Website Design: The Art of Making UI and UX Work Together

For any website, 94% of the first impressions formed by the visitors are design related. And these first impressions are highly influenced by your website’s visual appeal and navigation.

So, if you want to have an attractive and user-friendly website, you need to have a good UI/UX to work on it. Because UI-UX integration rightly helps in winning the visitors’ confidence by providing them with what they are looking for in your website.

Here you will understand effective UI-UX, their differing properties, and their balanced integration in website designing

What is Website Designing?
Why is website designing important?
What is the difference between UI and UX?
UX design components: How to integrate?
UI design components: How to integrate?
Wrap Up 

What is website designing?

Website designing is a process that outlines, organizes, and constructs the elements of a website. This can be fragmented into various parts like content structure, image layouts, and using colors, fonts, and other graphics. Everything that deals with the visual aspect of your website. Many consider it equivalent to web development. However, web designing is one subset of Custom Web Development Services along with web functionality. 

Why is website designing important?

People are judgemental. According to research, it takes only 0.05 s for a user to decide whether to stay or leave the website. Do you know what caters to such a rapid judgment regarding the first impression of a website? Yes, you guessed it right! It is the design of a website that invokes users to stay back or bounce out of a website.

In addition, some basic sections on a website that draws user attention involve a logo, main navigation menu, search box, main site image, site’s written content, and the bottom of a website.

Hence, to create a good impression on a visitor, website design should be critically taken into consideration as all of these sections fall under the two main web designing components, widely understood as UI and UX.

Take a look at the top 10 benefits that comprehend the importance of the right design of a website using UX-UI.

1. Sets up a better first impression
2. Improve customer experience
3. Decrease bounce rate
4. Convert visitors into customers
5. Drives eCommerce sales
6. Reduces customer service costs
7. Surge customer retention
8. Builds up a brand identity
9. Refines ranking signals
10. Keep up with competitors

What is the difference between UI and UX? 

User-Experience (UX) is a part of web designing that narrates critical analysis and rationale to understand and outline users’ interaction with products, systems, and services. Whereas, User-Interface (UI)is a collection of commands that helps a user to communicate with the program.

Both aspects have a human-first approach in web designing where UX deals with product organization and UI with the visual interpretations of production interaction. 

As UX and UI go hand-in-hand, it is futile to have one without the other. Both when combined tactfully create a complementary effect for any web design. For this, it is important to understand the separate roles of UX-UI. 

UX augments data-driven extrapolation of how the user is expected to feel when on a website, whereas UI meticulously implies the design patterns.  

UX is all about the notion that assures making a flawless, responsive website to boost your website’s conversions. At the same time, UI involves the tools, techniques, elements, and digital interfaces that are associated with the designing process of a website. 

All the UX and UI elements should have three significant factors - Usefulness, Usability, and Desirability. Because the intersection of all the three generates a better user experience. 

Let us separately understand the components of each module.   

UX design components: How to integrate?

Information Architecture (IA) is one primary UX design component in web designing. IA deals in organizing and structuring the content on a website, web or mobile application, and social media software. In simple terms, IA decides the arrangements of the different sections of the website to make it easily understandable. The content assembly relies on the type of web product. It involves the components like organization systems, labeling systems, navigation systems, and searching systems.

• Organization Systems divide the information on the web page. Effective organization of content can generate an effective experience for the visitors. Here are the three most preferred types of this system.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Labeling Systems make it easy for the visitor to understand the important titles of the web content. A lot of content can be confusing and result in an increase in the bounce rate of the website. Some common types of labels for a website include headings, index terms, and iconic labels.   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Navigation Systems allows visitors to navigate through the website. Here are some best practices for website navigation. 
  

1. Outline the pages on your website by the site map.
2. Need to Understand the wants and needs of your visitors.
3. Use descriptive yet short menu tiles.
4. Limit menu items in top navigation
5. Ignore using more than two menu levels in the top navigation. 
6. Encourage using menu headings in fat footers and mega menus.
7. Addition of CTA  button in the top navigation.
8. Make a sticky top navigation menu. 
9. Consider the mobile view for menus 
   

• Searching Systems enable visitors to easily discover the information they are looking for on your website. There are different ways to add the searching systems on your website, 

1. Google Custom Search - comes with an easy guide to run a JavaScript file loaded and run from Google’s site.
2. Third-party Search Engines - HTML creates a form in SiteSearch Pro which can cost for its ad-free version but also is easy to configure. 
3. Script addition to the website - A simple addition of script (Sphider, Lucy) in either PHP or Perl can allow the server-side engine to produce search results. 

Usability of a website is explained by international standards in five words as, learnability, understandability, operability, attractiveness, and usability compliance. 

• Learnability - How a new user can learn to navigate?
• Understandability - How well a user understands what they see?
• Operability - How much control a user has over the interface?
• Attractiveness - How appealing the webpage is for the user?
• Usability compliance - How well do the webpage components adhere to standards?   
  
  
  
  
  
  

UI Design Components: How to Integrate?

Interaction Designs

Interaction designs target the structure and behavior of interactive systems. It is to provide users with the best possible experience by interacting with designs as a way of communication. Here are its important features,

• Words - The meaning of words is a potent mode of communication. So, it is important to not get judgemental of the visitors with the usage of technical terms.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Visual presentation - Visual designs could be seen, registered, and understood in a lesser time than words. Thus usage of icons makes your website easily understandable.   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Input Controls - It involves the elements that allow users to input the information into the system. The elements include checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdown lists, list boxes, date fields, toggles, and others.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Navigation components - It involves the elements that help a user to proceed around the website. The usual navigation components include breadcrumbs and paginations.  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Wrap Up

Being a Web Development company, we have learned that the secret to an overall successful website is the integration of these two. The key feature of a proper web development company is that they should integrate both UX and UI to create a more interactive interface for their customers. It is due to this reason that we would highly recommend designing your website by integrating the UX-UI design process. So if you are planning to hire web development consultants, choose one that has knowledge of the customer business models, users requirements, and goals of the users in order to serve better. 

Author Name: Vipul Shah

Author Bio:

Vipul, the COO of Ace Infoway, a pioneering Web & Mobile App Development Company. He focuses on leading & nurturing partnerships that makes difference to businesses & internal customers. He totally understands and Speaks ‘Customer First’ language and believes in getting smarter, stronger, and goal-oriented, for a bright future.