Frank Chimero, an author of the book “A Shape of Design”, once said: “People ignore design that ignores people”. How relevant it sounds today! People become a central part almost of all produced products nowadays and digital with user interface design –  are not an exception.

User interface design adheres to the most common and valuable principle: “users are above all”. It’s pointless to argue here since the main goal of any digital application is to establish a perfect interaction for a person with a computer or any other device. Design is a crucial part of it because it helps to guide users. To do it more effectively, user interface designers follow several principles and make an experience with technologies convenient and satisfying. 

User Interface Design Principle #1: Long-lasting design

Creating long-lasting design isn’t only a matter of saving personal efforts and financial investments, but also a matter of feeling up-to-date. Most interface designs created today are truly fashionable and trendy. But what will happen to them after a year? They will become outdated. 

A throwaway society we live in today is highly fastidious and unstable. However, long-lasting design for your mobile or web application is a perfect solution. This user interface design principle is based on the levelling between show-off features (e.g. follow-up hover state effect) and reasonable application layout. It means that even after a long time your user interface design still will be able to impress users, but also make them enjoy the digital experience.

User Interface Design Principle #2: Innovative design

Don’t mix “innovative” and “trendy” design! Referring to innovative design, I would like to highlight a wide range of opportunities technologies offer us to create such a design. That’s why innovative design could be described as a matter of skills to find the right solution between common rules of user interface design creation and new technologies appearing right now and always changing tomorrow. We can say that this user interface design principle explores the designer’s creativity that helps to make interface design better and more reasonable than others having the same tools. 

The innovative design usually has some common features as 3D graphics, smooth animation, isometric illustrations, moving background implementation, etc. 

Not to be unfounded, I encourage you to take a look at www.bitsens.com – a website that has won a Best Innovation 2019, Best UI&UX Design 2019 as well as Website of the Day on CSS Design Awards.

User Interface Design Principle #3: Strong Visual Hierarchy

A mentioned principle of user interface design is related to the order of interface elements. People tend to structure information and make it more comprehensible for light perception. That should happen not only in humans’ written notebooks but on their screens as well. Users usually adhere to a common predictable path: from left to right, from top to down.

A strong visual hierarchy is important for both visual and text information on any digital application. To support it, some necessary tools are used: saturated colors, caption shape types, font sizes, the proximity of text information, text alignment, contrast, repetitions, etc. 

User Interface Design Principle #4: Design with a “feedback”

A good design is an informative design. This principle is based on the fact that all users should be aware of changes that happened when they take any action on a website or a mobile application. It means that the system should react clearly upon any request and mistake that is done by a user.  

Let’s turn to the theory of communication: a communication shall be completed when the feedback is received. The same applies to user interface design. In case of frequent actions, the application should reply accordingly – in a modest way. For any big changes as an acknowledgment of a payment transaction, buttons should at least change their colors to indicate the action. The lack of such communication ruins the whole interaction and forces users to double-check.

User Interface Design Principle #5: Intuitive design

A design that doesn’t make users learn how to use application anew can be considered as an intuitive design. It means that websites or mobile applications particularly adhere to some common patterns of user behavior. It’s closely related to different operating systems’ applications as Android or iOS, Windows or MacOS. 

For example, Android users tend to click the left down button to go back to the previous page while iOS – click a top left one. Such small details as well as finding a right balance to satisfy both types of users’ needs defines a success of digital interaction between them and applications.  

The Ending

So, we’ve mentioned 5 user interface design principles important to follow. They are long-lasting design, reasonable innovation implementation, strong visual hierarchy, “feedback” reaction and intuitiveness. All will help to succeed in creating a perfect web or a mobile application for your users. Apart from these, we’ve described other crucial principles here as well as provide full information about user interface design.

At Bitsens we’re experienced in producing timeless and minimalist interface designs that are able to embed all principles mentioned in the article. To see how we manage to do it, look at our best works.