How to Make a Good UI Design: A Walkthrough

Any software product must have a functional user interface (UI). When done correctly, users are not even aware of it. Users can’t get over it to effectively use a product when it’s done poorly. Most UI designers adhere to interface design principles to maximize their chances of success when developing user interfaces. Software design is influenced by high-level notions known as interface design principles.

Although the value of a good user interface (UI) is frequently emphasized, few individuals can articulate the fundamental ideas behind the practical design. Therefore, to find out what constitutes a good user interface, we turned to professional UX and UI designers. 

Websites, mobile apps, and desktop programs frequently come to mind when we think about user interfaces. However, design is one of the most crucial tools you can employ to create an engaging user experience. Every product, service, website, and mobile app has a visual component. Therefore, it’s crucial to consider both the technical and aesthetic factors while intending to develop a product.

It’s also crucial to think about user experience design from their perspective. Therefore, it’s crucial to consider various aspects that may impact how your people will engage with your product or website when creating it.

In your opinion, what makes a good user interface different from a bad one? Of course, aesthetics are frequently on our minds when discussing user interface design. For instance, we consider graphics, typography, and color. But UI design is more complicated than that.

What is User Interface design?

It’s crucial to understand what we’re talking about before getting into the specifics. The user interface defines the way a user interacts with a product. Therefore, user interface design is the process of creating the elements that the user interact with, such as the buttons on a remote control, the forms on a computer screen, or some other hardware and software arrangement.

What is the relationship between UX and UI? 

Because of its propensity to concentrate on the aesthetics of a product, UI design is frequently classified as a distinct subset of design that stands aside from user experience (UX). However, UI design plays a significant role in the broader field of UX design.

When creating the visual design deliverables, UI should—and does!—Consider the information and conclusions discovered through user interviews and research. Then, UI and web designers create the design language that will be applied throughout a software product or product suite, including colors, typography, and iconography.

The practical elements that users interact with, such as buttons and text fields, are also the responsibility of designers because they all contribute to making the product more usable and improving the user’s experience.

Why is User-Friendly UI Design Essential for Good UX?

A website or app’s use requires cognitive processing. Users must exert effort to perceive or complete a task; the more work required, the less satisfied they will be with the product.

User-friendly interface elements require less effort and enable users to finish activities more quickly. Good UI design makes users feel good by enabling easy interactions with the interface. User-friendly interfaces remove friction points and increase overall user happiness.

What Makes a Good UI?

The design is irrelevant to users. When utilizing websites and apps, they are concerned about user pleasure. The purpose of the visit and the anticipated outcomes affect their level of happiness. Good graphical user interfaces are, therefore:

• Empowering and facilitating task completion
• Discrete and centered on frictionless contact
• Aligned with the brand’s core beliefs and emotively appealing

Users should be effortlessly guided through content structure, and task flows via user interfaces. An excellent user interface leaves out unnecessary elements and strongly emphasizes essential functions.

How Does Designing User Interface Affect Your Product Performance?

Whatever you are selling online must draw attention and keep it long enough for them to form a lasting opinion. User interfaces that are well-designed make sure you make the most of the few fleeting opportunities to capture the user’s attention. The following are the benefits of a good UI:

• Creates a seamless experience
• Improves overall SEO performance
• Increases the time spent on site
• Reduces the bounce rate
• Reduces user frustration

Let’s look at some UI design guidelines you may use to produce excellent digital user interfaces.

15+ UI Development Tips and Tricks and UI Best Practices to Use

Most UI design best practices are based on research from other branches of study like cognitive psychology and neuroscience. This article will cover how to incorporate human psychology into designing interfaces and offer some helpful advice.

Identify Your Target Audience by Conducting User Research

Every choice a UI designer makes should consider the users, their wants, objectives, and the environment in which they utilize a website or mobile app. Making designs for oneself is a standard error. Your target audience can be confused by what seems clear-cut and understandable to you. Because of this, you need to comprehend your users.

To obtain that clear understanding, you must undertake user research on almost every step of the design process. The design process is guided by the data gathered through user research, which takes the guesswork out.

It offers a necessary confirmation for your user behavior and needs theories. Research is an excellent place to start because it makes everything later on more straightforward. Check out the difference between UI and UX.

Focus on Usability Above All Else

A helpful web page meets the user’s expectations in the most prevalent usage scenarios. Therefore, if your design meets the following five requirements, it will be considered to be usable:

• A user-friendly UI enables them to carry out necessary actions and tasks and achieve outcomes.
• It enables rapid work completion on a given task with minimal user involvement.
• It is easy to use and designed with the target industry in mind.
• It is not frightening to new users and has an easy learning curve.
• Users are encouraged to keep using the product since it enables quick recovery from user errors to reduce frustration.

A decent user interface will meet all these requirements, improving the user experience and reducing cognitive load.

The amount of mental processing capacity needed to use a product is referred to as the cognitive load. Avoid making users think or exert too much effort to utilize your product.

Organize and Prioritize the information

There is a hierarchical content structure for every website and mobile app. There are logical categories and subcategories for all topics. These categories ought to be well-known and correspond to user expectations. A user-friendly structure makes it easier for users to explore and obtain crucial information.

