Today, the business world is customer-centric, so communication has significantly changed from the viewpoint of “me” to “you.” The target customer is at the center of everything. As a result, helping your customers succeed is more crucial than ever.
Research shows that customer-centric organizations are 60% more profitable than businesses that ignore customer experience and success. Customer experience is also a fundamental differentiator because an outstanding experience offers excellent value for money.
Today, almost every company is a digital company, whether through leveraging digital solutions for offering better service to its customers, managing its employees, or gaining a competitive edge in the crowded marketplace. The user interface (UI) of all these digital solutions drastically affects customer success and the overall company success. That’s why global giants such as Airbnb, Amazon, and Google have already integrated user interface and user experience into the heart of their business processes.
UI Techniques That Affect Customer Success
The user interface is how users interact with mobile apps. It includes all the buttons, blocks, controls, and mobile app elements.
The fundamental goal of the UI is to offer accessible, effective, and enjoyable interaction between mobile apps and users. To create a compelling UI design, you need to know your customers. This includes understanding their needs, goals, preferences, skills, and tendencies. Once you know your customers, ensure you consider the following factors when designing your user interface.
Clean and Simple
The best user interface is typically invisible to users. It avoids unnecessary elements and uses clear language in messaging and labels. A clean and straightforward user interface improves customer experience and satisfaction. To create a cleaner and simpler user interface:
- Justify the use of font-weights. There must be adequate contrast between different fonts for a cleaner UI. Also, ask yourself why you used Light when all your body texts are Regular. Limit the number of font-weights by creating a hierarchy with case and size. Using fewer weights can also improve the load speed of your site.
- Check the font sizes. Create a cleaner structure by adhering to the consistent rules for font sizes. A minor difference in size between two sets of font sizes can distort hierarchy and contrast like font-weights. Also, this is critical for accessibility; avoid using tiny fonts and make sure your users can easily read your messaging.
Readability (or Lack Thereof)
In this age of information eruption, there’s immense information on mobile apps each day. Mobile users often open mobile apps with precise goals, such as shopping, reading new messages, checking notifications, and looking for new songs. But that’s a lot of information on small mobile screens, and it may take a while for mobile app users to scan everything.
If the readability of a user interface is awful, your website users will be like passengers who get lost in a chaotic and strange kingdom. App users need some guidance to get to where they want, or they might abandon your mobile app.
Effective readability blends with the logic of reading and conveying information effectively, allowing users to get the content they need, improving the usefulness of the content, enhancing user experience and customer success, and boosting the acquisition of new customers.
So, what factors affect readability? Visual hierarchy and logicality are the core of readability. These two factors greatly influence readability.
Logicality comprises differences, similarities, and dependencies. Differences are the contents of different levels or contents that don’t belong to any levels. On the other hand, similarities are contents on the same level. And dependencies are contents from lower levels that belong to the contents from upper levels.
After mastering logicality, creating a visual hierarchy is relatively more straightforward. Organizing elements and creating contrasts to offer a proper visual hierarchy is a fundamental responsibility of user interface designers.
Strong readability can make your message shine. It also makes the interaction between potential customers and your site smooth, helping your customers succeed while using your mobile site. Ultimately, determining the logical relationships between various elements is the basis of creating a clear and tidier visual hierarchy. Leveraging multiple factors, such as font-weight, font size, opacity, color, similarity, and proximity, can help you improve readability.
User Control & Elements Spacing
Excellent user interface design entails the thoughtful application of white space at all user interface scales, from micro to macro and component to page. Applying white space well results in a legible, harmonious, easy-to-use, and effective interface, improving customer success.
To space elements effectively:
- Apply the law of proximity. The amount of white space between user controls and elements in the UI determines how elements interact with one another. According to the Law of Proximity:
- Related elements should be closely spaced. Alternatively, unrelated elements must be spaced further apart.
- Elements of the same type must be spaced evenly apart.
- Start from a benchmark of generous white space. Allow your UI design to breathe to ensure customer success. An effective way to boost the usability of a user interface is to make sure there’s an adequate amount of white space between all the elements. Although there are exceptions, having a generous amount of white space usually is better than having too little white space.
Too Many Design Features
Ellie Wu notes, “I don’t do it all. I focus on what matters the most and invest in those things.” Thus, just because you can add a feature to your design doesn’t mean you should. Simplicity offers many benefits. So, you must avoid going crazy with features. Although over-designing isn’t a huge mistake, it can cause severe issues, adversely affecting customer satisfaction and success.
For instance, using too many colors on web pages is confusing because what bits are crucial becomes unclear. On the other hand, two or three colors are enough to provide visual prominence to what’s essential. The same applies to font styles. So, it’s vital to emphasize headings and subheadings and use contrasts to emphasize key phrases.
The more features you cram into your UI design, the more time users need to digest the information it presents. So, to offer a better user experience and improve customer success, your UI design should breathe and live on its own. Plus, don’t forget that adding white space isn’t bad. Often, it’s better than filling every inch of white space with text and elements.
Under or Over Complicating App Design
Your UI design must meet the basic specifications in the brief before you can begin adding other features or breaking the box. Thus, any design elements you add to make your composition more appealing should also add value to the user experience, ultimately ensuring your users succeed while using your mobile app. During the design process, it’s critical to ask yourself, “how many features can I add or remove?” Also, it’s crucial to think of UI design reductively rather than addictively.
Overcomplicating app design often occurs because designers unnecessarily ignore conventions. Will your mobile app benefit from reworking the standard interfaces and symbols within the tactile language and mobile visual? Typically, standard icons are universally intuitive because they provide visual cues without cluttering the mobile screen.
Also, don’t let app design flourishes hamper your app’s actual function or content. For example, designers often don’t add adequate white space to their apps. While white space is essential for excellent design in general, it’s also crucial for mobile designs because a cluttered UI isn’t user-friendly. It may adversely affect user experience and even customer success, hindering your users from achieving their goals.
Final Thoughts
Designers need to realize just how competitive the mobile app market has become and do everything possible to differentiate their apps from thousands or millions of other mobile apps occupying the same space. App design practices effectively deliver excellent user experience and ensure your users derive maximum value from your mobile app.
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