Ultimate UI for the best UX – less technical, more psychological

The most shocking mismatch on the market in the present day shows the uncertainty of business success irrespective of any region and industry. Such a mismatch can make any lively and rambunctious entrepreneur down.

Even scarier is this -

• Half of the users will give up if something takes more than 3 seconds! 
• It takes hardly under 1 second to make a first impression of something!
• 47% of your users have a low literacy rate!

How to hit the bull's eye? Do I need to paint a picture for you? No, I am not talking about any quixotic goal to achieve either. It's all about understanding the human psychology behind 'purchase'.

The prospects of marketing and selling your product are nullified if your presentation is jejune and does not impress the user in the first few seconds. 

Having spent over a decade in the IT industry, I find myself lucky to learn a lot from the rise and fall in the market. Certain companies became rags to riches in a few months, but a few saw a vertical downfall in a short span. There could be many reasons; however, the most interesting is how UI played a crucial role in affecting UX. Though not a master in UI/UX design, I’d still put my two cents; it’s interesting, as I said! 

For the definition, history, and other ‘superfluous’ stuff, you have the entire Internet ocean to look into. Here, I’d cut the crap and present you with precise information. The fact is that your targeted audience is not gallivanting around - they have a purpose of buying or availing a service. So, give them what they want that too without wasting a minute.

Billions of dollars are put into learning ‘how users will react to the product or service presentation.’ The biggest challenge is to deal with highly fluctuating demands. The UI/UX researchers have to keep track of the latest trends without compromising on the rudiments of designs. In my opinion, it is more psychological and less technical. The visitors, in hardly 10 seconds, would decide the action. Here is what it is -

Psychology of ‘Like’ under 10 seconds 

When you launch a product on the market, you don’t have ‘friends’ from Facebook and Instagram who’ll pour in with positive feedback and hundreds of ‘Likes.’ Instead, you deal with folks from all over who don’t give any damn.

Many factors affect user psychology, a few being …

Color: The overall presentation is the 'face' of your UI! The overall appeal makes the first impression. The shades you use for a design should match the subject or mood of your products and services. For instance, a dead grey or black looks terrible to children. Likewise, a decent news application would look horrendous with multicolor. 

A quick look at the standard colors and their probable usage

Other than color shades, contrast plays a vital role in separating actions. If you have fewer buttons, gray and black may work. Say, unavailability of a product can be simply showed using gray color.

Some colors speak their actions themselves. My observation – 

Placement of buttons: Work ergonomically! Ergonomics, in simple words, means how humans would move their eyes and hands onto the product. They would do it in the easiest way. ‘Ergonomically designed’ things are human-friendly. You don’t ‘feel’ comfortable if the ‘Login’ button is placed on the top of ‘ID’ and ‘Password,’ do you? That’s ergonomics. 

A lot comes under ‘placement.’ In fact, most UI/UX tips and tricks are zeroed on how and where the ‘call to action' buttons or links are placed. 

For instance, on an eCommerce website or application, ‘Keep shopping,’ ‘View cart,’ and ‘Checkout’ are the three commonest buttons kept on most of its screens. Here, the order matters. Human psychology doesn’t accept the ‘final button’ in the first place. The scanning pattern of the human eye-mind-finger goes from top to bottom. Hence, keeping the ‘Checkout’ button at the end makes better sense and UX. 

Even further, using colors and bold letters can add ease to the user experience. You can either gray out some actions, bold certain letters, and add some color to the final button to make it psychologically easy navigation.

Don’t get swayed away with fancy graphs and nomenclature. The famous ‘F’ pattern navigation was never new. You and I knew this for ages. 

It simply means that the human eye goes from left to right and is careful about the content initially. Later, the interest fades up and finally vanishes. In other words, the keywords or the heart of the product or your service are better described in the first two paragraphs or the first quarter of the page.

If your UI is not ‘text’ centric, the Z pattern follows. The human eye now reads from left to right and then goes into the center of the UI, left bottom, and then ultimately the down right corner. 

Shapes: A non-ignorable factor is the shape of the buttons on your application or page. Most buttons are rectangles as the human brain accepts them. A few round buttons are ‘okay’ for editing actions, such as ‘Undo,’ ‘Redo,’ and ‘Refresh.’ 

The reason, I think, behind the rectangle buttons are the texts they carry. It is difficult to accommodate the lengthy texts in round buttons. The surface area is bigger, and hence the graphics after ‘clicking’ the button is more visible on them. 

