Let's talk UI and UX...

UI and UX – letters that appear all over the place. We are told that they are important but what do they really mean?

You can think of them as design (UI) and function (UX) – so how something is presented to a user, its look and feel, and then how a user then interacts with something – in this blog we will be talking about how a user interacts with technology, but it could just as easily be a service or department.

The vast majority of us use apps and websites every day, and there are some things that we expect. We expect a menu of some sort, we expect to be able to search for content (although increasingly we want the content to find us – but that’s a topic for another day).

Users are able to learn new ways of interacting with systems – but the key is that the new way of working must be as intuitive as possible.

If you went to a website and the only way to navigate it was at the bottom of the page and the search was buried three clicks down this would be a bad user experience and the chances are you wouldn’t go back to that site again, unless you had to.

Good UI and UX can give your portal or app a competitive advantage – make it simple for your users to negotiate and keep it consistent (don’t suddenly change from having a menu at the top to it appearing in the side in places).

You don’t need to re-invent the wheel – you want it to feel like second nature for someone to use your system – they will stay with what they know, and familiarity of experience empowers users giving them confidence in what you are providing.

There are two key principles

• Not all users are the same – they won’t all do it the way you expect them to,
• Don’t make a user think

They may seem contradictory but they are complimentary – your UI should be so intuitive that it doesn’t matter who is using the system – they don’t have to think to interact with it – they just naturally know what to do, and as apps become an ever bigger part of daily life the importance is only likely to grow.