What does successful UI design look like?

User interface (UI) design at a glance

The user interface design process is about creating the visual design elements of your site. Think of UI as the way you convey your brand's visual identity and bring UX to life. UI exists to facilitate UX.

How does the UI design process work?

As mentioned in our article, UI design is typically the fourth phase of the end-to-end web design process.

In earlier stages, we recommend conducting visual exploration using mood boards to get a clear idea of how your brand will be conveyed and how your site will look and feel.

This visual exploration stage precedes UI design because it establishes the site's visual identity, including the use of color, typography, whitespace, buttons, etc. Some agencies do this as part of the UI phase.

Once you go through the UX design process, you will approve a set of wireframes that give you an idea of your site's structure and flow before everything is properly built.

As soon as you approve these wireframes, the visual design created with mood boards will be applied to bring them to life. Essentially, this is how the user interface is created.

Typically, your agency starts by designing the homepage of your site. As with all previous stages, you can expect the UI design process to be collaborative. Be prepared for all stakeholders to provide feedback to your agency and refine the design together with them as it aligns with the wireframes.

After the homepage is approved, your design will be applied to all site pages. Again, this is an iterative, collaborative process based on feedback and revisions.

Responsive design testing

After completing the desktop design, your agency partner will proceed to design the site at multiple breakpoints. To ensure responsiveness across all the most popular devices, at least the following breakpoints should be tested:

• 1920px - This covers most external computer monitor sizes
• 1366px - This corresponds to most laptop screen sizes
• 992px - This covers most notebook and iPad devices
• 768px - This covers most other tablet devices
• 375px - This covers most smartphones.

After that, you'll move to the most exciting part: your site will be fully designed, and you'll be able to view, test, and play around with it. Once you're satisfied with the design across different breakpoints, your agency partner will be ready to prepare the design for handoff to development.

What does effective UI design include?

Good user interface design is something that should be smooth and almost invisible to visitors when they land on your site. Aesthetics and visual style should be simple and attractive, but not distract from the UX.

Nowadays, you have just a few seconds to make a positive impression and hold visitors' attention, so it's crucial not to overcomplicate things. But what distinguishes good UI from bad from a practical standpoint?

As with UX design, there are several best practices you can follow to ensure an effective and engaging UI for your site.

Follow these guidelines to create a UI that delivers the desired experience for your visitors and supports your site's strategic goals:

• Keep the design simple and the content concise.
• Prioritize the preferences and interests of your target audience
• Make design elements as understandable as possible
• Maintain consistency
• Ensure your brand and company personality are accurately represented in the design.
• Harness the power of visual imagery to attract and retain visitors' attention.
• Make your call to action as strong and compelling as possible.
• Don't create anything that hinders the achievement of UX goals.

The importance of accessibility

Accessibility is the practice of making technology as easy to use and fully available to everyone. While web accessibility is primarily intended to help people with disabilities better use technology, it is also much broader.

There are people who have difficulty using certain types or aspects of technology but do not have a disability. For example, someone with declining eyesight may struggle to read small text on a smartphone screen.

It is also important to ensure your site is as easy to use for ordinary people because you should always strive to provide the best UX for all your visitors. Accessibility is a key factor in this.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), used to define what constitutes good accessibility, list four key principles of web accessibility that all sites should follow.

This means your site should be:

• Perceivable
• Operable
• Understandable
• Robust.

Web accessibility is an important topic, so we'll talk about it in more detail in a separate article. For now, it's worth noting that any web design and development agency you work with should consider accessibility a top priority when creating your site's UI. If they don't, you should challenge them and ask why.