It’s 2018. You’re making software. That means you’re making user experiences. And that means you’re dealing with UI designers. Even if you’re used to dealing with creatives in general, user experience design is still a more complex and nuanced engagement due to how directly involved the user is with that end experience, as well as the technology backing that experience. The UI team you hire is bringing creative, problem solving, design, interaction, and technology expertise to your project. And you need to manage that team and those skillsets while incorporating your own subject matter and product strategy expertise in a way that yields the best possible experience for your users. Basically, you don’t want your design feedback blowing the product up.
But your input will be required at many different points in the software-making process. Some of those points involve looking at designed mockups of what your website or app might look like. That can be an overwhelming or an underestimated task. We’re talking colors, fonts, organization of elements, page flows, interactive states, branding, imagery, and more. Even one seemingly innocuous piece of feedback can cascade into a less than ideal experience. Here are some tips for how to avoid that issue and get the most from your UI team.
As a stakeholder, you know your business and the specific business goals for this experience better than anyone in the room. That makes you invaluable to the end product. But that also makes you invaluable in a very specific way.
Giving strategic feedback instead of tactical feedback to a creative team helps them understand where a design might not be aligning with the business. If we only discuss feedback in terms of changing colors or fonts we're not getting at the why a color or font should change. How does that color support our business goals? Is this font appropriate for our audience? How do the interactions on our site fit into a user’s workflow? Asking these types of questions of your creative team can go a long way to getting your app designed in a way that maximizes their expertise for compelling experiences and combines it seamlessly with your business goals.
The cliché design criticism is "make the logo bigger." Which, of course, can be valid feedback. But instead of thinking about how big the logo should be right away, consider if the logo is the most important element on the screen.
That’s design hierarchy. Are the elements that are most important to your business and most important to your customers getting the right amount of attention in the right order?
Sharing what information is the most important to your message with the UI team can help them design a screen to draw the viewer's eyes to the most important element in your message and then on to the next most important element, and so on, guiding them through the experience and the story. Sometimes this is done by making a logo bigger, but more often it is achieved by adjusting elements according to common Gestalt principals like proximity—adjusting the space between elements—continuation—visually connecting elements together—or similarity—grouping like elements.
Most companies have thorough brand guidelines for print and advertising. However, most companies do not extend those guidelines to branding their digital applications. Often, this means the creative team needs to make assumptions and judgment calls as to how the brand should translate to a digital design.
We see this happen all the time. The UI team comes up with an innovative design that wields the brand in new ways, and the stakeholders are forced to kibosh it, not because they don’t like it or think that it’s innovative, but because they have no context for judging it. They feel it’s not in brand because there’s nowhere in the brand for it to be. It’s a tragedy.
The answer to that, obviously, is to extend your brand guidelines to user experiences, but in lieu of that, here are some general guidelines to consider with your UI team when translating a brand:
One of the easiest ways to bring a brand to a digital platform is by implementing the colors of the existing brand. However, often, in digital applications, more colors are needed than exist in the brand. Digital applications may require more colors for error feedback, warnings, colors for alerting the user to changes, or large sets of colors to display data in visualizations. In that case, you should ask your UI team about the new colors and how they keep the brand’s essence intact, as opposed to judging the colors themselves based on vague personal aesthetics.
Years ago, you couldn’t use any font on the web except Arial. Today, more and more type designers license web versions of their fonts to be used in software and websites. Talk to your UI team about using the same fonts you use in other branded materials and securing the proper license. It’s worth the investment. However, if that isn't a possibility, engage with your team and give them the freedom to put some thought behind what fonts will work best on a screen and fit with your existing brand.
If your company already has a strategy for creating branded images across your existing materials, your UI team should be considering how to bring that over to your digital applications. When looking at design mockups, consider how imagery is being used, how it’s unique compared to the competition, and—just like every other design decision—how it supports your brand and your business strategy.
It’s 2018. You want to make intuitive, branded, and visually engaging software, and your UI team can get you there. But the process requires everyone involved to contribute according to their expertise. Ultimately, though, it’s your input around the business's goals that will help your UI team make a great software experience for you and your customers.