What is User Interface (UI) Design?
The user Interface (UI) design shapes the website appearance, or theme, including the size and colour of the text, background, graphics and audio-visuals and the positioning of navigational aids. Aesthetics is a major consideration but UI design also involves many other factors. One of the most significant of the issues addressed is how to design the website in way that will be most convenient for the visitor. At this point the border between UI design and the closely associated UX (user experience) design blurs. It can be hard to know into which of these categories certain design work best fits. There are differences of opinion where the boundary falls but it is probably simplest to see UI design as a key element in UX design; the best UI website design is one that makes a website visually attractive but also very utilitarian.
A good eye for graphics and lettering is the first thing that comes to mind if you ask Mr. or Mrs. Average what makes an excellent UI designer, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Each website requires a distinctive UI design in keeping with its product branding and target audience. This demands a designer with a keen sensitivity to marketing issues and customer behaviour analysis skills in addition to that mastery of UI design tools and techniques. UI designers must be able to put themselves in the place of a typical site visitor. Their job is to figure out what is needed to immediately capture the visitors’ attention and to lead them to the information or product purchase options they want.
A major challenge facing the UI designer is finding a creative way to distinguish the website from similar sites — that animated footballer figure chasing the ball across the screen could delight the new visitor to the football souvenirs web store but it is likely to become an annoyance when it appears for the umpteenth time! The UI design expert has the talents to balance such website artistic considerations with the plain “bread and butter” concerns of the site owner to give visitors a well-marked route with a purchase at its end. The negative litmus test for a successful UI design is a lack of complaints from disorientated or frustrated customers. The positive litmus test comes through rising sales, praise from visitors and the interest of competitors.
