As a user interface designer, you know that creating an effective and engaging user interface is crucial to the success of your product. But what makes a great user interface, and how can you ensure that your design meets the needs of your users?
This blog post will explore five factors to consider when designing your user interface. By considering these factors, you’ll be able to create a design that is both effective and engaging for your users.
Understand Your Audience
One of the very first things to do when making or designing a user interface would be to understand your audience. Understanding your audience is paramount to making an interface that is easily used, not complicated, and suited to the interests of the audience in question.
Three aspects to consider when understanding your audience are pain points, expectations, and user behavior. Pain points are things that frustrate your audience about the design of a user interface. Meanwhile, user behavior is incredibly important since this indicates how users generally use an interface and showcases their purpose or intent. Lastly, expectations are what your audience expects from an interface.
Keep it Simple
Of all the factors that you should consider when designing an interface, one of the most important is probably keeping it as simple as possible. You might not be aware of this, but an overly complicated interface can dissuade a user from using your website, product, and more.
For example, if you are designing a user interface for a microwave, most people just need to select a time the food will be in for, a start button, and a button to open the door. Another thing to consider is using the right materials for your design. Ensure the materials are well suited for the purpose and are purchased from experienced and professional companies like newwestmetals.com, where the quality of products is a priority.
If you were to start making the design incredibly complex, such as asking the user to select the type of food; if it’s frozen, from the refrigerator or fresh, how long it was frozen for, etc., the user is not only going to get overwhelmed but also annoyed. These steps are preventing them from achieving their goal.
Make it Accessible
Another thing that you have to consider when designing a user interface, whatever it might be for, is to make it as accessible as possible. While a large majority of the population will be able to use your product without any problem, there will still be a portion of the population that will have difficulty using any product, such as those that suffer from disabilities.
With this in mind, it’s crucial to make the design as accessible as possible so that anyone can use it. Going back to the microwave example, adults aren’t the only people to use microwaves. Children use them, too, so having an accessible design is a must, such as simple symbols and as few steps as possible. A quality graphic overlay printing can help make an interface more user-friendly and visually appealing. They can also be used to add functionality to an interface, such as buttons or other controls.
Prevention
One of the most important aspects of an excellent user interface would be prevention. Having an abundance of choices when it comes to a user interface can be great. However, this can also be detrimental if the choices made have negative consequences for the user.
Having said that, an important aspect of a great user interface would have the ability to prevent users from selecting options that could cause negative consequences, which can be done by greying out certain options or disabling certain buttons after specific choices have been made. For example, going back to the microwave, even though it’s possible to set the timer for an incredibly long amount of time, this doesn’t mean that you should let the user do it since it can have fatal consequences.
Importance of Symbol Sizes
Lastly, the final factor for making an excellent user interface on this list would be understanding the importance of symbol sizes. As mentioned above, understanding your audience is a vital part of creating an interface that is intuitive. One of the most critical aspects of an intuitive user interface would be creating different symbol sizes for the most commonly used features. For example, again, on a microwave interface, the most commonly used features are the start button, the timer button, and the open-door button. It would be quite counterintuitive if you were to make the defrosting symbol one of the largest symbols and the start button one of the smallest since this goes against known user behavi