UI/UX Design, referred to as “User Interface/User Experience design,” has become very important in the field of application development focusing on creating the visual interface and improving the experience of the user. Sometimes many of us wonder if it’s possible to build an application without UI/UX design. Why should we even focus on UI/UX? Can UI/UX really make or break the application? In this article, we are going to answer all these doubts.
What is UI Design?
UI design or user interface design refers to designing visual interfaces for a software application. The UI design team is where all the conversations about the visual identity of the application and its components happen. Professional UI designers normally have a background in subjects like graphic design and some experience in the visual design field and are best placed to make detailed decisions on important visual aspects of the project.
What is UX Design?
UX design or User experience design is the process of designing the experiences or the interactions that a user has with a product. The basic principle of UX design is to keep the needs of the user in the forefront and improve the interaction of the user and the product keeping this in mind.
The Importance of UI/UX Design
- Improves the conversion rates: The main goal of UX design is to create an application structure that provides the best experience to the users. The aim of application UX principles is to turn visitors into customers by providing a positive experience to them.
- Communication with the users: How you communicate with the users decides the fate of the product/service. The visual elements along with the copywriting takes the major part of communication for the product/service. Irrespective of what help marketing provides, users have to come to your website/app to buy product/service or know about it. Here good copywriting along with great UI can create a lasting impression in the mind of the user.
- User Research for improving business strategy: The first step of UI/UX is to research about the user need and present it to the business team. Researching to the customers gives valuable insights about the product/service and what things should be improved.
- User Retention: User retention mostly depends on the product and the experience user is provided with. It is completely independent of how good the codebase is. The user only looks and interacts with the interface not the code. Key to User retention is a good user interface coupled with great user experience.
- Calculated resource utilization leads to saved costs in longer run: UX that is user experience deals with careful resource utilization for better consumer experience and faster application speed, this cuts cost for server space, saves human resource from working on unwanted bugs due to buggy design. All in all saves a lot of money in the longer term.
- Glitches and UI bugs can break the users trust: It really becomes difficult to make user buy a product/service if the application interface itself is full of bugs. Even a single bug in the interface can break the users fragile trust and they might end up buying nothing irrespective of how good the product/service is.
Best Practices for a Better UI/UX Design
- Nothing compensates for good design: Good design is making something intelligible and memorable great design is making something memorable and meaningful. Nothing in application development process can make up for a poor design. Design should be the main priority.
- Focus on the wireframing part: Great UI design can make or break a great wireframe. And a poor wireframe can kill your application. if the imagery is not right or do not go accordingly with the style or does not match with the content
- Contrast: setting up a proper contrast to the UI is can be obtained through organizing the, design establishing hierarchy, emphasizing a focal point and adding visual interest. It can be done by a lot of different ways – we can add contrast with color, with weight, with size of typography or even with the imagery.
- Alignment and Proximity: a proper alignment in the UI helps organize and group elements, it creates a visual rhythm of elements on the screen, Alignment and proximity brings order in unordered typography.
- Repetition: Proper use of repetition through increasing consistency, increases the user’s ability to learn and identify the pattern in our interface or layout and it also reduces confusion and helps the user guess objects in the layout properly.
Mistakes to Avoid for Better UI/UX Design
- Not enough focus on user research: For a UX designer, user research is the starting point. Many beginners in UX design make this mistake to skip this part and directly jump to the wireframing part. User insights are the game changers in the longer run, make sure to do extensive user research before wireframing and prototyping.
- Never consider you job is over after handing over the design: While others focuses passively on the design after the design is handed over to the frontend or copywriting team, best UI/UX designer takes the feedback from frontend team and then from the users after the production and keeps of iterating until it becomes exceptional.
- Not learning new technologies and tools: As a UI/UX designer we must step out of our comfort zone and learn the new technologies and tools in our field. This will pay exponential results in the longer run.
Conclusion
To conclude we can say that for an application, UI/UX design is as important as if not more important that backend and frontend part of the application. Therefore, for professionals working in this field – they have to continuously evolve and along with that rewards and perks of being a UI/UX designer are also very high. Hopefully, this article helped you understand the importance of UI/UX design.