Go through this complete guide diligently and by the end of it you’ll get a clear and comprehensive understanding of the following:

• What exactly are UI Design and UX Design?
• Differences between UI and UX.
• How to design a stunning UI & UX.
• 5 Common Mistakes that kill your conversion rate.

UI or User Interface

The UI design is all about the look and feel, the presentation and interactivity. It deals more with the aesthetics and less with the functionality part of a product.
It includes:
1. Typography:
Robert Bringhurst defines typography as the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form. It has the power to convey emotions, transfer a message and most importantly define content hierarchy. The font family, size, weight, color, the text structure, everything matters. The readability of the text can have a massive impact on how users experience the product.
2. Color:
If we talk about visual arts, color is the soul of an artistic piece. It can say a thousand words without even presenting a single letter. In UI design, it can perform several functions like supporting and carrying the brand recognition, focusing on the critical parts like a call-to-action button, or beautifying the interface, etc.
3. Component style:
A user interface can contain multiple components such as a background, text fields, input fields, buttons, cards, etc. Designing UI requires pre-planning the elements’ style to maintain uniformity throughout the whole product. A designer has to decide the shape, color, size, even the situation where the same component has to change its form.
4. Layout arrangement:
It includes organization, arrangement, and spacing of the things mentioned above. The app screen or web page layout has to be arranged keeping in mind the hierarchy of the content and how to control the eye movement of the end user. Visual weight has to be balanced, and proper spacing should be provided so as not to make the content look cluttered. A designer has to arrange components according to their importance.

UX or User Experience

As humans, we are obsessed with things that look good.

A functional and aesthetically pleasing user interface may turn many heads, but it is not the only thing that is needed to retain users. When a design decision is made based only on how good it should appear, the product is no longer being designed for the users.  That is where UX comes in the spotlight, and to the designers’ rescue.

User experience design is a human-first way of designing a digitally interactive product. This term was first introduced to the Tech industry in the 1990s by Don Norman who was a cognitive scientist and co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group Design Consultancy and according to whom, “User experience encompasses all aspects of the end user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”

This process is scientific and can be applied to any real-life situations and places such as our room shelves, vehicle experience, movie theaters, etc.
If you want to provide a good user experience, ask yourself the following questions:

• Is the product user flow designed so that the user can achieve their objective quickly?
• Is the usability good enough that the user can use the product easily?
• Are design decisions being driven by reliable data and user research?
• Is the product intuitive enough to guess and present what the user wants?

UX design provides solutions to real-life user problems. By thinking through questions like the ones mentioned above, and finding an acceptable answer to each one of them, a product designer can achieve this goal. It is a relatively new field because companies worldwide are slowly realizing that it is equally important to attract, as well as retain users through their product.

A UX designer’s role includes a myriad of responsibilities, namely:

• Analyzing competitors and customers
  A competitive analysis helps a UX designer to gather useful information about the product landscape, its details, the market share, etc. It is also done to research the user demographics, visual design language, content, and language. This data is then compared to have an understanding of the product’s general competition.
• Deciding product structure and strategy
  While vision gives clarity for the desired goal, strategy defines the journey to achieve it. Even before the design and development begin, a strategy is made to create milestones of what should be done step by step.

  

   

• Wireframing
  Wireframes are like the backbone of designing a product, also called a low fidelity prototype/representation. It contains the elements needed on a screen and the order in which it should come. It is created quicker than the actual design because everything is represented in its purest form (e.g., crossed rectangles for image placeholders). In the wireframing stage, it is easier to do changes after gathering feedbacks.
• Prototyping
  While wireframing provides the visual idea of the planned layout, prototyping gets more close to the actual product. It consists of middle to high fidelity representation. It gives the look and feel of the final product as well as the interactions, which further proves itself helpful in user-testing.
  

So, to sum it up, UI design is how products appear, and UX design is how it functions.

