To learn more about these UI updates, the design principles behind inMotion Ignite, and the process our design team uses to evaluate user experience, we spoke with Joey Stevens, UX Designer at inMotionNow.

inMo: Let’s start with introductions – tell us a little about yourself. What’s your name and title, and what do you do here at inMotionNow?

JS: My name’s Joey Stevens and I’m the user experience designer at inMotionNow. I figure out how to make our products as intuitive and usable as possible.

inMo: What are the design principles that guide design decisions in ignite?

JS: If I can reduce them to three:

1. Consistency – When we add something to the UI, we make it flexible so we can reuse it. The basis of our design system is to solve a problem once and reuse that solution going forward. That way, the user doesn’t have to constantly adapt.
2. Getting out of the way – Strip away distractions wherever possible. Extraneous visual elements, unnecessary steps and clicks, even long sentences get pared down.
3. Listening – We’re fortunate to have a close relationship with our users and we lean on them for feedback. Major features will go through lots of user testing before we build them.

inMo: What prompted the product team to start thinking about these UI updates? What problems did the Director of Product bring to you to solve?

JS: We constantly reassess design decisions, and some new UI patterns began to arise from that. We chose the settings pages as a jumping-off point because we felt we wouldn’t disrupt anyone’s workflow too much. Our main challenge was to create a management pattern that worked for different types of content and could accommodate any interactive form we’d ever need in ignite.

inMo: What were some other UI changes we considered before landing on these?

JS: The early ideas were evolutions of what we already had with some changes we knew we needed: clearer context when editing something, similar-looking pages should work similarly, functions found in other parts of the app should be consistent, stuff like that. We eventually took a more holistic view of the type of interactions we were changing and found a way to improve several areas at once, and that’s what we implemented.

inMo: Let’s talk about the gradient header lines – this is a pretty new look for us – where did we draw inspiration for those?

JS: The colors themselves are inMotionNow brand colors that predate ignite itself. The idea to use a gradient came from a desire to more clearly demarcate content that could be difficult to scan. We had been using a handful of different header and title elements, and we were able to consolidate those into a simpler and more effective solution.

inMo: Let’s talk about the new Reviews icon – we implemented that to differentiate Reviews from Proofs in ignite, so how did we land on pink?

JS: We developed ignite’s color palette very early in its development. We chose base colors that were different enough to be distinguishable, and by the time we decided to give Reviews their own color, pink was one of the only colors we hadn’t used yet.

inMo: Overall, Inmotion Ignite has a very clean look with plenty of whitespace but also careful use of color – what role do we want color to play in the overall experience of ignite?

JS: Careful is a good description. We use color a lot but never to convey meaning by itself, because not everyone sees color the same way (or at all). Color in ignite helps identify and emphasize the most important information.

If you’d like to learn more about inMotion ignite, sign up for a free 90-day trial.

The post UI Update for inMotion ignite: A Chat with the Designer appeared first on inMotionNow.