However, ‘rounded’ buttons are on the rage these days. They are nothing but rounded corners of the rectangular buttons. Reason? Nothing specific! ‘Rounded’ corners look softer, IMO!  

Fonts: Fonts do have moods. Wrongly used font type would ruin the user experience as it would not ‘go’ well with the human brain. For instance, official documents, presentations, and corporate websites would look better with Arial or Calibri. Nevertheless, learn applications for toddlers and kids go better with Comic Sans. Literature, educational articles, and the like look attractive with New Times Roman or Georgia. 

Factors that can kill your UI/UX

The factors mentioned above deal with only one but mightiest organ – the human brain. Billions of dollars are getting put into understanding how the user will react. Surprisingly, even giants fail to understand the users’ mood at times. In other words, even big daddies fail to impress the end-users, and ultimately they take their product back. 

·       Yahoo! Messenger worked, GTalk failed

·       Facebook worked, Orkut failed

·       Chrome worked, Internet Explorer failed

·       Amazon worked, eBay failed

·       Gmail worked, the rest all failed

 What were the reasons? Such all products… 

·       Failed to understand the mood of people. They leaned more toward graphics and bigger pictures.

·       Failed to understand the change in people’s choices. They needed everything under one roof, ‘Marketplace’ for example.

·       Failed to understand the ‘newer comfort’ of the latest generation. My teenage daughter hates typing! She says everything should be voice-enabled. 

Ignoring the present generation: they change their choices every minute! You cannot ignore the present generation that makes a big chunk of any user base today. They want things done with the least effort. If speaking works, they don’t want to type. Hence, anything without voice search in the future will be crap! 

Not giving a chance to correct users’ mistakes: to err is human. ‘Undo’ is a blessing. From a designing tool to adding items to a cart, you should provide facilities to reverse their action in one or the other way.  

Testing users’ intelligence: don’t throw puzzles and intelligent content at them. Think that the users are in Grade 7, busy, and a hurry. Simple things work way better than UI with complex content. They don’t have time to ‘think and act’; they are not here to decode mysteries.

Forcing users: freedom is priceless. If you force users to enroll, provide personal information, or even fill longer forms, you lose them. Unless necessary, don’t show your ‘data hunger’ to the users. It is for this very reason, more and more websites are coming with ‘Checkout as Guest’ where the users simply shop and checkout. 

Trapping users: I have come across many websites and applications with pop-ups. At the same time, it is okay to advertise on your platform. Trapping users by keeping ‘close’ (‘x’) hidden or smaller will close the entire application. A clear ‘cross’ button to close the pop-up is appreciated. 

Many taps/clicks: fewer the clicks or taps, better the experience. Don’t let the user have more than two or three taps to reach their destination. Multiple tapping or clicking will result in losing the visitor. This goes true in scrolling as well – for quick action, the scroll should be minimal. Nevertheless, you can hand endless (infinite) scrolling to showcase your products/services. 

Animation over speed: pictures and graphics speak louder than words, but nothing should compromise the speed of the app or website. No matter how intuitive UI you design, but if it takes minutes to load, the user experience is brought down. Ensure that you don’t give importance to animation (heavy graphics) over the software loading speed. 

Improper spacing: while designing and placing buttons or anchor texts for links, the human thumb’s width is a determining factor, especially the ‘Delete’ button. Placing two buttons too close results in errors. Nevertheless, keeping too much space won’t give any comfort to the human eye either. 

How to assure that your UI is a great UX

Overcome this irony – humans think of bots to promote their products, and bots think of humans to be more useful. 

Design the way ‘you’ would access the app or website. Here are some simple ways to make sure that the UI/UX is in place. 

Prototypes: the simplest yet most effective way is to make a prototype or dummy product on paper. Simply drawing or sketching the UI and working on it with pencils will help you change the design as many times as you want. 

Try colors: try different colors and shades in the models. Ask yourself the best suitable one for the buttons, menus, and overall appearance. 

Ask ten people: User Experience is what –asking users whether they find it easy. That’s it! Ask at least ten people around you and take feedback. Most of them should have a common experience – bad or good. Work accordingly. 

Take references: Android is the most user-friendly. Apple is the epitome of simplistic designs and shades. Take references from these two giants for colors, shapes, sizes of your UI components. 

UI/UX is no rocket science; it is a new term for the age-old ‘obvious’ things. Don’t panic! Think of humans, think of yourself and start designing; think of a child to present your UI –easy, simple, free-flowing, and smooth.