Points to Ponder On

1. Don’t just design transitions, but the whole interaction

Designers go head over heels seeing those fabulous Dribbble designs and fancy transitions. The innovations that have occurred in modern interactive devices such as smartphones, smart-watch, etc. have made it possible to bring in a plethora of effects and inspirations too such as scrolling animations, button transitions and all sort of flashy things. While it is tempting to use these from a predefined library, the goal should not go out of focus. Use whatever is necessary and feasible for development.

2. Think Quality over quantity

Following types of data could emerge from user research:

• Quantitative:
  Survey results, A/B test data and conversion rates – measurable data that indicates numbers – where, when or how much.
• Qualitative:
  Observations of user test participants quote from contextual interviews – data that helps the product designer understand the why.

If being in a dilemma, or being in a situation where only one of them can be chosen, having an understanding of why users do something is more valuable than having numerical measurements that may not even be helpful in the issue involved.
Recommended Read: Top Trends In Design and Web Development

3. Use more research methods

Every research method has its perks as well as drawbacks. That is why using a mix of them can provide more dimensions to the data acquired. Triangulating research can enable UX designers to confirm data accuracy and relevance, helping them to have a more precise view.

4. Use more participation

It is required to have a common showcase arena where the project progress, findings, and planned steps can be exhibited to promote more transparency and participation. Choose the participants strategically and make it easy to access whatever is relevant to them. Users, stakeholders and colleagues, everyone collectively has more ideas, insights, and perspectives than a single UX designer, so take advantage of this great asset. Everyone may not be from the same demographic, but they drive the design to a more user-centric approach, which further promotes relationship building and helps build something astounding by collaboration.

5. Be visual in the first steps

While design documents provide insight into client requirements and user needs, it is preferable to be more visual. You don’t need to worry even if sketching is not one of your skillsets; nobody needs to be an artist while delivering ideas about the user flow and design. One of the most significant benefits is that it provides a broader understanding of the problems a UX designer is trying to solve.

Common Mistakes that are Killing Your Conversion Rate

The facts below provide an overview of the current situation:

• 38% of users leave a website if the content or layout is unattractive.
• 47% users expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.
• 95% of visitors agree that good user experience is the most crucial element of a website.
• 94% of people will close and stop trusting a site if the website design is not engaging.

  

The attention span of users is getting smaller day-by-day. They want results with less effort, less time and patience is barely existent. Getting through many screens to get what they want is a huge turnoff which drives them away, especially in a market where there are many more competitive products and content out there.
Mentioned below are some aspects that might be killing your conversion rate:

• • Confusing and Cluttered Layout
    Putting more and more content in one visible part of the screen order to put it in the users’ glance at first, is a terrible idea.

    If everything is made to draw attention, none of them gets it
    

    A designer should think more precisely and put themselves in users’ shoe to understand – What is the most important thing they may want to know or do. Information should be presented step-by-step according to that importance. There should only one goal that is to be focused – Conversion.

• • Device Unresponsive Design
    More and more users are using digital services on their mobile or tablets, which are easy to carry on-the-go. When they are not able to enjoy the best features on small screens, they leave. Responsive design of a digitally interactive product makes it flexible across all screen resolutions.

• • Unintuitive Navigation
    After de-cluttering the content, the next task at hand is deciding the hierarchy and navigation. What a website or application has to offer should be evident in the heading, and how they can gain from it should be described shortly in subheadings. Do not re-invent the wheel. Put things where users’ expect to find it. Do not make many positions, look or form changes from what they are used to. This might confuse and frustrate them. User-friendly navigation keys are critical, as there is only a second or two to convince a user to stay.

• • Text-Text Everywhere
    Nobody has the time to go through blocks of text. What an end user does is comb through it to get an overview of the subject. Therefore using related, informational, and soothing imagery may take the users out of the monotonous boredom of reading and at the same time feed the knowledge about the text they might not be reading. So try to use less but precise wording wherever applicable.

