User Interface and User Experience

UI/UX DESIGN

For any business to reach the peak of success user interface and user experience play a major role. Both UI and UX work hand in hand. The user interface is all about working on a series of screens, pages, and visual elements. On the other phase, user experience revolves around how a customer interacts with various aspects of your product, services or website.

Let us dig deeper into the most commonly used terminology UI and UX designing. Starting with a user interface

What is User Interface?

The word “interface” defines the function clearly that it is the user who interacts with services offered through the website or mobile applications. In user interface, we are going to deal mainly with screens & touch screens, keyboards, lights, visual elements, sound, etc.

User Interface has an interesting history. Ever since from the Graphical user interface era interface was through icons, buttons, menu, and checkboxes. Next came the Macintosh that included point and click mouse. Back that the users the computers were sold only if the user could interact with the system. Hence the evolution of user interface designing comes into the picture. With the advancement in technology UI design now not only works on interfaces of computer, mobile phone, augmented and virtual reality but also works on an invisible or screenless interface that includes voices, sounds, and gestures.

What is User Experience?

User experience or UX concept evolved from the improvement of user interface (UI). The experience overall includes the mixed reaction of a user on provided service like a positive response, negative, neutral and other specific interactions. As defined by Don Norman “User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-users interaction with the company, its services, and its products”. In terms of UX designer’s user experience is widely known as flied customer experience or experience design.

To make a user experience excellent some of the effective UX design highlights are mention in a honeycomb format. These concepts need to be managed with quality designing so that the user does not experience a tedious interface.

This simple design helps in understanding how and what are the perspectives that the user looks into while interacting with a service or product. Starting from how user discovers your company, what are the sequential interaction they take in to find particular service, the positive/negative response as they get while accomplishing a task and the smoothness they find throughout the tasks. UX designers should look into all these aspects to ensure that the company delivers products or services to meet customer requirements.

Basically in user interface designers focus on what the user needs to interface on service and elements like ease of access, understanding, and method of interaction. Overall interaction design, visual design, and information architecture together lead to User Interface.

To meet smooth interface one should look into completion, efficiency and satisfaction factors. The choice of layout should be chosen carefully. Interface elements are not always limited to

• Interface elements like buttons, text fields, radio buttons, checkboxes, dropdown lists, toggles, etc.
• Navigational components like slider, tags, icons, search field, pagination, breadcrumbs, etc.
• Informational components like a progress bar, notifications, message boxes, tooltips, modal windows, etc.
• Containers like accordion.

To design an excellent user interface some of the best practices are to think from the user end. Knowing your customers, understanding their goals, skills, preferences, and tendencies play a major role. Once you identify the user requirement start designing your interface by keeping these key points in mind:

1. Make it simple: Knowing your user expectations avoid using unnecessary elements and be clear in the language that you use on labels and in messaging.
2. Create consistency and use common UI elements.
3. Based on the importance consider the spatial relationship between icons on the page and structure the page accordingly.
4. Color and texture: customer attention can be drawn with strategic usage color texts, lights, contrast, and textures.
5. Typography: Use typography of different sizes, fonts, the arrangement of text that increase scanability, text legibility, and readability for creating hierarchy and clarity.
6. Make sure that the system communicates properly.
7. Keep track of the defaults and remedies to tackle them.

Let us now understand the steps that are involved in UX designing.

Developing a user experience that meets user satisfaction is not just team effort it’s always a company vision. The best user experience design is a part of the product development process. The unique combo of structure, content, and UX will help in accomplishing the required goal. UX designing method is an iterative method that aid in continuous improvement of your design. The design process of efficient UX involves six stages:

1. Understanding: To solve a problem you need to understand the problem. This stage involves methods in which the contextual and individual interviews are encountered during the real-time usage of service or product. The stakeholders in stage include the design team, business manager and product manager. Proper analysis of the problem gives you the outcomes like the user personals, stories, cases, and flows.
2. Research: It is one of the key steps to design UX. The team handling research explores how the outer world is dealing with the feature offered. In this stage known your latest UI trends, design principles, and user experience guidelines. The design team alone is the stakeholders in this process. Knowing your competitor’s approaches helps you get new and fresh ideas in which you can build the design.
3. Sketch: Draw desired design sketches, whiteboard flows and proper wireframes for the betterment of your design. It is an iterative process and involves testing and evaluations of wireframes. Stakeholders in this stage are the design team, product managers and technical experts. This stage yield definite sketch, wireframes, mockups and user flow understanding.
4. Design: After finalizing the layout and flow of the required interface the next step is to design the final graphics. Apply theme, images, and styles to mockups and wireframes for a pleasing design. The stakeholders in this stage are the design team, product managers, business managers, and technical experts.
5. Implement: In this stage, the development team designs back end functionality and connects it with UI. Stakeholders in this process are the development team and the design team. In this stage, the developed UI with complete functionality and experience is obtained with a designed theme and style.
6. Evaluate: After the implementation, the end products are evaluated based on factors like whether the system or service is usable, ease of end-user interface, the flexibility of the design, solutions for user concerns and backup solutions for evaluating user issues. Stakeholders of this stage are the design team and product managers. The outcome of this stage yields the user feedback, UI audit reports, and area of improvement.

Quality User Interface and User Experience development yields to the success of the company or business. Altorum Leren offers excellent UX/UI services that help you in building a stable and user-friendly business environment.