Reliability is key in any relationship; it is the glue that keeps relations in harmony and together. In terms of User Experience (UX), there are a lot of factors that a UX practitioner has to be aware of when trying to ensure that reliability is central to a user’s experience trust. I want to highlight Look and Feel, that first impression before a user even interacts with your product, where you can win half the battle.
I think when people come across the idea of Look and Feel, they think it’s the “make it pretty” part, but optimizing look and feel does not necessarily mean taking leaps and bounds to have some progressive design that is super colorful and full of boastful illustrations or photos and an edgy layout or typographic treatments. It is rather accounting for what your audience is ready to experience and accept on a visual level. Adhering to simple design principles and being consistent with how you apply those principles can make a world of difference. The visual design of a User Interface (UI) should work hand-in-hand with the functionality of the application and be appropriate to the audience you are reaching.
The idea of someone liking a design is subjective. We as designers should offer justification for each design decision to make the process of choosing a design more objective and based on reasoning. A great look and feel will eliminate distractions from layout and should assist in adding context to the overall message being communicated by the application. You want your design to work for your audience, but often it’s your product owner and stakeholders—who represent your audience—whom you are going to have to satisfy.
Innovation is one of the key elements of crafting a great UI. To harness innovation you have to be aware of what has been done and what others are doing. Spend time studying what you enjoy regarding user interactions and layout and design within a UI. Understand the design patterns and workflows; can they be improved upon?
If you take a look at major commerce sites, e.g., Amazon.com and Walmart.com, they share a very similar look and feel as well as design pattern. This is because they are both major outlets for online shopping. Amazon set the standard for ecommerce; major retailers like Walmart, Best Buy, Ikea and pretty much every other major warehouse-like retailer followed suit because it worked. No need to reinvent the wheel here or have the user expect a different shopping experience than what is normally accepted online. These retailers have already successfully identified who the audience is. They already know how users want to shop and what shoppers expect. If any of these retailers were to change the feel of how shoppers shopped on-line they had better be setting the new standard or they will potentially lose the trust of their shoppers.
Look and Feel should be accounted for throughout the whole design process. A designer should be thinking about the user experience and crafting the User Interface in a direction that delivers this experience. This is done by first identifying the audience through research and figuring out what they like or are willing to visually accept. In most cases our user has to be convinced that we are who we say we are and that we can reliably and consistently deliver a good experience.
Written by Flexwind employee, Corey Turner