UX and UI: Crucial Web Design Elements
While in many ways intertwined, UX and UI are quite different in their respective design approaches. It could be said that UI is how a website visually presents itself to the world, while the UX is what gives it life.
UX design is making a website as usable as possible, while providing the utmost satisfaction to the user. The design process is more closely attuned to market research. And is primarily a non-digital approach. An exception would be that a tool dedicated to assist in the design of a website’s UX might include the digital features necessary to build a prototype to conduct user testing. Such a tool would also support team collaboration and feedback.
UI design, on the other hand, is strictly digital. It typically does not involve coding – unless the boundary between design and development becomes blurred. UI design is multi-faceted and akin to graphic design where front-end tools assisting layout, element positioning, and content editing play the major role.
In today’s world of digital information overload, the difference between dominating a market niche, and being an also-ran, can come down the UX quality and performance. Most design-forward companies rely on InVision to create the best customer experience at every digital touchpoint.
InVision is more than a prototyping tool. It provides a complete working platform for digital product design teams. Features, including live digital whiteboarding in Freehand, and Inspect for seamless handoffs, give designers and developers an opportunity to stop thinking about workflow and devote their full time to give free rein to their creative potential.
Automatic syncing and live collaboration features help teams design and gather fast feedback from stakeholders and real customers in real time. They are always working from the right files, and on the right products for the end users.
InVision and InVision Enterprise have helped leading product design companies create world-class experiences. Sign up for a free trial and discover why brands from Airbnb to IBM rely on InVision.
Proto.io is ideal if you would like to use one platform for all your prototyping needs: designing, previewing, sharing, user testing, collaborating, and getting feedback. It’s packed with valuable features; such as importing from Sketch or Photoshop and allowing you to create interactive prototypes out of your designs.
To prototype in Proto.io, you don’t need to be an expert designer, nor do you need to know how to code. The intuitive interface helps you easily build exactly what you want. Interactions are super easy to create with the Interaction Wizard and sharing is just a click away. You can create beautiful animations in no time, preview on an actual device, and capture user feedback in text or video form!
If you’re looking for an all in one prototyping tool, Proto.io is by far your best choice. Take advantage of their full featured 15-day trial to see for yourself.
Sketch is an amazing app that allows for a wide variety of designer activities, including graphics, interfaces, and websites. The informative video tutorials make Sketch easy to learn and use. The vector-based workflow lets you create incredibly complicated shapes without putting up with trial and error attempts, or annoying tweaking. The shapes you create can be edited, and therefore adapted to a different layouts and styles. This is a modern tool, for modern designers.
If you’re in need of a UI/UX tool that supports rapid prototyping, encourages team collaboration, and keeps your project’s tasks organized and your project status visible, Notism is an excellent choice. Notism takes static design screen information and transforms it into interactive prototypes, without any need for coding on your part. Prototypes and other design information can be shared via video in real-time for review, comments, feedback, or sign-off.
The task manager allows project and task status to be reviewed at any time, so you are always able to see what requires your full attention.
Great Simple has some awesome solutions if you’re on the lookout for top notch UI and wireframe kits, or a full set of core design elements. You’ll appreciate the extra effort Great Simple’s authors have put into their products, to ensure that even the most hard-to-please designers will be happy to add them to their toolkits.
Two best-sellers, the iOS Design Kit, and the Material Design Kit, definitely belong in your design toolkit. Be sure to check out the free iOS and Android kits while you’re at it. These popular kits have been downloaded more than 70,000 times.
If you’re a Sketch user, it’s not a problem. All Great Simple products are compatible with Sketch and Adobe Photoshop.
Tips for Making a Better User Interface
Today’s Internet users are more sophisticated than in years past. They’ve come to expect more and more in terms of the quality of the user experience they encounter when working with digital displays. Businesses therefore, need to carefully consider the quality they put into these experiences. But how do they do this?
- Keep it Simple
A great user interface is simple, logical, concise, and nearly invisible. Working with it should be intuitive. The user should never have to stop and think about what to next. It features the essential, and only the essential elements; nothing cute or fancy
- Make Everything Clear
A satisfied user is one that finds interacting with your system an easy task, and a satisfying one. Make simplicity and conciseness your principle UI design objectives, and you should not have problems with users abandoning your site out of frustration.
Just remember to keep your messaging simple, and clearly label your buttons and actions; and all should go well.
- Make the Interactions Efficient
Designing your UI to make interactions as efficient as possible, helps users to carry out their tasks smoothly, efficiently, and without losing their way or becoming distracted. Avoid design elements that contribute nothing to user flow, and hide any options that are not regularly invoked.
- Be Consistent in Your Design
Once you’ve engaged a user, you want that user to stay engaged. Consistency is important, in fact imperative, if that is to happen. Users quickly fall into a usage habit when visiting a site. If your UI presents a challenge, they’re more apt to abandon your site instead of trying to rise to the challenge.
- Use Familiar Design Patterns
Users like familiarity. Your website doesn’t have to look like every other website, but there are certain conventions regarding icons and button locations that many designers follow. Use UI design elements that are easily understood and appropriately positioned.
A shopping cart should look like a shopping cart, and the purpose of a call to action button should be obvious.
- Understand How UI Plays into UX
UI design can rarely be successfully completed without taking several UX factors into account. Namely, user flow, and brand or product key features. By doing this early in the design phase, fewer problems are apt to be encountered during user testing or prior to launch.
- Implement a Visual Hierarchy
It’s important to highlight an interface’s most important elements to ensure that the user will focus on them at the appropriate time. The simplest example would be to highlight a key element by making it bigger and brighter, and otherwise stand out among its neighbors.
Conclusion
A website’s UI determines its visual presentation and its look and feel. Its UX defines its degree of usability and its ability to provide user satisfaction. UI design is digital. It is much like graphic design, as it involves layouts and positioning of design elements.
UX design is similar to market analysis. It involves user testing and user analytics. A website’s UX defines its usability and user satisfaction attributes.
The post Great UX/UI Tools and Tips that Improve Your Workflow appeared first on Web Design Blog | Magazine for Designers.
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