This is a guest blog post written by Amanda Cline.
Amanda Cline is serving as a developer at Xicom Technologies Ltd – A renowned Custom Mobile Application Development Company. Having being associated with Xicom Technologies Ltd, since 3 years from now, she has gathered an excellent amount of expertise as an IT support personal, blogger, computer programmer, App developer, a mentor and a trainer.
The days no longer exist, when people used to visit the real time stores for gathering information about the products and services offered by a particular business enterprise.
Today is the time of digitization, when consumers prefer accessing a business product/service right through the convenience of their smartphone or tablet. This growing usage of the hand-held devices has lead to a sudden increase in the number of websites and apps that are fully compatible with almost all the smartphones and tablets.
Well, designing a great-looking, intuitive mobile app is not everybody’s cup of tea. You need to have a detailed understanding of all the factors that affect the overall performance of a mobile app. Right from the design to the UI/UX; everything needs to be managed properly so as to come up with an absolutely stunning mobile-friendly business app. This is a post which will acquaint you with the basic significance of having a well-organized and properly designed UI (User Interface) to avoid the app un-installs and growing website bounce rates.
1. UI design begins with an intimate understanding of the customer’s business processes
Knowing Thy User is the foremost factor that needs to be considered while designing an intuitive UI (User Interface). You need to gather a clear understanding of the customer’s business and operations. A viable means of acquiring this knowledge is to see through the eyes of the end user. Hence, as you begin working on the website/app’s user interface, just step into the end user’s role and see if you’re able to fetch some quick design ideas.
2. Support for modular functions comes by default with a good UI(User Interface)
Are you developing your next website or application keeping the flexibility factor in mind? If no, then it’s time to design a user interface which would support different modular functions. In other words, your app/site would comprise of a drag-and-drop function which would enable the administrators to tweak the structure of the back-end in their own unique way.
3. Prototyping is the key to a remarkable mobile user interface
While quite a majority of interface designing teams doesn’t bother to prototype, it is actually a concept that shouldn’t be missed for sure. By putting in limited investment, it will become possible for you to share your interface design approach with your fellow colleagues and gather valuable feedback in return. Though you can go ahead with creating paper designs, developing a working prototype is a much better technique for allowing fellow designers to interact and reach to your design ideas. For instance, if you’re heading towards development of an application using Adobe Flex, it is recommended to build the prototype iterations using the Adobe Flash Designer software. Doing this will allow you to receive an exact replica of how the application would look and feel when made available to the target audience. Here, you’re just expected to write the necessary code for enabling the logical flow of multiple UI (user interface) components.
4. Measuring your user interface design is of prime importance
Once you’re done with collecting some brilliant ideas for your app/website’s user interface design, it’s time to test the same on a working build. Doing this will render you a good insight into how the interface feels like. Plus, you can also find answers to questions like: Did your friends or colleagues understand the procedure of navigating around your website without meeting any confusion? Did you have to give a thought as to what you’re doing while browsing the website? Etc. With satisfactory answers for all such questions, you’d be able to rest assured about the flawless performance of the user interface design that you’ve just created.
5. A good user interface design is backed by learnability, efficiency and simplicity
Talking about the user interface design, you (the interface designer) must ensure that the interface is easy-to-use right from the first time the user utilizes it for interacting with the website/application. The amount of functionality provided within the user interface should be limited to exactly what the user requires for attaining his/her goal. Next, comes the efficiency. Well, as per this, making the key tasks as efficient as possible is what will retain the users’ attention on your website/application. Lastly, there is simplicity, which means that all the tasks included within the user interface must be easy and less common. It is recommended to keep the interface design’s layout uncluttered so as to avoid any unnecessary functionality. Moreover, the visibility of UI elements is also a point that needs to be considered well. Making the vital information more visible as compared to the less vital information will add a greater value to your user interface design.
Conclusion
Here’s hoping the above write-up would have encouraged you to gather helpful insights on the growing significance of having an awesome user interface for your website/application. Keeping the target users in total control of the user interface will perhaps increase the visitors’ count and conversion rate/download count for your website/application.
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