Freelance User Interface and Interaction Designer Bournemouth, Dorset
User Interface Design
For a moment forget colour schemes and animations, just think about the user interface. Does it make sense?
User interface design covers the bare bones of your website or application. Strip it all right back to a wireframe and simply look at where all the content will sit on the page. Are the important information and main call to actions easily accessible. User interface design is something that is often just completely overlooked because you are using a prebuilt theme or a CMS that displays content in a certain way. Just because it is displayed that way off the shelf doesn’t mean it will keep people on your site and generate sales.
Websites have started to fall in to cookie cutter grid layouts with very familiar bootstrapped icons and navigation. The positive side is that people are used to these layouts visually but it does mean that you will not stand out from the crowd. To stand out you need to really focus on something fresh and exciting you can deliver to your users.
UX or user experience is getting a lot more focus than it previously did. Your user interface is the precursor to your site visitors user experience. Its the first thing they see before trying to interact with the website or application. It can even hinder people from beginning a user journey if they can’t find what they need. Its really best to not get bogged down in all the buzzwords and noise around UX and UI. All projects and audiences are different and require different approaches. Don’t worry if you have not thought about the user interface before the build, its never too late to improve what you have.
User Interaction
User Interaction is what gives your site the extra layer of polish that makes it a memorable experience and plants the seed for them to return to the site. A lot of websites in this day and age are very flat with the same layout and structure. You don’t have to go mad with 20 animations a page or any animation for that matter, but adding some subtle movement will have a big impact in bringing your website in to life.
Almost everything on the web requires some kind of interaction to get a result and while we are waiting for this result we expect to know what is going on. If we don’t know if something is working we tend to try to reload pages, which can cause issues or we just give up. Having this feedback plays a very key role in making sure users are completing the user journey they set out to do. Whether that be downloading a file, buying a product or submitting a form.
We are at a very exciting stage in web development where we can have all of these nice little extras and they don’t come at a huge cost in site performance if done the right way.
If you want to discuss User Interface and Interaction Design in a new or existing project use the form below.