The important functions of the categories vary for the users as well. For instance, a news app would display breaking news first and sports news last, following the same rationale as a TV broadcast. When you have limited space, especially on mobile screens, it is imperative to place critical content above your content structure.

Design for Mobile First

In 2015, the use of mobile devices had overtaken that of other devices. Additionally, Google started evaluating mobile usability as a ranking factor; thus, designers must have a mobile-first approach if organic search traffic is a significant source of traffic for their company.

Designers must produce a brand style guide for their clients that contains both the appearance and the voice, enabling effective and consistent branding across all media to wow a new client. This will produce more efficient marketing assets and give their customers a more consistent brand message.

Nearly 4.7 billion people use smartphones and have developed mobile browsing habits. Since the third quarter of 2019, over half of all website views worldwide have been on mobile gadgets. However, smartphones have physical limitations.

The amount of information you can display on their little screens is constrained. For this reason, designers must create a well-organized content structure with distinct priorities. The availability of key features and materials should be immediate. Everything else can be organized and packed in layers beneath.

So, it’s essential to focus on the mobile app design first, as web design tends to contain more information easily.

Ensure High Visibility of Important UI Elements

The primary defense against the user’s poor short-term memory is emphasis. Five to nine items can be remembered at once by an individual. Getting rid of older objects from short-term memory is necessary for processing information about newer ones. Making essential elements shine out will help you get beyond this attentional block.

To express importance, use contrast in relative size and hue. More minor, neutral-colored elements and text are less noticeable than larger, more vividly colored ones. The perception of geometric shapes is improved by regularity. Additionally, anything moving, such as animated effects or video, grabs attention more than static components.

Areas for Navigation Should be Obvious and Simple to Locate

Usability relies heavily on navigation. Users can utilize it to find features and menu items. The category hierarchy should always be reflected in the navigation, which works hand in hand with the content organization. If not, the user will become perplexed and frustrated.

Additionally, on desktop or mobile, the navigation sections should always be clear and noticeable. Users would benefit from being able to switch from one page to another more quickly. On mobile, you can mix major navigation elements for the key categories and secondary menus for the remaining items if your content structure is complex.

Incorporate Highlights and Shadows to Convey Depth and Realism

Like in the physical world, light and shadows also exist in the digital one. Every UI has ambient light and a direct light source that is either apparent or implied.

In addition, there is a shadow cast by objects that block light. In a two-dimensional design, the elevation of one surface about another can be simulated using shadows. Because of this, highlights and shadows give UI design a sense of depth and realism.

Shadows are frequently used to simulate the elevation of items on mouseover and to convey a state of readiness for action. Designers frequently employ shadows to indicate the hierarchy of surfaces, such as the navigation being above the content.

Emphasize Visual Hierarchy

On a webpage, the elements are arranged in a visual hierarchy. Users tend to pay attention to elements on top of a web page. The page’s headings list the most important components first.

The visual hierarchy resembles a map in this sense. The way a map is often drawn makes it simple to locate the locations you need to visit. Similar to how the visual hierarchy should be set up, the content on the page should be clear to see.

The three various levels of visual hierarchy are: Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary hierarchy

To emphasize visual hierarchy, the following step act as a guide:

Use Contrast

Contrast is the difference in appearance between two elements with comparable appearances. The elements’ colors, forms, sizes, and placements are used to generate contrast. The contrast between a bold font and a light background is a fantastic illustration of contrast.

Don’t repeat the same color

The page will appear cluttered if too many elements utilize the same color. Instead, use a few contrasting colors.

Balance the hierarchy

The hierarchy should be balanced by uniformly distributing the elements on the page. For instance, it would be ideal to position the photographs close to the center of the page if you were making a photo gallery. The photos will look less cluttered, and the page will appear more balanced.

Keep things simple

Keep your website designs straightforward and uncomplicated when creating them. Ensure the typefaces are not too huge, and avoid using too many colors or textures.

Use White Space

Visual separation depends on white space, commonly referred to as negative space. Use it to illustrate which components complement and are distinct from one another. Conversely, proximity suggests that the components are linked.

Conversely, increasing the amount of negative space will help an element stand out and grab the viewer’s attention. White space is a fantastic technique for drawing attention to essential components. Explore the top landing page design ideas.

Create a Compelling Message

It is possible to define compelling messages as persuading users to connect with and use a product or website. For example, they can compel customers to use a product or encourage them to spread product knowledge.

The following requirements must be met by a compelling message:

• To convince users, it must be captivating or appealing;
• It needs to be easily accessible;
• It must be clear and straightforward to comprehend;
• Users should receive some incentive to share information about their purchases, such as discounts or free shipping.

Use Recognizable Icons and Symbols

One of the most challenging aspects of visual design is iconography. To maintain readability in small sizes, icons are small and lack depth. Because various users perceive things differently, the absence of detail might be perplexing. In addition, it isn’t easy with abstract categories that real-world objects cannot represent.

For iconography, there are two guiding principles. The first is to represent actions in the digital era using real-world metaphors.

