Sometimes filling in a form or searching for a piece of information on a website is incredibly frustrating. Other times it feels effortless. What makes the difference?
User interface (UI) design is the art and science of keeping your user happy and ensuring their attention's on your message, not your (annoying) website.
We're saddened to report that some of the most important principles in user interface design are being broken all over the web. It's rare to find a site that doesn't commit any of these 7 deadly sins:
Some designers just can't resist showing off their latest skills in flash or illustration at the expense of what really matters - your brand. If the thing that draws your eye doesn't represent your brand, something's really wrong. That goes for colours too.
The goal of a website is not to cram as much information as possible onto one screen. White space reduces eye strain and makes users feel happy and relaxed on your site.White space also governs how your content interacts with your branding. For example, if your logo is too close to other content, its impact is drastically reduced. Never sacrifice white space.
Different kinds of content need to be blocked or broken up logically. We call this the 'Noah's ark principle'. Have you ever noticed how you could always find the kids who smoked down the back of the schoolyard? When content is well grouped, it becomes easy for people to find the information they want. With logical content blocks and sensible separation through design features like icons you can present a wide variety of content types on one page without it becoming confusing.
On the web, less is usually more (see point one). The better the web designer, the more elegant and judicous the use of colours, fonts and stylistic features. This means if something stands out, it does so for a reason. Your website should be more zen than rococo.
If you have too many colours, some of them will clash and amplify one another at the expense of your brand (see point 1). The same goes for the photos your brother took at the last product launch - they might be great photos, but if they don't perfectly fit the look and style of the page they're on, they're likely to make the whole page jarring. And as a guide, more than three fonts (heading, sub-heading and body text) are probably going to make your site less readable. Books are readable, and there's a reason why.
First and foremost, good navigation keeps the user oriented at all times as to where they are in the site and how to get to any other place they want to go. It presents choices, but also highlights desired paths and makes them as easy as possible for the user. This means an action response such as 'contact a consultant' or 'buy this now' occur precisely where that decision is likely to occur, not via another page. The pathway you want to encourage also needs to stand out appropriately from other navigation options, such as through colour.
Secondly, when it comes to navigation, every click counts. Frequently used site areas need to be as few clicks as possible from the frontpage, because user frustration and 'I can't be bothered'-ness rises exponentially with each click. With a modern cms you can take advantage of dynamic page content presentation such as ajax and javascript widgets to reduce the number of clicks and give your site a leaner, more flexible structure.
Just as every click counts, every millisecond counts on the web. After just one two-hundredth of a second, net users start to feel like they're waiting. A deathly slow page load can lose a customer for life. Great code means a page loads fast, and that means your site and your brand feel responsive and slick (bad hosting can also be the culprit here).
In the same way, creating a great form which is intuitive to fill out, requires a minimum of inputs, and validates lightning fast on a single page can make a huge difference to sign-ups and sales.
There is such a thing as being too niche - it's easy to target one group so well that you alienate everyone else. And it's hard to predict who's going to visit. Balancing the disparate needs of different groups of users (for example, customers, staff and shareholders) can be complex, but it's worth ensuring that your design has appeal for more than one narrow target audience (and won't look dated by next week).