Every day, hundreds of mobile applications, websites, and software applications with various designs are released into the market. Yet, a lot of these designs fail to engage users in a way that effectively aligns with companies’ business goals. More often than not, this is due to a weak UI/UX design.

Contrary to most people’s opinions, user interface (UI) design and user experience (UX) play a major role in the success of your application’s design. When these components work together synergetically, they can offer as much value as the software itself.

To highlight the value of UI/UX design, this article will look into what UI and UX design are, how they can benefit your business, and what constitutes a good UI/UX design.

What Is UI Design?

UI design is the process used by designers to help construct a digital product's interface. The main focus during this process is on the look and style of an application. Ultimately, the aim is to create an alluring graphical layout.

UI, more specifically, refers to elements such as the buttons on a page, page’s textual contents, images, text entry fields, and other such components that users can interact with. As such, a software’s UI design can be seen as the graphical user interface of an application.

Why Is UI Design Valuable?

UI design is one of the main reasons your website will generate –– and benefit from –– an influx of traffic. It is what draws attention to your digital product and keeps visitors there. It is often the make-or-break characteristic that makes visitors recommend your site and stay loyal to your offerings. Essentially, your application’s UI design is what captures your audience and persuades them to frequent your website or application. As such, it’s often said that a proper UI design is one of the key ways to increase traffic to your digital entity and improve conversion rates.

What Is UX Design?

While UI design deals with the aesthetic elements of your website or software, UX is all about a user’s experience with the website or software. The UX design encompasses a wide range of processes in software development and mobile app design. These involve aspects such as branding, design, and usability. Ultimately, it focuses on the interaction between a user and a software application, emphasizing effective communication and interaction.

What Is UX Design’s Value?

A proper UX design enhances the user experience and improves the adoption of the software. This benefits your business and your customers as well: customers will be happy with the digital product while you can benefit from increased conversions.

Beyond enhancing your conversion rate and offering a more enticing platform, a solid UX strategy also diminished costs resulting from a poor user experience. With less customer support needed with the use of an intuitive user interface design, your users won’t require as much support in that area.

Moreover, in terms of business metrics, creating an easy-to-use application appeals to users, resulting in enhanced business metrics. These enhancements include an increase in user retention, productivity, and customer loyalty.

How Do UI and UX Complement Each Other?

Both UI and UX work together to contribute different elements to your digital product’s overall design. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that UI is nothing without UX (and vice versa). Focusing on one without the other leads to an incomplete software design.

UX can be seen as the backbone of the design: it’s a more data-driven approach to accounting for how your users feel using your application. On the other hand, UI refers to the front-end aspect, taking into account design patterns and granular details. As such, UI design ensures that your product’s design is pleasing to the eye, whereas UX design ensures that this design is functional and easy to use.

Yet, to reap the benefits of a proper UI/UX design, you have to know what constitutes good UI/UX design.

Features of a Good UX Design

Starting with the backend of a UI/UX design, we’ll look into what you can do to ensure that you create an all-encompassing UX design that serves your users.

First, always remember that your design elements should be useful. A good UX design involves a great understanding of what the application must be able to do and how it can achieve this. While it may be tempting to crowd your applications with plenty of features to offer as much value as possible, this shouldn’t be the case. Users retain value from your software if you make sure the software does precisely what it should, and nothing that it shouldn’t.

A purpose-driven UX design ensures that the purpose of your application –– and how it can be used to achieve that purpose –– is clear. In order to continuously assess a feature’s usefulness, you have to keep asking yourself whether this feature brings users closer to their goal in a cohesive and logical way.

On the same note, for a feature to prove useful, it must also be usable. Users of the software should be able to operate the functionality with ease. This should be the case for both novice and advanced users. Facilitating this requires speeding up workflows, trying to accustom users to the system as quickly as possible, and allowing for features that intuitively guide those who are less familiar with the application.

Features of a Good UI Design

In terms of what constitutes a solid UI design, there are several key things you should include in your application’s UI design. Firstly, a good UI design makes everything the user needs readily accessible. Whether that’s a specific button or page, if the user can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll quickly exit the application. As such, try to keep things accessible, implementing shortcuts where possible.

Another aspect of good UI design is making sure certain elements of your application’s design are consistent. Things such as menus shouldn’t change locations every time a user loads a new page. This also applies to aspects such as fonts and icons.

Lastly, don’t always try to reinvent the wheel. There is often no need to revitalize something when the industry standard works just fine. For example, aspects such as standard icon usage and placements of tools (e.g., search bars) should be kept constant. Their universal recognition makes it easier for users to navigate your website.

Should You Hire a Professional UI/UX Designer?

If you’re not a professional UI/UX designer, it may be difficult to take implement these tips into your website, mobile application, or software. UI/UX designers ensure that your software’s design is more than just a pretty layout, and serves your business by aligning your app’s design with your business goals.

This is important as there is a great intersection between business strategy and UI/UX design. By collaborating with professional designers who can understand your customers, UI/UX designers can trial and test the perfect UI/UX design to help you generate the best results. As such, outsourcing the process of UI/UX design can ensure that your business needs are met and that your customers are satisfied.

Want to leverage the power of professional UI/UX designers? Contact Chacra Software at https://www.chacrasoftware.com/contact-us to find out how our designers can help your business!