Why Good UX and UI Design is Important
Increasing digitisation means that you can no longer consider your customers solely in terms of the transactions they make. The new, digitally conscious customer expects instantaneous information at their fingertips and measures their satisfaction relative to the quality of digital experiences that your business provides.
This is where User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) design comes in.
Good UX and UI design is one of the easiest ways to satisfy prospective customers, and also works to enhance consumer perceptions of your brand. It serves to maximise the digital interactions that end-users have with your business and will keep them coming back for more. In today’s competitive marketplace, businesses need to provide high-quality digital interactions and user experiences just to stay afloat.
In this blog post, we will take you through the reasons why good UX and UI design is so important, and our top tips to improve your business’s UX and UI design processes.
What is the difference between UX and UI design?
They may sound similar, but these two terms mean very different things; understanding the difference can help your business to optimise both effectively.
UX Design
User Experience can be defined as the process of supporting user behaviour across all aspects of interaction with a chosen company. UX design is focused on the usability, relevance and desirability provided in the interaction with a company, its services and its products. It is very similar to customer experience, though the ‘customer’ in this regard is the end-user of a website, mobile application or product.
UI Design
User Interface design works closely with User Experience but is more focused on enhancing the presentation of a product. It results in outcomes that delight users aesthetically and is often responsive to changes in browser space or device type. UI design covers all the visual elements that UX design seeks to implement, which means that a great product experience starts with UX followed by UI.
Why UX and UI design matters
In today's competitive marketplace, maintaining good UX and UI design is almost as important as promotional activities for attracting prospective customers and generating sales. Creating top-quality user interactions and experiences earns consumers’ confidence and trust in your brand, and shows them that your business can fulfil their needs and provide them with positive experiences before they have even made a purchase. These positive experiences with your brand are the tools that boost conversion rates.
Good UX and UI design helps to keep users on your site, divert their attention to other parts of the site once they’ve got what they came for, and once they’ve left, keep them coming back. It can be adapted to fit the needs and demands of your target audience, making your product or service as engaging as possible.
Features of good UX and UI design
Usability
This is the degree to which your website can be used both effectively and efficiently. The key is to ensure your design enables usage in a way that complements human behaviour. For example, humans prefer to get things done quickly, so users of a platform will wish to perform tasks as fast as possible through the easiest process.
Relevance
Your design should be consistently relevant to the needs of consumers. This means ensuring that all misleading, duplicated, or unnecessary content is removed, moved, rewritten, structured or sign-posted.
Interactivity
A website that exhibits interactive content empowers users. By choosing their own location, language or content search, users have autonomy over their digital experience which helps to gain their trust. Interactivity is also easily analysed, so you can get to know your users and what interests them the most.
Presentation
The visual presentation of your website provides a better first impression for your business. A professional, well-presented website design will better your chances of converting customers, as not only does it attract traffic to your site, but also works to retain their interest and keep them there.
Responsiveness
Responsive web design is a must for all websites, as around half of user-visits are from mobile devices. Incorporating mobile solutions into a new website or webshop is therefore essential for optimum user-friendliness on mobiles, tablets and desktops.
Top tips to improve your business’s UX and UI
1. Content focus
Your content is what sparks conversations with customers and creates value. Ensure that it is is focused enough to build strong relationships with your audience.
2. Touchpoint mapping
Don’t just focus on one single customer interaction. Review each interaction customers have with your company, regardless of media or channel, from awareness through to usage and loyalty, and provide in-depth recommendations.
3. Structure and layout
Fine-tune your architecture, structures and layouts to deliver your content most effectively. The positioning of your website content must be easily navigable for end-users.
4. Innovative interactive concepts
Aim to create interfaces that deliver bespoke functions in a way that is intuitive to users on their chosen device. Try implementing a hover effect to alter the appearance of an image. All the user will need to visualise your effect is a mouse.
5. Looks and Styling
Pay close attention to visual elements such as typography, use of colour, graphic styles, illustration, photography, imagery, video and animations. Try to understand what will work best for your target audience.
Novicell's UX and UI design collaboration with Revlon Professional
After many months of hard work and big efforts by Novicell UX and UI design teams, along with Revlon Professional, we have finally launched their new website that projects the essence of Revlon International.
The result? An inherently user-focused website that is responsive enough to work across all device types in multiple languages.
Check out the full case study here
How can we help you?
We encourage businesses to focus on customers over transactions and to adopt user-centric design models. This means using the customer journey and user experiences as the focal point of your company's activities. We conduct scenario testing to run a series of user scenarios, applying the results to plot improved UX and UI designs that better meet your user's criteria and success points.
We go beyond what any of your competitors are doing. This means doing some things a little differently but definitely doesn't have to involve risk.
