited and we are only capable of maintaining around five items in our short-term memory at one time.
Due to the limitations of short-term memory, designers should ensure users can simply employ recognition instead of recalling information across parts of the dialogue. Recognizing something is always easier than recall because recognition involves perceiving cues that help us reach into our vast memory and allowing relevant information to surface.
For example, we often find the format of multiple choice questions easier than short answer questions on a Test because it only requires us to recognize the answer rather than recall it from our memory. Flexibility and efficiency of use. With increased use comes the demand for less interactions that allow faster Navigation. This can be achieved by using abbreviations, function keys, hidden commands and macro facilities.
Users should be able to customize or tailor the interface to suit their needs so that frequent actions can be achieved through more convenient means. Aesthetic and Minimalist Design.
Keep clutter to a minimum. Therefore, the display must be reduced to only the necessary components for the current tasks, whilst providing clearly visible and unambiguous means of navigating to other content. A consistent design is predictable. Not only should UI design be consistent internally, but externally as well. General conventions across websites and apps that work identically or nearly so make your site easy to navigate and use.
The guidelines detail how functions should work across apps and on all Apple devices so that a user of any Apple product can pick up any other and easily use it. Many patterns already exist for design problems patterns also reduce cognitive load, principle 9 below, because users already know how they work.
A great UI allows people to use the product without friction, not spend time figuring out how to interact with the product. Every action should have feedback to indicate that the action was successful or not.
Hovering over a navigation item that then changes color indicates an item is clickable. Buttons should look like buttons.
Many of these UI design principles serve to reduce cognitive load for users. There are a few common ways to reduce cognitive load and make using your website or app easier:.
UI designs need to take into account accessibility issues. Online, this often means ensuring the visibly impaired can access and use the product. Test and validate UI choices by gathering user feedback. Watch users attempt to use your design without coaching them. Are they confused? Can they achieve the desired outcome easily?
Do this in both the design process and continually evaluate after launch heat maps are one way to track how effective a UI is. Create a UI that will work and look great across multiple platforms. Navigation should always be clear and self-evident.
Users should be able to enjoy exploring the interface of any software product. Feedback is typically associated with points of action — for every user action, the system should show a meaningful, clear reaction. A system with feedback for every action helps users achieve their goals without friction. UI design should consider the nature of interaction. For frequent actions, the response can be modest. This might be something as simple as a button changing color when pressed the change notifies the user of the interaction.
The lack of such feedback forces users to double-check to see if their intended actions have been performed.
For infrequent and significant actions, the response should be more substantial. For example, when filling out a password field in the signup form, good UI might inform users of the requirements for their password.
Users are much more forgiving when they have information about what is going on and are given periodic feedback about the status of the process.
Visibility of system status is essential when users initiate an action that takes some time for a computer to complete. The use of progress indicators is one of the subtle aspects of UI design that has a tremendous impact on the comfort and enjoyment of users.
Good UI can comfort users by showing progress while the system is completing a task. Dropbox is indicating the status of a document upload: the current progress and the amount of time left. Users of different skill levels should be able to interact with a product at different levels. Adding features like tutorials and explanations is extremely helpful for novice users just make sure that experienced users are able to skip this part.
Once users are familiar with a product, they will look for shortcuts to speed up commonly-used actions. You should provide fast paths for experienced users by enabling them to use shortcuts. Irrelevant information introduces noise in UI —it competes with the relevant information and diminishes its relative visibility. Simplify interfaces by removing unnecessary elements or content that does not directly support user tasks.
Strive to design UI in a way that all information presented on the screen will be valuable and relevant. Examine every element and evaluate it based on the value it delivers to users. The interface of iA Writer app is a clean typing sheet with no distractions.
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