Welcome to the first post in our brand new series on web design! We're chatting about all things UI design today and how it is a key component for an amazing website design that stands out from the crowd.
A beautifully effective user interface (or UI for short) can be defined in a variety of ways. When it comes to UI, you'll find web designers frequently employ ambiguous terms like "consistency," "repetition," and "breathability", but what do these terms actually mean? What do you need in order to have a great user interface? Let's get started!
The interaction between the user and the product is called the user interface. The act of designing the object that the user interacts with - whether it's the shapes on a computer screen, the buttons on a remote control, or a combination of hardware and software - is referred to as user interface design.
The user interface (UI) is a crucial part of any website design or software product. When it’s done well, users don’t even notice it.
When it’s done poorly, users can’t get past it to efficiently use a product or website. This can lead to low conversions, abandoned shopping carts and poor sales.
1. Place users in control of the interface
2. Make it comfortable to interact with a product
3. Reduce cognitive load
4. Make user interfaces consistent
UI designers work to develop the visual design language that will be used across the product or product suite, including colors, typography, and iconography.
UI designers are also responsible for the creation of the practical components that users interact with, like buttons and text fields, that all help make the product truly usable and enhance the user’s experience.
The greatest UI design examples have a solid grasp of visual design fundamentals, particularly when it comes to colour and typography. Ensuring that everything a user sees is "on brand" and accessible will keep them focused on the work at hand rather than questioning why, for example, purple body text appears on one page but not elsewhere in the app.
Users can be confused by a lack of consistency and discrepancies like this, which is something UI designers want to avoid at all costs.
We created a beautiful UI design for our client, Floss'd. Utilising their brand colours, typography and graphics, we built a UI design for their buttons, forms, and even image settings that reflected their fun, bright-coloured branding and playful vibe.
The Gippsland Business Awards needed a UI design for their updated website that reflected their community standing and standard of trust with their site visitors. We worked with their branding to create clean lines, clearly designed ctas and streamlined forms that brought an air of professionalism to their site.
To sum it up, we believe effective user interface design is about removing as many obstacles, bottlenecks, stumbling blocks, and potential causes of confusion as possible from the user experience. Above all, the aim is to create an environment that all users find fluid and intuitive to navigate; allowing them to achieve their objectives with a minimum of fuss.
It's crucial to nail the UI design of any website development project to ensure your site stands out above the rest. We hope you've enjoyed reading through this first part of our blog series on web design. Stay tuned for the next instalment on UX design coming soon!
We've put together a handy UI & UX design PDF checklist to bring to your web designer or use to review your own existing website.
