Why Illustrations is imprortant for Mobile App and UX Design ?

Illustrations have been popular ever since the advent of product design or even before that. Illustrations are visual representations of a concept, story, ideology, brand, topic, etc. created using sketch, graphic design, painting, etc. Illustrations can enhance your mobile app design and user experience in a lot of ways, from visual appeal to visual hierarchy, illustrations provide you a better and more engaging alternative to text-form content. In this article, we will discuss Illustrations – what are illustrations? its types? how are they used? where are they used? and how they can enhance your mobile app design and user experience. Let’s start with some basic terms.

Illustrations for Mobile App Design and User Experience

Illustration

Illustration in simple words is all the imagery that you see in any product, website, or application. It is either an image or a visual representation of a concept, story, ideology, brand, topic, etc. mostly created using graphic design these days. Earlier, Illustrations used to be created through painting or other forms of visual arts.

Illustrations help in visually communicating a message, our product/website/application’s insights, our mission, or the story of our product/business. Illustrations are key to grab user’s attention, especially for digital businesses. Illustrations play an important role in Mobile app design and user experience.

There are many types of Illustrations, some of the most commonly known and used ones are:

• Digital Illustration
• Fine Art Illustration
• Editorial Illustration
• Advertising Illustration
• Book Illustration
• Instructional and Educational Illustration
• Architectural Illustration
• Infographics
• Technical Illustration

Where are Illustrations used in Mobile UI/UX design?

You can find Illustrations everywhere in various mobile applications, some of good examples of using illustrations in mobile app design are as follows:

• Decorative Illustrations that you see in highlighted text, buttons, icons or other visual elements.
• Mascots of various mobile applications.
• Illustrated Headers and Banners – specially of e-commerce applications.
• Background Illustrations attached and used to enhance the background that in turn enhances the foreground.
• Product Illustrations – mostly for highlighting the product.
• Technical Illustrations and data visualization illustrations in form of charts, graphs, etc.
• Illustrated Maps are used to show offline centers or location.
• Storytelling Illustrations (we will discuss this in the next section).
• Custom Loading Animations are also a form of illustration used heavily for enhancing UI design.
• Hand-Drawn Sketches also comes under illustrations.
• Call-to-Action (CTA) elements also mostly use either plane text or text along with illustrations.

How Illustrations can enhance your mobile app design and user experience?

Visual Storytelling:

Visual storytelling refers to convey a message or communicate something with the help of visual elements. Visual Storytelling can be used for conveying a message, communicating some information, sharing your mission about the product or creating an effective advertisement. Using Illustrations for visual storytelling can really help in catching the viewer’s eye and hence enhance the overall UI/UX design.

Improving the aesthetic appeal of the application and the product:

Aesthetics simply means using something artistic or something very pleasing to the eyes in your design. But why is it important? With the reducing attention span where people are not interested in reading rather they only want short visual content, by adding aesthetics in the user interface we can ensure improvement in retaining the Gen-Z people. Aesthetics becomes even more important for Mobile App Design since we have a smaller screen to fit in everything.

Humanizing the App:

Illustrations make the application more humane. While text is one of the best ways to communicate longer messages, a lot of text in the screen does not make the application feel expressive. Visual elements, Illustrations and video/GIF elements in the screen makes it more expressive and humane.

Setting up a visual hierarchy:

Content Hierarchy is a method of ordering visual elements or illustrations in a layout to create divisions that show users where to focus and how to find information. This helps the user to identify which is the most important part of the application and which content can be ignored. Visual Hierarchy is key to better user navigation and hence to better user experience.

Emotional Impact of illustrations:

Appealing to someone’s emotions (off course not in the wrong way or for wrong reasons) is the best way to grab someone’s attention or make someone buy your product. Illustrations creates more impact than text, they are more natural and are more appealing than text.

Making the content/product more engaging:

Illustrations surely improves the engagement of the users. There is limited things we can do with text, but with illustrations and visual elements we can create more animations, visual effects and other effect to drive more engagement. This connects the user more to the mobile application and hence improves the mobile app design and user experience

Memorability:

Even poor illustration are more memorable then the best text content. this is the sad reality in UIUX design that most of the text content written goes unnoticed by the customers. Also the test content that is read, most of it the customer forgets. Illustrations make the message more memorable and makes the product stay in the mind of the customer.

A must for creating a brand:

One of the most important reasons of why to use illustrations is this – creating a brand. One can simply not create a brand without using illustrations. By illustrations we mean the graphics, visual elements along with the decorative components that are added to the brand text. Illustration gives life to a brand text. Creating a brand is very difficult if not close to impossible without using illustrations.

Communicating the mission of your e-commerce store:

Irrespective of what help marketing provides, users have to come to your website/app to buy products from your e-commerce website. Here good copywriting along with great UI can create a lasting impression in the mind of the user. This really helps in making customer realize why do we even exist as a business and how are we different from other e-commerce websites/applications.

Catching the attention of the customer:

A unique user interface coupled with great user experience will always catch the eyes of the customer and make him/her fall in love with the website. Key to catching the attention of the customer is to create a really unique user interface along with great UX design. This helps in catching the attention of the customer and customer retention – which is crucial for the success of any e-commerce store.

Conclusion

Illustrations play key roles in our Mobile App Design and User Experience. By the previous sections, now we know the importance of Illustrations and how they play an important role in success of any digital product, website or application. While designing an Mobile application, one must remember the importance of illustrations and use them accordingly. In this article we discussed How Illustrations Can Enhance Your Mobile App Design and User Experience. We started with the basic introduction to Illustrations, types of Illustrations, UI design and UX design. We then learned about the Where are Illustrations used in Mobile UI/UX design? we also discussed the importance of Illustrations in Mobile App Design and User Experience.