UI/UX design is often undermined by the impact it creates on a website or an application. companies and startups realize it late how crucial UI/UX design is in the making of any digital product, website, or application. UI/UX is often misunderstood as making a design file that has the blueprint of the entire website or application. But in truth, UI/UX design is way more than that. It even includes research, presenting data for business strategy, wireframes, prototypes, customer feedback, graphic design, animations, and a lot more.
In this article, we will discuss the importance of UI/UX design and how it is crucial for the success of any website or application.
Importance of UI/UX Design
UI Design
User interface is referred to all the visual or graphic elements a user interacts with in a platform. UI design or User Interface design is the process of creating the visual interfaces for a software application. There are lots of businesses where a designer will play both parts, but there are also lots of designers who specialize in UI design. UI designers help users to navigate an interface by using visual cues.
UX Design
User experience refers to the overall experience of a customer or a user using a product, platform or service. Especially in terms of how simplistic and pleasing it is to use. UX design or User Experience design is the process of creating 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 prior and improve the interaction of the user and the product keeping this in mind.
Components of UI/UX design
The process of UI/UX design can be divided into 3 components:
- User Research: The first key component of UI/UX designing starts with user research. The UI/UX designer takes detailed notes of the user research. there’s a lot of information that will be gathered so the UI/UX designer has to analyze the information, understand the trend, and organize data using tools to identify trends and patterns in that data. The role of the UI/UX designer is to create reports and presentations to present that complex information to other people in the team.
- Wireframing and Prototyping: The second key component of UI/UX design is Wireframes and Prototypes. Wireframes are detailed structural sketches that illustrate a concept. A wireframe for a digital product is similar to a blueprint for a house. Wireframe clearly illustrates how the product functions and the core elements of its design.
- Visual Designing and testing: The Third key component is visual designing and testing, after prototyping, UI/UX designer then comes up with creative and innovative design solutions. he/she designs the User Interface and creates different visual touch points and establish the interactivity with them. Along with that the interfaces are tested and iterated upon the shortcomings.
Importance of UI/UX design
Since we have now discussed what UI/UX design actually is, to extend those points, here are few points on the importance on UI/UX development and why it is crucial for the success of a website or an application:
- For getting business insights: This is done through user research. While researching about the customers need provides us a lot of insights on how to design the website or application.
- A bad interface can break user’s trust: It really becomes difficult to make a user buy a product/service from your website or application if the interface of your website or application 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 your digital product/service is.
- User retention: Retaining the user is crucial for any company or startup since it leads to the user spending more time hence more money on the website or application. Key to User retention is a good user interface coupled with great user experience. This hooks the user with the product/service and makes the user retain on the website or the application.
- Creating a loyal customer base: For creating a loyal customer base, user experience comes into play. The whole idea of UX design is to create an application structure that provides the best experience to the users.
- Data-Driven decision making: Researching about the customers gives valuable insights about the product/service and what things should be improved. This data driven decision making helps the overall business to become user friendly and grow faster.
- Understanding and using human psychology: Understanding and using the human psychology we can create more engaging digital products, websites or applications for the users which in turn helps our business. This helps us as a UI/UX designer to create a visual amalgamation of objects where we have a set pattern for what object the user should focus on and what elements to focus less on.
- Saves resources in longer run: By investing in UI/UX design, a business or startup can invest in the longer term. Instead of getting the UI changed every time a new feature is added, its better to have a UI/UX team/person that researches and comes up with the features required, design, interface etc.
- Communicating your mission: Irrespective of what help marketing provides, users have to come to your website/app to buy your digital product/service or know about it. Here good copywriting along with great UI can create a lasting impression in the mind of the user. This helps the business get connected with its customers.
- Scaling of product as well as business: Mobile applications is better known for targeting more customers and getting more eyeballs to your digital product/service. The mobile approach UI/UX design can help you scale the application to more number of people.
Some more points on importance of UI/UX design that are worth mentioning:
- UI/UX as a USP (unique selling proposition) for the website or application.
- A Better experience and interface for the users.
- Creating a community around your product.
- Branding your website or application hence improving your brand as a business or startup.
- Bringing more users.
- Boosting up the sales.
- Converting first time customers to loyal users.
- Ease of navigation for the website or application.
- Retaining the users.
- Better and more informed decisions on features and functionality of product you offer.
- Increasing the LTV (life time value) of a user.
Which is more important among UI and UX design?
It is really tough to choose between which one is more important – UI design or UX design. For that let’s compare both the jobs on various parameters.
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UX Design |
UI Design |
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Job Description |
UX design or User Experience design is the process of creating the experiences or the interactions that a user has with a product. |
UI design or User Interface design is the process of creating the visual interfaces for a software application. |
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Work |
UX designer starts with user research. This is done by understanding customers, concepting, workshopping and trying different ideas to come up with different concepts and solve the user problems and find ways to improve the user’s experience |
The UI designer takes on from UX designer and creates the clear visual representation of all of these concepts and visually lays these ideas down so a user can see what they need to do in an application. |
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Responsibilities |
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By this comparison of UI/UX design you can conclude which is the more important part of the designing process. Mostly, UI design is considered more important compared to UX design because of the reason that improper visuals hurts the most to the customer and breaks their confidence in the product/service. Usually, there are job openings for specific UI designers rather than UI/UX designer because of the same reasons. In industry, UI design is given more priority than UX design, but this might vary depending on company to company and what the goal of the company is.
Conclusion
UI/UX is conventionally thought of as designing the interface and structure of the application while it is much more than that. Importance of UI/UX design is immense when it comes to a digital product, a website or an application. Companies and startups should be highly encouraged in focusing towards the UI/UX design more and give it equal importance as developing an application, maintaining or deploying it. We hope that this article helped you improve your understanding of how important UI/UX design is.