How to Think Like a UI/UX Designer

Brands increasingly focus their efforts on optimizing user interface and user experience. Unsurprisingly, this attention has increased the number of job openings for UI/UX designers in digital agencies.

Whether you are searching for a job and career as a UI/UX designer or are simply looking to incorporate aspects of UI and UX at your business, learning to think like a UI/UX designer is useful. Use this article to understand how UI/UX designers create digital products users enjoy.

How to Think Like a UI/UX Designer

1. Remember the fundamentals of web design
2. Design results-driven mobile apps

UI Design and UX Design: The Basics

User interface (UI) design involves a series of processes that are targeted to improve the visualization and interactivity of websites and mobile applications. Broadly, UI designs serves to make navigation easier for users. Buttons, pages, screens, and other visual elements found on applications and digital products all comprise user interface.

User experience (UX) design, on the other hand, involves the process of optimizing the general experience of the users who interact with a digital product. UX design focuses on creating applications and websites that provide customers maximum satisfaction.  

Together, both UI and UX design make products easier to use, interact with, and comprehend. When deployed on a website or application platform, they contribute to products people want to use.

Consider the following tips to think like a UI/UX designer and create products that are satisfying, simple, and easily navigable.

Remember the Fundamentals of UX Design

As already mentioned, UX design involves optimizing the general experience of users who interact with products to provide them maximum satisfaction. So, when designing with a UX mindset, your focus should be to provide users the best experience possible.

In order to accomplish such an experience, you should remember two major fundamentals of UX design:

1. Know Your Users

You must have a working knowledge of the people you are trying to reach with your digital product in order to create an effective product, so institute a solid research phase for any project.

In the research phase, work to learn all you can about your target user and how you can make a product easier to use for them.

For example, if you are building an app that helps people hail cabs, you have to develop a mobile process that is easier than simply hailing a cab on the streets. You will need to pay attention to visual elements, content strategy, and UX writing in order to achieve seamless comprehension for the user.

2. Cater Your Design to Users

A common mistake for digital developers is to create a product that feels right to them without taking into account user intentions and desires. This largely occurs because of insufficient research and myopic thinking and leads to digital products that non-designers or non-developers find difficult to use. When creating digital products with a UI/UX mindset, make the design primarily about users, not yourself.

Websites and Mobile Apps Should Be Results-Driven

It’s possible to become focused solely on designing a product that users enjoy interfacing with. While this is a laudable goal, all websites and applications should be focused on results: more users, more engagement, more sales – more of whatever your company is developing the app for.

Remember the importance of your call-to-action (CTA) in order to create the most results-driven products possible.

Focus on a Single Call-to-Action

A call-to-action (CTA) serves the purpose of getting the user to do something when they visit your website or use your app. If, for example, your digital product is a mobile app for booking hotels, the CTA should lead customers to book a hotel.

If the product provides a platform for online purchases, a CTA should prod customers to take make a purchase. It is that simple.

However, it is possible to deploy too many CTAs and overcrowd your landing page. If you want to increase conversions or sales, keep it simple for users: Focus on a single CTA and give users a clear action to follow.

The Importance of UI and UX Design

Thinking like a UI/UX designer will help your business to effectively communicate the benefits of its products and the ways they solve the problems of users or consumers. By remembering the fundamentals and grounding your design in the desired results, you can improve your customers’ experiences.