They surround us everywhere and go unnoticed by us. Whether from our smartphone or laptop, the user interface design is specially made to be invisibly visible…yes, a paradox with which we interact every day of our lives. Every software program that we access has a user interface design where everything is premeditated and has a single objective: facilitate the usability of an application so that brands and their audiences can find each other in a much friendlier way.

When it seemed that there were no more mysteries to discover, because in the world of technology and innovation, there are infinite issues that remain to be known and learned to solve. Here is a brief explanation of what the User Interface (UI) is and below we will delve a little into what situations we should avoid if we want to achieve a website optimized at the highest level.

What is interface design?

Interface design or User Interface refers to all the graphic elements that help us communicate with a system, allowing us to land a central idea, materialize it and build messages for the interaction between a user and the computer.

This is how a system, application or program is generated - responding to the user's needs - that will transmit the information that a company or institution needs to bring to its clients. In other words, interface design is considered to be the elements of identification, navigation, content and actions that allow the manipulation of a website or app.

The user interface is used through a set of objects, icons and graphic elements. Consequently, when designing an interface it is essential that the UI design expert guarantees an easy and intuitive interaction, thus ensuring that the user can access the information they require or execute the action they need in the simplest way possible. 

That is why the interface design is perfect, the person who works with this type of task must have knowledge of several disciplines, such as psychology, visual and graphic design, web development and systems engineering.

In this sense, at Lab9 we were fortunate to collaborate together with our client “Sharyco”, a mobile app for corporations whose objective is to provide an improvement in the person-environment relationship and promote a healthy lifestyle. Our UI expert team took care of thoroughly analyzing the stakeholder profiles to then determine which would be the optimal graphic elements to guarantee friendly and fast navigation. This led to the definition of a unique style manual - color palette, typography, typographic weights, branding and more - that allowed progress to be made in short periods of time at the visual design level.

Most common UI usability errors on websites

1. Poor content structuring: it is known that businesses are always looking for new ways to advertise their services in their applications or programs, whether with a division by sections or a hierarchy that matches the brand culture. The design or redesign of this information structure must be carefully calculated, since if the user is not sure where to click to find what they are looking for, it is very likely that they will end up closing the program or application.

2. A design that is not responsive: Mobile devices have become an extension of the arm for most of us. For this reason, every user interface design must adapt to the width of each of the various devices that are part of the digital ecosystem, through good responsiveness. Otherwise, users will find text that is too large or small, images that take up the entire screen, or buttons that take them nowhere.

3. Inadequate management of internal links: this happens when it is not perceived that there are hyperlinks, because the space to click is not enough, because the links are broken or incorrect or even because the website does not highlight in a different way the links that have already been accessed.

4. Absence of internal search mechanisms: time is valuable and no one likes to waste too much time searching for elements on a web page, so the lack of shortcuts is a yellow light for those who want to have the best web usability. In addition, the existence of an internal search bar provides clues about the most frequent terms among our clients' queries, highly useful information for your company's SEO strategies.

5. URLs that are not friendly: a friendly URL is a web address that is made up of words that inform the content of the web page to which they redirect - they are identified joined by hyphens in the top bar of the page -, which help the SEO of a page, making it look much more professional, being easily remembered.

6. Functional inconsistency in design: similar elements must perform similar actions. It is a kind of law within usability. This allows the user to become familiar with an element and repeat the action with said element in different parts of the application or site, using intuitiveness.

7. Do not lead the way: on pages with several sections or subsections, users run the risk of getting lost, raise your hand if this did not happen to you. To avoid this, “breadcrumbs” can be used, which serve as an indication of the route that the user must follow to reach the web page they are on again. They look something like this: Home > section> subsection> page being consulted.

In the case of virtual stores, it is recommended to place an indicator of the status of the purchasing process, so that the customer knows how many steps they have left to complete.

How do you know if a website has bad usability? 

If your website has a high bounce rate - the percentage of users who come to the website and leave without visiting any more pages -, usually combined with a low dwell time, it is very likely that some of the errors mentioned are being made. 

That is why at Lab9, working on UI and UX usability, we focus on solutions that guarantee the best results in the short and long term.