Simplicity In User Interface

There are lots of modern applications that have unpredictable, complicated, or even irritating interfaces. There are many reasons why it may happen — functional, visual, cultural, etc. The following article explains how to prevent common issues and make the interface of application simple and user friendly.

Planning

The very first thing you should do is to understand the main goals of your application. For example, if you are selling food, most customers will use it to find and order products. So, you have to identify commonly used features and understand how customers use them.

Next, you have to understand who your customers are — i.e., identify your primary customer segments. Depending on customers, you may want to show or hide different features or functions of your application. For example, if you know that your customers are elderly persons and do not use PC a lot, then you should take it into account and have only a couple of buttons on every screen.

Finally, you should know the restrictions of your application. Most customers now use mobile phones instead of PCs or laptops, so you should think about how to adapt your features and functions to a small screen. It may also happen than the application has to work both in online and offline modes. Such factors may also affect the interface, so you should think about them from the very beginning.

These goals, customers, and restrictions give you an excellent foundation to design a good and simple interface.

Designing

As a designer, you should know and understand the most common usage scenarios of the application. They have to include all the main features and functions, cover the main goals, and remain simple and usable. The most natural approach is to do all that step by step.

The first step can be building the scenario from application features and functions to fulfill a goal. Usually, the scenario consists of multiple areas and steps. You can use simple paper stickers, mockups, screenshots, slides with comments — i.e., virtually anything that can describe the required business flow.

The second step is to apply the goals, customers, and restrictions you have collected before. You can apply them in any order. During each of the iteration, you should pick one of the factors, see how it affects the chain of functions, and change it if needed. The crucial point here is to maintain user interface simplicity from the very beginning. So, the application of each of the factors should make the interface simpler.

Something may go wrong during the second step, and you will not be able to complete it successfully. In such a case, you should analyze what caused the problem, return to the first step, reconsider your scenario to eliminate the problem and do it again. You may also use several iterations for each scenario to polish and simplify it even further.

When the interface is ready, you can proceed to the testing phase.

Testing

There are lots of standard approaches to test an application in general and interface in particular.

Functional testing is the first thing you should do. It will evaluate whether all the features and functions work correctly. You may also include performance testing to guarantee that the application is responsive enough.

The next phase is user testing. Here you should ask your potential customers to use your application. You may use focus groups, or you may do beta-testing to see how people use it. If you have several alternative scenarios, you may do A/B testing to see which one is better.

There are two crucial things you should do after customer testing. First, you should record all the actions and timings to see if your interface is simple enough for your customer. Second, you should ask for feedback to understand existing issues and problematic areas. If you have too many problems, it may be better to return to the designing stage and redesign your scenario or interface.

There are high-level best practices that may help any application to get a simple and transparent interface. The process itself is iterative, so you can apply it several times to achieve the required level of simplicity. Remember that the customer is your final judge, and you should do your best to give him the best user experience.