UI Expert

What Makes a User Interface Good and How It Helps a Website

A good user interface on your website keeps visitors on your site. A bad one will confuse them and turn them towards alternatives. Although design has gotten a lot of attention in the web community today, not enough websites actually focus on a better experience for their users. Fortunately, the basic principles for good websites are known to UI experts.

Clarity

When users come to your website, they should be able to understand exactly what it is for, what it does and where to go next. This seems like a pretty intuitive thing, but a lot of websites simply seem to miss this fact. They are instead focusing on minimalism and hiding as much content as possible. It is this simple. If people can’t figure out what to do on your website, they have no reason to stay there.

Familiarity

Have you noticed that the icon for saving files is the same purple floppy disk on nearly all applications, whether they are on the PC, Mac or a smartphone? That is because people are familiar with it. When they see that icon, they instantly recognize that it is for saving files. Zero cognitive overhead.

Make sure your design is familiar to your users. If your web page has a lot of functions, create a tabbed interface or something that looks familiar. The easier it is to use, the more people will use it. A familiar UI is of utmost importance for customer engagement and conversion rates.

Responsive

This means, your interface has to be quick to respond to user actions. It should also indicate what is happening. Something like the Gmail loading page tells users how far the page has loaded and does not leave them hanging, waiting for something to happen. You can apply this to any number of user interface elements.

Creating a highly usable website

That so many websites fail at creating good UI does not mean it is impossible. In fact if you stick to a few guidelines and hire a good UI expert, you will be able to get a good website in a few weeks. Most web development firms today have user interface designers onboard.

Although you can hire an in-house UI professional, for most cases, hourly staff will suffice. This is especially true if you are a small and medium sized business and are just starting out. The only requirement here is that the UI specialist needs to be qualified and experienced.