For instance, the trash can symbol always denotes the act of throwing away something. The second rule is to describe the symbol in text tips. When the icon is ambiguous and abstract, it is pretty helpful.

Use Appropriate Typography

Screen readers appreciate the comfort that laid-out text offers. Making reading harder is unnecessary because it already involves significant cognitive work. To eliminate accessibility problems, use strong contrast; the optimal combination is black text on a white background.

The ideal method to incorporate typography into a user interface design is to employ just one primary typeface. However, the design seems cluttered and unprofessional when many typefaces are used.

You should occasionally employ a different typeface. For instance, you should pick a bolder typeface if you want to give the background of your website a distinctive look.

The same is true when employing a unique typeface inside a button. Use a different typeface, for instance, if you wish to add an exclamation point to a button. Again, you ought to use bolder body text in this situation.

Try to keep the two types similar if you wish to use separate typefaces on your website. To put it another way, avoid combining too many different fonts.

Keep the Interface Simple

The best user interfaces are essentially undetectable. They avoid superfluous parts and utilize straightforward language on labels and in messages.

Make User Interfaces Consistent

A good user interface must be consistent; a consistent design is intuitive.

Users shouldn’t ever dispute a product’s reliability. The product ought to use consistent colors, fonts, and icons. Always with your design system manager to ensure you don’t abruptly modify the visual aesthetic of your product. A submit button, for instance, should appear the same on every page of your website.

A site should not use distinct styles for elements on different pages. Users shouldn’t have to question whether a button that has been changed, such as in this example, still implies the same thing.

Use common UI design elements such as a progress bar, slider, toggles, tags, etc.

Ensure the icons used across a product are part of the same family. They must behave the same way.

In a simple explanation, use common UI elements (such as search bars and text fields) in a simple sentence and create consistency.

Use Colour to Communicate Tone

From the beginning, when you come up with an idea for the user interface design to the finish when the product is deployed, the tone should be considered throughout the user experience process. First, the user experience team should clearly understand how the product will initially appear and function. Then, designers can produce a user interface reflecting the brand and user experience objectives.

It will be easier to keep a user focused on the task at hand if everything the user sees is “on brand” and easily accessible rather than having them question why, for example, they only see purple body text on one page and nowhere else in the entire application.

Place Users in Control of the Interface

A good user interface gives its consumers a sense of control. Users feel more at ease when they have control over the process, which helps them learn more rapidly and feel more in control.

It is crucial to give consumers the option to always swiftly undo whatever they are doing in the event of an error. such as Undo and Redo

It’s also crucial to offer insightful criticism. For instance, it’s crucial to show consumers that an action has been acknowledged when they engage with an interactive object (like a button). This may be as straightforward as a button that changes color when pressed (the change notifies the user of the interaction). Users must double-check to determine if their planned activities have been carried out because there isn’t any feedback.

Last but not least, accommodate users with various ability levels. For new users, adding features like tutorials and explanations is extremely helpful. Just ensure that experienced users can skip this part.

Test Your UI Design with Real People

As was already said, user research assists in verifying your theories on the needs of the user. Contrarily, user testing verifies your solutions. It is the only way to ascertain whether your design fixes the stated issue.

Before implementation, always test your designs with actual users. Utilize high-fidelity prototypes that may be posted online and request that users carry out test tasks. Keep an eye on how people use the interface. Be on the lookout for roadblocks, hesitancy, and dropouts. When you have conclusive test results, return to your design and fix the problems you found.

Anticipate Mistakes

Even though people make mistakes, they shouldn’t (always) have to pay the price. There are two methods to assist in reducing the effects of human error:

Avoid errors before they occur.

Give suggestions on how to fix them when they occur.

In e-commerce and form design, error-prevention strategies are frequently used. For example, button activity is delayed until all fields have been filled in. In addition, forms can identify input email addresses incorrectly. For example, a Pop-up can ask you if you’re sure you want to remove items from your shopping basket.

Sometimes it’s easier to avoid mistakes than to attempt and correct them later. This is because they take place before the gratifying sensation of accomplishment that comes with hitting the “Next” or “Submit” button can take hold.

Nevertheless, sometimes it’s best just to let mishaps happen. When that happens, thorough error messages shine.

Make sure your error messages do the following two things when you write them:

• Describe the issue
• Describe the repair in detail

Remember that you can use the same guide for situations that are not errors. For instance, let me know that I can always restore deleted stuff by going to your Trash and pressing Restore if I accidentally remove something, and it can be recovered.

The poka-yoke principle is the idea of foreseeing user error. Poka-yoke, a phrase from the Japanese language, means “mistake-proofing.”

Conclusion

Quality user interface design principles are simple to express, challenging to implement, and unexpectedly hard to describe. The fundamental rules of good user interface design were just mentioned. When attempting to build a product that is intuitive and usable, they are the ones that matter most.

As said, it could be challenging to put into practice many guidelines. All Time Design will save you from the hassle and stress.

All Time Design’s professional designers will help design your UI with these guidelines followed from the first to the latter. So then, for as low as $499, you are on your way to designing that following top-notch website.

At that fee, you can still design your logo, expand branding ideas, or focus on web development via UI design.

You can make the most effective choices for your users with All Time Design.