Most of us spend 3+ hours online every day using a myriad of devices with screens that require near exclusive attention where over 1 trillion web pages and millions of mobile apps are competing for our time.  To help you be effective, we have selected 5 most important principles that assure your application or website is sweet and stands out from the rest.

1. Digestibility

As Geoffrey James, in an Inc.com article states, “It is not the information itself that is important, but the emotional effect that the information has on your audience.”

But imagine the opposite, hitting a brand-new user with a huge lot of instructions, not related to the context of the product. No one likes such confusing surprises.

And so by digestibility, we mean the look and feel of a website. This includes: Keeping Things Simple and Consistent, Progressive Disclosure, Implementing Visual Hierarchy, Breadcrumbs, Making Good Use of Typography, and Using Colors and Contrast Properly. We will be discussing these points in our next blogs but for the time being, let’s talk about how to keep things simple:

• Keep things simple and consistent

‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’. But when it comes to websites, people scan them, they don’t read them. Make your website ‘scan-able’ because users don’t read websites the way they read other material.  Why do you think the use of infographics has increased and become standard fare for anyone looking to convey sets of data or instructions?

It is the basic psychological nature of man which says that, he will prefer the look and feel of things, to the content, before diving into the website. Simpler and easier to the eyes, the better will be the experience.

2. Clarity

Users actually crave for simplicity and clarity. It takes them a couple of seconds to decide whether they are interested in a website or not, so be clear with what you want users to do. A good design will always be honest. Aside from understanding the words in your website, you need the user to understand the actual value. Trying to con the users or being unclear about your product isn’t going to win any fans.

Related to value, pricing is one area where clarity is everything. Why would users click “Buy now” if they can’t figure out what you’re asking them to pay? While shady “free trials” that switch to auto-billing might be the norm, we doubt they’re winning any popularity contests. Rather than getting into this, you should explain things like you’d want them explained to you. Make things as clear as you can. You are the one who’d know exactly what you’d expect out of the products you choose to use, so don’t make false promises.

• Know your audience

Another smart way to make your website clear and user-friendly would be to design it according to your audience’s requirement. If you’re in the planning process of launching a website, you must already have an idea of what your future audience will want and so for example, using design patterns that users are comfortable with could help ease them into your website. Once you’ve identified your audience, you can test how your design plays out among them and take their feedback into consideration.

3. Consider feedback messages

One of the best things that you can do is design feedback messages that convey crucial information to your users when they’re performing any action. For example, use a simple animation as a feedback message when something is loading in the background. Or, did someone fill a field incorrectly? Design a message to inform them so they know exactly what went wrong. You can create an interactive animation or gif when your website is under construction or down for maintenance.

a) Lazy Registration

‘Lazy Registrations’ is another popular method. The term basically means that registrations should come late in the process. When would you actually use lazy registration? Although it may seem like lazy registration could be used all the time, some circumstances are ideal:

• When users are allowed to try out your website product or service before making a decision (photo-editing websites for example).
• When it is important to familiarize users with your system before they sign up. This can be a crucial step in their process of deciding whether to register.

4. Collaborate your way to success

Depending on the scope of your project, at some point you might find yourself working as part of a team that can shoulder some of the work alongside you, and in such a scenario it’s crucial to make sure that all members of the team share the same information in order to create a usable and appealing interface. Thankfully, there are a lot of collaboration tools available to help a team stay on track. For example- Trello.

5. Bring it all together

Designing an interface is no simple task. You need to take multiple disciplines into consideration as well as arm yourself with technical information regarding your audience, and foresee their needs in order to create a design which will meet and rise above their needs.

Moreover, you need to maintain a close relationship between user experience design and the interface design, since one goes in hand with the other. However, most of the points we’ve covered during this article have something in common which will make your life a lot easier: they’re not limited to web design projects. In fact, most of the advice we’ve shared so far should be very familiar to you if you’ve got some design experience (which we bet you do!) – all we’ve done is expand on their relationship with interfaces.

All in all, we’re confident that taking this advice into consideration, you’ll be well on your way to becoming a seasoned interface designer.