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User interface design and usability are the often overlooked components of good Web design. In order for a Web site—or any application for that matter—to be successful, graphic design must go hand-in-hand with UI design and usability design.
User interface design is the term we use to describe how the necessary elements of your Web page or application are arranged and presented. Once you have decided what you need your Web page or application to accomplish, the UI designer must determine the following:
- Where should the buttons (navigation) be located?
- Should the links be graphics or text or a combination of both?
- What colors work best for the various elements?
- Should any options on the screen be presented as a drop-down menu, a list box, check boxes or radio buttons?
In the best of all worlds, once you've determined what a Web page or application needs to accomplish, the UI designer determines where on the screen the elements need to go. Only then does the graphic designer apply his or her craft to make everything look great.
At Manx, all graphic design goes hand-in-hand with user interface design, and vice-versa. We don't just make your Web site or application look good—we make it usable.
Usability
The goal of usability design is to make a site or application (to paraphrase Jakob Nielsen) learnable, efficient, memorable, and satisfying. To accomplish this, we need to know the target audience of your Web site or application. Creating detailed profiles of typical users and generating detailed tasks they may want to accomplish greatly assists usability efforts.
But usability design doesn't stop there. Just as every application development cycle includes quality assurance testing, usability design requires usability testing. Whether this means setting up a video camera and actually watching real users navigate through the site, or simply monitoring user behavior via Web log file analysis, this step is crucial to determine whether a particular design is in fact as usable as it should be.