• • The 404 Dead-End
    There are situations where a user might not be able to find what they need and land on a 404. Consider a use case of an e-commerce application, where the user cannot find the product he/she was looking for. Such situations can be creatively utilized to drive the user to someplace where they could have a new start. The home page or the seasons’ new outfit collection might be a good place to start with. Presenting the users with aesthetically pleasing illustration, or animation of an empty crate is also an excellent way to hold on to them.

Concluding View:

“People ignore designs that ignores people.”

— Frank Chimero, Designer

Over the last decade, hardware has witnessed tremendous transformation. Now products have become much cheaper, efficient and smaller. Therefore making similar softwares proficient of beautiful animations, graphics, and interactions is extremely critical.
Now it is just not enough for designers to create an efficient application. Users are expecting more and more out of their devices; they want impeccable efficiency along with beautiful graphics and tasteful interactions.
This transition is pushing designers to get more creative with their design strategy.
The responsibilities of a designer have unbundled to much more than they used to be. With the influx of so many domains, designers now need to be appropriate ‘specialists’.
That is why designers at EngineerBabu are handpicked from the crowd to create the best possible user experience possible for our customers. We have solid expertise in creating world-class design solutions. With a portfolio of more than 100 exquisitely designed products under our wings, the tremendous hard work our dedicated team puts-in is quite evident from the smile of our satisfied customers.
Check out our creatively designed products, right here.

Recommended Read:

• The Ideal Custom Logo Design Company
• Top Trends in Design and Web Development
• Features of a Successful Mobile Application
• How Much Does Mobile App Development Cost?
• How Much Does Website Development Cost?

The post What is UI and UX? A Designer’s Guide to the Tech Industry appeared first on EngineerBabu Blog.

Imagine a situation when your user is visiting your website, but it becomes difficult for him to understand your business and he is having a terrible experience instead. You will lose him and all of his references forever.  And when it will keep happening, it will cost you 100s of users daily. And mind it that’s a big loss.
You might be thinking, what went wrong SEO is perfect, marketing is perfect, the product is perfect and the team is perfect. Then what’s wrong with the business?
Well, that’s your website. Yes, because your website is global speaker of your business. That’s the first place where your user is interacting with you and when this experience is bad, it doesn’t matter how good is your product and services, you gonna lose that user and ultimately business.

“Good design is good business.” -Thomas J. Watson, Jr. http://t.co/ficddAlW6Q pic.twitter.com/wggTkI7iKL

— IBM (@IBM) March 18, 2014

Here, are few things to consider while designing your website:

Top 10 Website Design ideas for Small Businesses

1.  A Good website design means

For me, a website means ‘Business’. And most of us, good website design is one “which is looking good”. But that’s just a small part of it. A website which is looking good not necessarily helps you in getting good business.
A good website design means, simplicity, visibility (UI), usability and user-friendly (UX). It should have simplicity in terms of color combination and placement of elements, all the important elements need to be easy-to-use, hassle free flow, call-to-action at all necessary places. Avoid all sort of redundancy, whether it’s text, images, characters, colors, it should be balanced.
The most updated version of website design is ‘Material UI’. Most of the website designers and freelancers follow material UI defined principles.
2. UX is the twin brother of UI.
For a website design, both UI and UX are equally important when it comes to a good website design.
The term “UX” is relatively new, the concept of user-friendly design has been there for generations.
UX may cost you some money now, but it definitely gonna pay you back in no time. UX leads to the customer satisfaction in very first interaction with your users.

When your first interaction is so satisfactory, it reduces the cost of customer acquisition, customer support, instead, increases retention. Even if your UI is good but you kept UX secondary, you will get secondary results.
3. Invest now, reap forever
During the first year of Amazon, Jeff Bezos invested much more in user experience (UX) than in advertising the product. Currently, the way Amazon is leading over their competitors we all have witnessed ourselves. That was an investment in the product, not the cost.
Similarly, we have to invest in making our website UX best, later it will itself start making money for making it better by the time. We have multiple examples available, like Facebook, Apple, Google, Airbnb, these company outperformed because of the better user experience even when the similar products were already existing.
Hire website designer who has expertise in UI and UX, and understands your product and users well. Remember it’s an investment.

