From Idea to Interface: The Simplicity of Website Design With Builders

While simplicity isn’t easy in website design, working with a professional team who can understand and embrace your business’s value and simplifying the complex foundations of your site can increase your conversions, improve your user experience, save time and money and help your SEO rankings. Read on to learn more about how to create an interface that’s simple for your visitors to use.

An important concept in the UI (user interface) design process is visual hierarchy. This involves arranging and organizing your website elements so that visitors naturally gravitate toward the most important ones first. The four main aspects of visual hierarchy are simplicity, clarity, distinctiveness, and emphasis. Simplicity means limiting the number of cues you use; clarity means making sure that all the necessary information is clearly presented; distinctiveness helps visitors distinguish your website’s most important elements from one another; and emphasis is about using color, size or other properties to highlight the most important parts of your interface.

In an ideal world, your website would welcome visitors at the door, show them around and answer any questions they have. Unfortunately, websites don’t have the luxury of greeting or helping users as they enter, and this lack of personal attention has real consequences. In fact, a survey found that 88% of users are less likely to return to a website that gives them a bad experience.

You can avoid this by thinking about your users and what their goals are when building an interface. For example, imagine if you went to the doctor and were asked to fill out an incredibly long form with repetitive information. This could be annoying, but it’s also a good opportunity to use the UI design technique known as progressive disclosure. Progressive disclosure is a way of breaking a complicated task into multiple steps that are easier to digest.

One of the best ways to incorporate this principle is by designing your UI with the help of interface metaphors. An interface metaphor is a set of UI visuals, actions and procedures that pull from specific knowledge that users have from other areas. For example, a trash can is a great UI icon to use because users intuitively know that selecting this will delete their data or files.

Another good practice is to include error messaging that tells users what the error is and suggests how to fix it. Error messages that simply say “unknown error” are useless and frustrating for users, because they can’t determine what the problem is.

Finally, try not to over-think or over-engineer your interfaces. Oftentimes, over- thinking and over-engineering lead to interfaces that are difficult or impossible for users to navigate. This is why it’s important to start with a paper sketch or html prototype before putting your code to work. A paper sketch is cheap and easy to change, but programming is expensive and hard to modify later on in the process. It’s also best to keep in mind the heuristic rule of seven: people can only hold about 7 things in their working memory at a time.

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