How to create intuitive design that would be easily understood by the user?

Let’s touch upon the design issue today. During our work with numerous projects and clients we have gained vast knowledge of how the design process should be organized and how each step in the design should be well-justified. All these aspects affect the speed of work, mutual cooperation within the team and the result, of course. Let us share this knowledge with you and examine some typical mistakes while creating the interface and give recommendations on improving the working process.

What things does everybody forget about?

Users
Users are the main object for the designer to focus on. They are the ones for whom the interface is created. May the person be a designer or customer - he is not the final consumer. For some reason, this fact is often forgotten. Of course, before starting the work on the project, it is necessary to conduct the research on a potential audience, draw up portraits of users, make a User Story and surveys, etc, but in real life, it depends on the budget of the customer and his participation in the process.

Ambient Conditions
The created product would always be used under certain circumstances and in certain places. It is necessary to understand how the interaction between the user and the product will be occurring - the interface heavily depends on this information. It is highly important to understand whether a person will be focused on the screen, either he works with it on the street or indoors. This is the so-called situational factor.
For instance, an app for navigation is mostly used while traveling in the car and the user usually has an instant to take a quick look on a screen and proceed with the driving. Taking this information into account, the app interface should have a very unambiguous, clearly readable interface with large, bold icons and text.

Accessibility
The design should always be checked for the contrast, readability, for the presence of a visual hierarchy, adequate typography, and accessibility of perception. In general, this works for everyone, not just for users with disabilities, as you might think at first sight.

Testing
First of all, we are talking about self-testing in the process of design creation. The designer should always have the ability to see the design from the user’s point of view. The advantage of working on the design in an agency is that there are plenty of people with different opinions that can be taken into consideration in order to improve the design concept.
If we talk about testing on users, then the product must be tested on real people. It is better to do this before the main release. This step helps to find out if real users do not understand some parts of User Flow at the early stage and greatly reduce costs. Within the project creation it is much cheaper to make changes during the design stage than to do it after development and release.

Guidelines
The guideline itself is a document with details on your brand and how to use it. This is a set of rules and recommendations and the most important detail is that it has ready-made design solutions. The integration of these rules simplifies the user’s life and makes your interface more predictable. So having guidelines for the project is an undoubted advantage.

Conclusion
Our team always stands for intuitive design and fruitful cooperation with the customers. The way the design is created affects the project to a large extent. The design part is not the final one but it sets the pace and further development style. Our specialists are always willing to make intuitive designs and know the value of things said above so be careful while choosing the agency to work with - every project starts with the design and not everyone understands its asset.

Author: IT DEV GROUP