UI Design Principles and Best Practices

UI Design Principles

• Direct attention using color, light, contrast, and texture to create hierarchy and clarity.
• Use typography to create hierarchy, increase scanability, legibility, and readability through different sizes, fonts, and arrangement of text.

Communication Principles

• Always inform users of location, actions, changes in state, or errors to ensure a smooth user experience.

Defaults

• Carefully think about and anticipate user goals to create defaults that reduce the burden on the user.

UI Design Best Practices

• Use simple interfaces with clear language, avoiding inessential elements for user comfort and gratification.
• Maintain consistency by using common UI elements that users are familiar with.
• Use smart, purposeful page layouts to draw attention to important aspects of the website.
• Use colors and textures appropriately to draw attention to specific components.
• Use typeface to increase readability and legibility of content.

Graphic Design

• Defines the grid, colors, fonts, and backgrounds of a website.

Prototyping

• Defines the layout, content, and type of controls and their behavior.
• Improves all major aspects of organizational strategy or operations management by reducing cost, improving quality, decreasing time taken, and decreasing risks.

Interface Elements

• Input Controls: buttons, text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdown lists, list boxes, toggles, date field.
• Navigational Components: breadcrumb, slider, search field, pagination, tags, icons.
• Informational Components: tooltips, icons, progress bar, notifications, message boxes, modal windows.
• Containers: accordion.

Best Practices for Designing an Interface

• Keep the interface simple and avoid unnecessary elements.
• Create consistency and use common UI elements for user comfort and efficiency.
• Be purposeful in page layout, considering spatial relationships between items on the page.
• Strategically use color and texture to draw attention to important aspects.

Design Principles

• Visual Design: improves a site's ornamental value through fonts, colors, and images.
• Interactive Design: creates an interface with well-thought-out behaviors based on user interactions.
• Information Architecture: helps users find the info they need to complete tasks by labelling, structuring, and organizing web content.

Prototyping Advantages

• Reduces development time and costs.
• Requires user involvement and receives quantifiable user feedback.
• Facilitates system implementation and results in higher user satisfaction.
• Exposes developers to potential future system enhancements.

Prototyping Disadvantages

• Can lead to insufficient analysis.