It is the third and the final article in Design Process series. In the previous articles Why Sketching is Essential Part of Product Interface Design Process? and Information Architecture: Wireframes and Prototype in Product Interface Design Process, we reviewed two processes essential for Product Design creation, and now, it is time to speak about the third, but not the least process – UI design (or Visual product design), and its role in digital product designing.
It is safe to say that the essence of any business is sales and profitability, but not a design. So, what is the role of UI design in improvement of doing business?
Art is one of incentives for a designer, as opposed to a businessperson, but it is the art that is used for business interests, art that improves life and product quality.
The duty of the artist is increasing the life quality by means of beauty, Charlie Haden said.
A designer should be able to create a product (or a communication medium), about which people could not even dream before they see it.
UI is a user interface. It is responsible for a general view of the product and its physical characteristics. To be clearer, UI is responsible for interface colours, easy-to-read text, easy-to-touch buttons, and many other things. Sometimes it is mistakenly called graphic design, but it is a lot more complicated.
User Interface Design or UI is a narrower concept including a particular set of graphically performed technical elements (such as buttons, checkboxes, selectors, and other fields). Its objective is to assist user in organization of interaction with an application or a website.
Main tasks of UI design are as follows:
- Single style of interface elements. Styling is an essential moment in product UI design as that is the style that is kept in user’s memory.
- Organization of interface elements. The product interface elements should be logically structured and interconnected.
- Adjusting of interface elements. It is required to improve friendliness of this user interface, feeling of harmony and absence of chaos.
- Grouping of interface elements. It presupposes combination of logically connected elements into groups (menu, forms).
- Availability of free space that, in its turn, allows differentiating information blocks focusing attention on one point.
Visual design of the product
The visual design aim is to make sure that the product gives a feeling of quality and evokes correct emotional response. It is visual designers, who are responsible for designing of product “spirit”. The most of the time they spend working on visual attraction of user interface elements to make the digital product intent and value absolutely clear for users. As the visual designer is the closest to actual experience of using the product, he/she has to draw much attention to details. Visual designer’s work result is individual product atmosphere, its unique, vivid, and recognizable story that will further be told by the product to its users.
Clickable prototypes and mock-ups in product UI design
As a rule, UI representation as a set of statistical mock-ups is somewhat undergrade and boring. Fortunately, such tools as InVision are able to transform separately existing pages into clickable prototypes and mock-ups with interactive elements, and after that easily share them with team members for networking and testing aims. Furthermore, this tool works perfectly for final design representation to a customer. It provides excellent opportunities of feedback and making comments.