Why to use UI/UX Design ?

People often tend to not understand the importance of UI/UX design, this leads to doubts about why we even need UI/UX design in the first place. This is the reason why UI/UX design is often undermined by the impact it creates on a website or an application.

In this article, we are here to answer your question about why to use UI/UX design. We will start the article with an introduction to basic concepts and then move on to some higher-level topics.

Use of UI/UX Design

What is UI Design?

UI design or User Interface design is the process of creating visual interfaces for any website, application, or piece of software. User interface is referred to all the visual or graphic elements a user interacts with in a platform. There are lots of businesses where a designer will play both parts, but there are also a lot of designers who specialize in UI design. UI designers help users to navigate an interface by using visual cues.

Responsibilities of a UI designer:

• Wireframing and prototyping
• Testing and iterating
• Typography
• Colors
• Styles
• Branding
• Spacing
• Boldness
• Number of items
• Icons and Images

What is UX Design?

UX design or User Experience design is the process of creating the experiences or the interactions that a user has with a product, website, application or piece of software. User experience refers to the overall experience of a customer or a user using a product, platform or service. 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.

Responsibilities of a UX designer:

• User Research
• Information Architecture
• Interaction Design
• Wireframing and Prototyping
• Customer feedback and implementation
• Collaborating

The 3 Step Process of UI/UX Design

UI/UX design involves of a lot of processes, we can bifurcate the process of UIUX designing into three important steps:

Step 1. User Research

The first step of UI/UX designing is 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. Researching about the customers gives valuable insights about the product/service and what things should be improved.

Step 2. Wireframing and Prototyping

The second step of the UI/UX design creating is Wireframes and Prototypes. But what are these Wireframes? 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.

Step3. Visual Designing and testing

The final step in UI/UX designing process is to Visually design the interface using the prototypes and wireframes and test it. In this particular step the UI/UX designer comes up with creative and innovative design solutions keeping in mind the wireframing and prototypes created before. 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.

Why to Use UI/UX Design?

There a many reasons why you would want to use UI/UX design before developing any application, website, product or any piece of software, some of the most important reasons are:

1. The need of user research – Data-Driven decision making

The first step of UI/UX is to research about the user need and present it to the business team. interface designer is a small part of UI/UX. Researching about the customers gives valuable insights about the product/service and what things should be improved. Therefore, in just the first step of UI/X design we are improving the product as well as improving the business strategy and getting customer feedback.

2. Converting first time customers into loyal customers

The whole idea of UX design is to create an application structure that provides the best experience to the users. UX is directly or indirectly responsible for a user’s journey through an application which ultimately decides the success of any website, application, product or piece of software. Converting first time customers into loyal customers is mostly dependent on the user experience and the application interface along with the actual use cases of the product.

3. User retention and visibility – Key metric of a business

User retention is a one of the most if not the most metric to judge a business/ product. It even becomes more important for a digital product/service. How much time a user spends in your website or application is mostly 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.

4. Effectively Communicating your vision to the user

How you communicate with the users decides the fate of the product/service. The visual elements along with the copywriting will take the majority part of the communication for your product/application/website and also the brand. Customer will only buy in your vision through effective communication and for that a communicative, visually rich UI of the product is very important. Here good copywriting along with great UI can create a lasting impression in the mind of the user.

5. Ensuring effective interaction of user with the product

UI/UX Design is the way through which users can interact with any applications or websites. The primary goal of application UI principles is to provide the best interaction to the user. This helps in the overall quality of your digital product. User interface design is aimed at easy enjoyable and effective interactions between the users and the app. The primary goal of application UI principles is to provide the best interaction for the product to the user.

6. Improper UI/UX Design will be painful during scaling application and adding features

If UI/UX design is not a focus for any product team initially, it really becomes painful while scaling the application in terms of adding new features. Adding new features in an improper UI design becomes confusing and increases the UI bugs in the application. A well-designed product can handle new functionalities been added. UI/UX design concepts like Repetition, Alignment, Contrast, etc. become even more important for the mobile app approach since the size of the screen and the visuals that can fit in are limited.

The Importance of a Good UI/UX Design

Now we know why do we need UI/UX design in the first place, we know how crucial a good UI/UX design is for any Business to sell its products, to extend those points, here are few points on the importance on UI/UX development:

• Making data driven decisions in the business.
• Improving the ease of navigation of the product/service.
• Better and more informed decisions on features and functionality of the product.
• Converting first time customers to loyal users.
• Branding of your Business.
• Communicating your USP (unique selling proposition) as a digital business as well as a product.
• Bringing more users and better retention boosting up the sales.
• Better interface and experience of the product.
• Sharing the vision of your Digital Business.
• Retaining the users and increasing the LTV (life time value) of a user.
• Creating a sense of community around your product.

Conclusion

In this article we tried to answer a common question between new comers in UI/UX design and people who know very little about web design. 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 any digital product, website, application or a piece of software. We firmly believe that companies and startups should be highly encouraged in focusing towards the design side more and give it equal importance as developing an application, maintaining or deploying it because ignoring UI/UX in the longer run can be fatal to a business/startup working in digital industry.