4. The first impression is the last impression
We all must have heard that phase at some point of time in life. And we know how true it stands. So, same is with your website. Your products website is your first interaction with your users, and it should be able to leave the best impression.
[Tweet “A great design lives beyond time and function-M.Cobanli.”]
The message should be very loud and clear. Your homepage must have all the ingredients to answer all the questions of the user. If any of the answers are missing, and your website design fails to convey the right message, you will lose your potential buyer.
Right from the logo, to tagline, to colors, placement of elements, call to action all counts in when it comes to good website design. The dimension, color, and position of each element should work together and creates a clear path to understand your interface. All these things have a great impact on driving users and sales by way of SEO.
5. Good website design means good business

A good website design, increase the rate of conversion from user to your customer. This is what most important for an entrepreneur or a businessman.
A website should have a very clear message and call to actions placed beautifully where user have maximum tendency to buy your product.
A good website designer, have this expertise but you are the one who should know what to be placed.
If you don’t have the web designer and web developer with you, you can hire freelancers.
A freelancer is a good choice for small business, as they are much more pocket-friendly than having your own team.
6. Give the first preference to users
We often see website good in UI but underperforms business expectation. It happened when the end user is ignored.
We should not forget that we are designing a website for the users not for us. So, we need to anticipate the users choice and habits, not ours.
Users try to stick to the one which is easy for them to use and understand. One needs to do research about customer preferences and choices, and need to invest time in understanding the customers need before moving ahead with the design. The best website design considers all.
7. Website Design, SEO, Business walk hand-in-hand
A good UI and UX is an add-on for the SEO, which ultimately derives business. SEO works on certain principles, it brings users to the website but imagines if user skips the website without making any clicks or going through your product and services.
Then all the hard work and efforts go in vain. While designing website considers the elements required for SEO and place them in a way that it will help users in going through the website and buy your product.
For eg. Call-to-action, it should be at all the places where users have maximum tendency to click.
[Tweet “The Top 10 Reasons Your Small Business Needs Great Website Design.”]
8. Competition? A good design has a winning edge over the competition
Guess what, a good design helps in winning over competitors. Many of the business shy away from trying something good and new, they prefer to take the risk to go with the existing available designs while the one who tries to do something new yet simple and attractive earns the customers attention.
A good UI and UX earns customers loyalty and stickiness, one user finds your website easy to use, they won’t go anywhere for the next time. In fact, they will refer to others about the good aspects of your website.
A good website design turns users into their brand ambassador. Simple changes in the flow can make a website easy to use and the other one too complex to understand. We all want to go with the easy one always.
9. Saves Money
A good website with an easy flow, makes the user understand it quickly which will save your support cost indirectly. A good design doesn’t let the user realize the time consumed in reaching the goal he is looking for.
10. Content is King
Design without a content is like coffee without sugar. A good website needs equally good content. A good content, like the headline, tagline, about us, helps a user in understanding about the product and services in detail. A good content placed rightly adds value to your website.

Content helps in SEO also. So, while designing website consider the content and give it proper place.
As I mentioned earlier your website is your global speaker. It’s a way to communicate with your customer.
When you are in business we all know the customer is king. Then it becomes mandatory to consider customer choices, preferences and ease of using it. Don’t forget, you are making a website for customers, not for yourself. And customers means business.
EngineerBabu holds expertise in making UI, UX friendly websites for you. And we have a large pool of freelancers, website designer, UI & UX experts, who can help you out in launching a perfect website for your business.

The post Top 10 Reasons Your Small Business Needs Great Website Design appeared first on EngineerBabu Blog.