As a User Interface Designer (UI Designer), we often don’t know what the problem is at the outset of a design project.
Therefore, design is often iterative. We learn based on the available evidence presented from the users. Failing quickly and often enables us to succeed sooner.
When designing systems and user interfaces it is paramount that you focus in on the people that will use your product or service. This is important for a number of reasons which I highlight below.
- Good UI design makes people happy. It gets them excited and ultimately means that they will come back for more. Good user interfaces can have a significant impact on the users’ ability to accomplish things. User interfaces have enabled us to have computers on millions of desks, connect with your family on and offline, share photos and find information.
When Apple designed their remote control devices they decided that there was only a small number of essential tasks that needed to be completed. They looked at the established norms and ultimately simplified the key elements down to the minimum number.
Good user interface design is about simplification and ensuring that it performs a small number of tasks well.
- Bad UI design costs time, money and sometimes lives. Bad User interfaces are annoying. Think of all the time that you waste on day to day tasks that could be avoided through good interface design. Day to day tasks such as trying to establish why your wi-fi isn’t working or using a poor banking website to service your account online. If these frustrations take an average of 10 minutes each day, based on 60 million people in the UK, we could be wasting 600 million man minutes per day or 3.65bn hrs a year on distractions that we could be spending on improving our lives.
The bad design of medical equipment can cause severe accidents or serious injury. Many of these potential issues can be avoided by following some basic UI design principles. A good UI designer can resolve these issues and remove frustrations.
- Good User Interface design becomes invisible to us. When an interface becomes second nature, through practice and design, our attention shifts from manipulating an interface to accomplishing a task. Like a blind person using his stick to navigate an obstacle, it becomes an extension of his arm and the senses translated to its tip. That is what happens when a great user interface becomes intuitive.
- Placing people at the centre of the early UI design process saves time in the long run. Great user interfaces require enormous creativity, design thinking and lots of work. Designing good interfaces can be achieved more simply if you have a tool kit that can guide you through a process following a set of principles. This can be built up over time.
- The UI Designer can overcome poor design by following a process where they:
- Let users tasks, goals, and motivations focus development through solid contextual research.
- Make decisions based from the perspective of specific user types by developing customer personas.
- Work with users throughout the process testing concepts often, with a robust feedback mechanism.
- Pay attention to the problem at hand and people’s abilities.
- Talk to the actual experts that use the product or service on a daily basis and the other stakeholders.
By following some of these principles, we will develop wonderfully designed products and services that will save us time, frustration and enhance our lives.
