A powerful UI can create a difference between an impactful application and one that fails to make such an impact. While we discuss building high-quality apps, all of these basic details are significantly very important. Thus, we want to share some basic and most common UI design mistakes and ways to fix or avoid them. If you have just begun to end your design career, then be aware of these mistakes and prove them to be invaluable.
Each app is different from the other. Thus there is no perfect formula for developing the perfect interface. Here we have also discussed some of the best practices for good UI design. It will help you with UI problems and solutions. It will also be a checklist for you about the UI design mistakes you want to avoid while designing an interface. So let us move further and know about the best practices for building a good interface.
Best Practices for Attractive UI Design
Each design project starts with user research and involves a basic understanding of user goals, motivations, performances, tendencies, and needs. All equipped with analysis of user research data, the project can be further moved to the design phase. As a UI designer for a top UI design company, you should complement your user research data with knowledge about usability principles. It ensures that the interface has elements that are quite effortless to understand and access. Read more on best UI/UX prototyping tools for the designer.
1. The Basic Interface Works Wonders.
An invisible interface can be claimed as one of the basic but best kinds of interface. This is because it lacks the ui design mistakes of having “extra elements, ” thus clarifying messaging and labels.
2. Ascertain Consistency Through Common UI Elements
Good and bad UI design examples always ensure the use of commonly understood or basic icons and elements. A persistent UI consists of various design patterns in a different layout, language and design throughout the system to magnify efficiency. Users are only required to get familiarized with it once or twice, and further, they can guide the system with swiftness and ease.
3. Make Smart Use of Space
Cautiously positioned items can draw users’ attention in a better way to the most vital piece of information. Thus it can help with scanning and readability. It is broadly known as a visual hierarchy. If you are looking to follow the visual hierarchy, the structure of your team on the page is based on their level of significance.
4. Use Colour and Texture Strategically
Proper use of light, color, contrast, and texture can be put to good use to drive users’ attention to some of the elements.
5. Deliver Hierarchy and Clarity Through Typography
Effective use of font styles and sizes can help you deliver information to your users logically. In addition, distinct sizes, fonts, and arrangements of the text can be quite helpful in multiplying the user’s ability to promptly scan the pages and boost readability and legibility.
6. Communicate System Status Clearly
A good, helpful and intuitive system will provide users with information related to location services, actions taken, modification in the state, or errors. Thus to put it into action, one should decide the best UI element that could communicate system status promptly and move further to the next steps to reduce user frustration.
7. Place Defaults Wisely
One step that plays a major role in reducing frustration and inducing delight in users has defaulted. So, for example, you can have your set of pre-chosen or pre-filled out fields in forms that would comfort out the burden on the users and rushes the process as well./span>
There is not a proper solution to design a perfect UI. However, there have been ways and techniques that ensure that your product will follow visual hierarchy rules as it is quite good at navigating. A top mobile app development company would help you with many social media posts highlighting the subtle difference between bad and good UI. Now let us further look at the ways to solve or eliminate basic UI design mistakes.
Meaningless Inconsistent in Your UI Elements
If you want to have a smooth and concise app, you should avoid using various styles to provide mixed signals. The vital element is to practice these patterns and elements any time you desire. A persistent-looking design has a long way to building trust with your visitors and developing an enjoyable experience. In addition to that, it will also help your users to learn their ways and tactics around your app in a much faster way.
- To avoid such UI design mistakes, one must keep an eye on these elements:
- One should be consistent about the font styles for paragraphs, links, titles and many more.
- They should make a consistent colour palette for elements like text, buttons, links, footer, hover states and many more.
- One should use squared or rounded corners for the patterns in your apps like buttons, cards, icons or many more.
- Each of the elements that deviate in a particular way should have proper reasons to do so.
- For such UI problems and solutions, you should maintain a consistent thickness line for icons dividers and other links in your interface.
Making Use of the Default Drop-Shadow
While we talk about drop shadows, the less is more. Thus it is always advisable not to overuse them as you will have a very noisy and busy design. But in case you are making use of drop shadow, then you must keep the following tips in mind:
- Please do not make use of the default drop shadows as further it is meant to be adjusted.
- It is always advisable to make a very subtle design, and do not use black for drop shadows as it is a very negative colour. On the contrary, you can use a darker background version to provide your design with a much more natural look.
Create Some Distractions Between Primary and Secondary Buttons.
While you are working with the apps, you will realize that there are various actions that the user can complete. Thus you need to provide visual significance to the primary actions. As all the navigation takes place with the help of buttons, you have to make it easy for the users to recognize the primary buttons by making them bold and prominent. Secondary actions should be less eminent but visible if the user is looking out for them.
Here is a way you can follow to distinguish between primary and secondary buttons:
One can distinguish between primary and secondary buttons by using different visual weights for secondary and primary buttons. Further, the button with the strongest visual weight will get more attention from the users. Thus, bold text, strong colors, and size provide primary buttons with visual weight and do the opposite with secondary actions.
Lack of Text Hierarchy
Text is one of the key units of informational content. This is one of the main reasons why it should always be organized and legible. The appropriately formatted text would facilitate the user’s perception of information. Therefore your job as a designer becomes to organize this in one of the most comprehensive ways and most digestible. It would be best if you keep the following thing in mind:
- Make use of adequate kerning and spacing.
- Must possess plenty of contrast between each style title like weight, size and colour to separate each style.
- To make the information hierarchy visible, one should start with a big title that should be one of the most eminent elements of the page. Other texts and subheaders should be considered smaller and many more.
- Divide your blocks of the text clearly, make use of small amounts of space to easily connect to related information, and make use of lots of space to visually separate different blocks of this information.
Bad Iconography
Most of the time, icons are considered one of the easiest parts of the design. Thus some designers used extra decorative elements, as they are a significant part of modern interfaces. In mobiles, where icons are quite similar to buttons, you will look for an interface mostly made of icons.
Thus it is one of the major reasons to choose the appropriate “symbol” that would communicate the element’s meaning and keep a consistent style for the icons all over the app. Is UI design hard for you? Don’t worry. We have covered some tips when it comes to iconography:
- Make sure that the message of your icon is quite clear.
- Make use of consistent style. First and foremost of all, your icons should either be filled or outlined. In addition to this, make sure to have a consistent corner radius and line thickness.
- One should also make use of SVG/Vectors for your icons. Thus it is one of the easiest ways to make sure your icon will look sharp on any device or resolution.
Are you looking out to design your icons from the beginning? This step-by-step guide will help you in the icon design process. Read more on the importance of UI/UX design in mobile app development.
Unaligned Elements
Bad mobile app design examples have unaligned elements, which takes away users’ interest in the app. However, once you discover the strength of aligning things, you will realize that making any layout looks beautiful and balanced is vital. There are two significant and beautiful ways that one can follow to help organize your interface, as a 12-column grid and a baseline grid. Both would be invisible in the final design, but these are critical to have a balanced interface.
Most designers believe that making use of the grid can restrict them from their creativity, and in a way, it is also a bit true. Although you are just starting as a UI designer, thus it would be advisable to learn ways to break the rules before breaking them. Here is one of my top tips that would help in alignment in UI design. You should not align related items to different sides, and always one should try to align related elements to the same section as it connects them visually.
Conclusion
Best UI design and the interface does not excite fancy parallax or cool animations. Rather one should make sure that they remember the basic things like readability, clarity, navigation, and responsiveness to get easy access to relevant content. Furthermore, creativity and beauty will come over that. Thus we would recommend you hire a UI/UX design company, so that common UI design mistakes do not slip into your website.
