“UI is the saddle, the stirrups, & the reins. UX is the feeling you get being able to ride the horse.” - Dain Miller
UX and UI are inextricably linked, but they have two very separate roles and Dain Miller describes their relationship perfectly. UI is all about the touch points the user encounters to navigate from A to B, such as buttons, scrollbars and swipe-able screens. All of these components have a huge impact on the overall UX of a product, and you can’t have one without the other.
Before delving deep into the topic, let’s have a look at some of the important statistics related to the effects of a good UI/UX; so that the importance of these two can be assessed better:
According to a study by Forester, Good UI can raise a website’s conversion rate by up to 200%, while a better UX design can raise the conversion rate by up to 400%.
According to Mobify, “every 100ms decrease in homepage load speed worked out to a 1.11% increase in session-based conversion, yielding an average annual revenue increase of nearly $380,000. Additionally, a 100ms decrease in checkout page load speed amounted to a 1.55% increase in session-based conversion, which in turn yielded an average annual revenue increase of nearly $530,000.”
Every $1 invested in UX design results in an ROI of between $2 and $100.
About 74% of visitors will return to a website if it has a good mobile UX design.
Websites that load within five seconds have 25% higher ad view-ability, 70% longer sessions, and 35% lower bounce rates than slow-loading sites.
70% of people look at a list with bullet points, while only 55% look at a list without bullet points.
67% of mobile visitors who like the user experience of a website are likely to make a purchase.
The first and foremost question that naturally comes is:
What is UI design?
“UI” in UI design stands for “User Interface”. In simple words, it is the graphical layout of an application. User Interface Design in Information Technology is actually the design of the user interface for software, websites, or applications. It’s about programming the look of things, with a view to facilitating usability and improving the user experience.
User interfaces generally come in three formats:
Graphical user interfaces (GUIs): Users interact with visual representations on digital control panels. A computer’s desktop is a GUI.
Voice-controlled interfaces (VUIs): Users interact with these through their voices. Most smart assistants Siri on iPhone and Alexa on Amazon devices are VUIs.
Gesture-based interfaces: Users engage with 3D design spaces through bodily motions: e.g., in virtual reality (VR) games.
What is UX design?
“UX” in UX design stands for “User experience”. This involves the design of the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product; it is the process of enhancing the user experience while designing products that are useful, easy to use, and delightful to interact with.
The Purpose of UX design: The main purpose of UX design in business is to improve comprehensive experience, customer satisfaction and loyalty through the utility, ease of use and interaction.
Key Components of UI/UX:
To win the confidence of the customers, UI/UX designs play a vital role. The success of your UI/UX designs that you incorporated depends upon the number of customers that it is able to attract. UI/UX designs can break a brand or improve the brand recognition. So, it is very important to know about the vital components that determine the effectiveness of UI/UX design.
1. INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE:
Information Architecture (IA) concerns the structure of your website. It is important to have clear navigation so that users can easily find what they are looking for. The major role of information architecture is to provide its users with easy navigation across every browser.
2. AUDIENCE RESEARCH:
Before starting the design, target audience is very important. To make a website useful and relevant to a user, you need to understand what they are looking for. Working out your target will help you focus on what content should be included in the website and how it should look and feel.
3. INTERACTION DESIGN:
Interaction Design is the conceptual design with which the users interact with the software, website, or application. This includes the design of your website and how users interact with it. It encompasses even the colours, font, icons, buttons, images, graphics and motion.
4. USABILITY:
Usability can be described as user-friendliness in other words. It mainly concerns whether users can easily get what they are looking for on your website or not. It’s a good idea to use real users to test the usability of your website.
5. WIREFRAMING:
Wireframing is all about creating a test sample of the application to test the features, visuals, look, feel and usability of the application before it is launched. It is the best way to evaluate the functionality of the website or the application and check if it serves its purpose and attracts more customers. The designer gets the perfect way through this to incorporate page elements, visuals, design and other page components.
How a good UI?UX can make your App successful?
A great interface:
Gives users a realistic feel while using your app.
Provides them with a continuous flow of valuable information.
Will lead to a boost in conversion rates and thereby grow your brand name.
It is therefore essential to hire an experienced Ul/UX designer who will make sure your mobile app is interactive and pleasant to your users.
Basics of UI/UX design:
Before stating the importance of UI/UX design it is better to know the basic elements of the design.
1. Simple and Uncomplicated: The easy, uncomplicated and simple websites attract more people than the ones that are way too over-designed and complex. So, it’s better not to overburden your website with complexity. Rather let it be simple and convenient so that the customers can easily go through your website without any difficulties. 2. Sectionalise Your Design: A website needs different sections to organise everything properly. The grid layouts organise the content of your site into different columns, boxes and sections that line up and look balanced. Hence, they successfully make a website well organised and easy to use. 3. Content Design/Writing: "Content is the king and it will always be the king"; who is the queen then? The queen here is marketing. So, content design and writing –both are essential. Using properly and proficiently written blogs, you can attract a lot of people and turn them into potential customers.
4. Readability and Typography: A properly readable and simple font is much desirable as it is going to attract a lot of customers in comparison to the one with designer fonts; so, the fonts, font size, font colour and everything related to font matters when it comes to a website. 5. Navigation: Navigation is very important to gain visitors. It’s been seen that visitors or users stay longer on websites that have easy navigation. Some successful navigation includes a logical hierarchy of pages by keeping the navigation easy, intuitive and consistent on every page. 6. Load Time: one need to make sure that loading time of website isn't too long. In addition to this, there are some other hacks like image optimisation, composing the code into central Javascript or CSS and minimising the HTML, CSS and JAVA etc. 7. Primary UX Motions: The other thing that your website or application must have is basic motions of UX like cloning, transformation, masking, overlay and all others that are related to the continuity of the object. 8. Aesthetically Pleasing: It’s not at all easy to make your website aesthetic and pleasing. But it can develop trust and credibility.
Importance of UI/UX:
Designing an effective UI is crucial for the developers. This demands thorough research and prior planning to understand the problem of the users and their requirements. Having the perfect combination of UI and UX is great for your customers. But the question is: Why is it so important? The answer lies underneath:
1. Increases Customer Satisfaction & Improves ROI
A unique design can offer engaging content and smooth navigation between different pages and screens. This improves customer satisfaction which in turn leads the way to customer acquisition as satisfied customers always recommend great applications to others. Loyal customers as returning buyers increase the ROI for your business.
2. Helps to Know Your Audience:
The essential thing that a developer should know, even before starting with the development work, is his clients; not only the clients, but also their business models, business needs in details. The focus of a designer should be his target audience. As UI/UX segregates the audiences into classes so you one can easily understand the requirements of a particular audience segment. A designer’s understanding about the mentality of his audience is crucial to converting the prospects into loyal customers which in turn will pave the way to increased sales.
3. Builds & Improves Your Brand:
Customer satisfaction and UI/UX design are complimentary to each other as investing in one (UI/UX) can help to effectively increase customer satisfaction. If your customers are well satisfied, then the designer can work the areas that need concern which will eventually, increase the credibility of your application that in turn will increase the value of your business and also uphold your brand image in the market.
4. Saves Time & Money:
The great combination of UI/UX design eliminates the chances of your clients finding any issues with your application. No frequent upgrades are needed in a good product with excellent UI/UX design. This saves time and money that can be efficiently utilised to improve different areas that need concern.
At the end we can conclude that you can create an app with great functionality but if you fail to focus on the designing part, it may lead to the downfall of your app. It is mandatory to have the right balance between the functionality and UI/UX of the app in order to make it a successful one.
Comments