Understanding UI/UX To Design Your Business

User Interface or UI is what a user sees on opening an app or a website. It consists of the visual components of digital media such as colors, typography, iconography, buttons, etc. The goal of UI is to provide an attractive and visually pleasing application or website for the users, which in turn compels them to stay and look through.

The name itself suggests what User experience is! UX is what a user feels or experiences while surfing through an app or website. It lays down a path of how a user interacts with a product. With the help of UX, users get a good experience of using, accessing and navigating through a product.

With our 15+ years of experience, we understood the user’s need and their preferences. Users don’t look for very astonishing designs, rather they are looking for minimalistic and at the same time easily accessible products.

UI and UX have changed the way people see the digital world. Nowadays, users don’t want to see dull, boring or glitchy websites. Instead, they are now looking for something appealing, colorful and user-friendly. Businesses stress more on the technology rather than on the user’s requirements and hence the business loses customer value. To stay relevant, businesses don’t just need to create market-worthy but user-centric products as well.

UI/UX enhances your website by adding new features and upgrades according to your brand. This creates brand awareness among customers and provides uniqueness. This leads to customer confidence in your business and your brand.

Creating a UI/UX design with user satisfaction in mind leads to overall growth of the business. A satisfied customer will surely come back to buy related products or services. UI/UX also helps in improving the user experience by adding many factors in the process.

There are so many components in UI/UX, a few of them are mentioned below.

 1. Usability

Usability is the effectiveness and efficiency of the interaction between the user and the product. It is more about customer satisfaction.

 2. Information Architecture (IA)

Information Architecture, also known as IA is basically organizing and managing information in a practical and productive way. This makes searching for information easy and convenient for users.

 3. Visual Design

It consists of the UI elements and the aesthetics. It lays stress over visuals and comforting design.

 4. Interaction Design

Interaction Design also consists of UI elements but unlike visual design it stresses over a design which is smooth for the user-product interaction.

 5. Wireframe

Wireframe is a basic version of your product, whether it’s an app or a webpage created for better understanding and visualization. In simple words, a wireframe is used to show the allocation of space to different elements, prioritization of content and the potential interaction between users and the product.

This is what Tommy Moorman, the Marketing Manager of StoroPack has to say about us; “Communication is key in most projects, and they out performed my expectations.” Learn more about how Sunflower Lab helped Storopack in their success journey.

Designing is a long and thoughtful process and making sure that it fulfills all the purposes is a must. A perfect design can help a business reach a multitude of audience, and at the same time, one wrong design can make customers leave your website to never come back ever again. In the designing process, your ideas come alive and interact with different users in different ways.

Walk with us to learn about different phases of UI/UX Designing Process:

 1. Defining the Needs and Ideation Process

“Asking the right question!” This step is necessary to understand and define the user’s needs before working on a new product. This phase helps you to have a grasp on the What, Who and How of a product and figure out its solution.

• “What is the need of the product to be formed?”
• “Who will it help?”
• “How will it be helpful?”

Once you know the answer to your question, you can move ahead to the ideation process. Here, you generate an idea based on the customer requirements and needs. Learn more about Product Ideation and Discovery process through our blog.

 2. Research

A thorough and deep research should be conducted to figure out the target audience, their age, and gender. This research helps to learn about their pain points to do further planning based on the information received. Not only the target audience but it is also important to learn about the business competitors in the market.

 3. Planning

Using all the information collected in the research phase, start planning and analyzing the potential result of the product to be created by making hypothetical scenarios and wireframes.

 4. Design

Now, you have a plan laid out. From here the graphic designers take over. They create a basic sketch of your product idea for better understanding of how the product will look like, how it will interact with the users, etc.

Here, all the elements like colors, typography, information architecture (IA), navigation, etc. of both UI and UX come together turning the product of your dreams into reality.

 5. Prototyping

Prototype helps in determining whether a product has smooth flow or not and gaining customer feedback about the same. It ensures consistency of the product and gives more realistic experience to the testing process.

There are so many amazing prototyping tools like InVision, Principle, Marvel, Pixate, etc. Here at Sunflower Lab, we understand the need for a good prototype and constantly work on providing you with the best solution.

 6. Testing and Retesting

It is important to run tests before launching the product to steer clear of any issues or bugs. Testing and retesting is done to accomplish maximum satisfaction of the users.

UI/UX is the key to success, but it can also become the key to disaster. An example of disastrous UI/UX Design is Netflix’s Hover Autoplay.

In 2015, Netflix launched the Hover Autoplay feature which is troubling the users. Whenever a user hovers over the thumbnail of any movie or series, the looped trailer starts playing. This design, which was supposed to attract viewers, became a poor user experience because it is not user-centric at all.

Attractive and creative aesthetics are necessary, but they should not compromise the quality of experience the users need.

In the current times, the web development is quite complex and difficult to understand. So, the coming of UI/UX design in the game has changed how users perceive the websites now. Everything is turning digital and keeping up with the trends is how a business runs nowadays.

If you are looking to pursue a career as a UI/UX designer, it might be looking overwhelming now, but with changing times new ideas and new minds are always appreciated and valued. One can also search for UI/UX Design Bootcamp and learn more about the same.

When we say the scope of UI/UX, we mean what we see and what we experience. Now, if we wouldn’t want to experience the same old boring stuff after 8-10 years, so why should you?

In a nutshell, UI/UX is the new normal and the faster you start investing in it, the better results and revenues you generate. If our photographs have turned colourful, then why should our websites stay black and white.

Design is like an idea tuned into a reality and the better the idea, the brighter is the reality. To make your ideas come alive, Contact Us at Sunflower Lab. Our team would be happy to help!